— Scroll down to watch the video for “Eternal Damnation, feat. Joe Moe” —

I’m not a Christian, but I love Christian music. I don’t just mean Bach & Handel. I’m a sucker for Christmas carols, Gospel, Protestant hymns, Gregorian chants. I find so much of it incredibly moving, both music and lyrics. 

Even the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) you hear all over the radio dial on long drives anywhere in the US. It’s always a cut above the pop and rock that it’s trying to convert you from.

There is a lot of anguish in CCM these days. The most common theme is about getting through hard times and loneliness with the knowledge and assurance of Jesus’ love and forgiveness. The songs are often addressed to Jesus/God Himself. It’s very powerful stuff.

And while some CCM invokes in ecstatic terms a life everlasting in Heaven, basking in God’s glory, eternal salvation, etc. there is not a lot of talk about Hell. I can see why. Hell has always been a hard sell for me. The afterlife in general, but particularly Hell. Why would a God of Love devise a place to punish and torture people for eternity? 

So, I decided to write a Contemporary Christian song about going to Hell. I know it’s perverse. I’m not a Christian, I don’t believe in Hell. But the song takes Christian theology at its Word (as best as I can figure it). And Hell’s the place where people like me – who work on Sundays – are supposed to end up. 

Now, I realize it’s easy for a secular agnostic like me to write a snarky song about Christian mythology. But I hope it doesn’t come across with smug reassurance. For while I’m dubious of the particulars of a Christian Hell, there is a larger philosophical question that Christianity is grappling with: Trying to reconcile the seeming unity of the universe with the multiplicity and antagonism of existence. Or why is there good and evil? And, to my mind, there is no satisfactory answer. 

Christian archetypes are still very potent, demonstrated not only by the power of CCM, but also by the power of its counterpart, death metal. There are plenty of death metal songs that evoke Hell and Satan, and they are hair-raising and otherworldly. I can’t say where the energy for these archetypes comes from, but to deny them in the name of secularism feels like a cop out. 

Given their power, the last thing I would want to do is make a song about going to Hell to glorify evil. So I endeavored to keep the music for my song very much in the light. I tried to be funny, but also make it uplifting. (I told you it was perverse.)

You may notice that my song is a bit more ornate than the usual CCM fare. I wanted it to be fancy and melismatic and beautiful, with fun churchy chords. And soaring strings and heroic French horns and a righteous choir!

To sing it, I knew it had to be Joe Moe. Joe is a beloved longtime collaborator. We go back nearly 40 years. We’ve written musicals, made records and lots of music together. He has a beautiful voice, and he’s a brilliant writer, artist and director. Also he has an equally perverse sense of humor.

Go in peace.

Recently at a music conference “radio panel” I found myself apologizing for the number of genres I use on my new album (country, power pop, electro pop, bluegrass, jazz, world music; with lyrics comic, political, psychological, philosophical). Until I realized there was nothing to apologize for. For me, genre diversity is not an accident, it’s a feature.
 
Coming of age musically in the ’70s, when radio would segue from Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft” to Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” genre diversity was a given. The Beatles’ White Album was my cornerstone. It gave me, and, I assumed, everyone else – music consumers and producers alike – carte blanche.
 
Genres have always fascinated me. They start as products of distinct cultures or subcultures. But as they are absorbed into the mainstream, they become styles and ultimately end up as feels.
 
To me, genre is a musical consideration like key or tempo. What genre best lends itself to the subject matter of the song? But more than that, genre is an interesting avenue of exploration. What kinds of effects can be created by juxtaposing genres or merging genres? This has been my approach to making music since I first started.
 
There is nothing particularly novel about genre hopping. Historically, it has been more the norm than the exception. Mozart evoked Turkish janissary bands, wrote German Lieder and Italian Opera. Stephen Foster, the father of American popular song, wrote Irish ballads, minstrel songs and waltzes. Genre hopping was purely practical; different genres represented different markets for selling music.
 
But in our time, for people like me, genre is a choice. I like mixing genres within one song, butting up one against another, or melding two together. And I am far from alone. Many of my favorite musicians do the same thing, some much more so than I. It’s fun. You can try it at home.
 
Since I first tried it, I’ve gotten lots of push-back to my ecumenical attitude. I remember arguing at age twelve with a bandmate over using kalimba on a song. Commercially, it has not been perhaps the wisest tack for me. Apparently, it makes radio programmers heads explode. But I make music the way I want music to be.
 
I understand the resistance. First, music is hard to talk about, and hard to categorize. People want to get a handle on it. Genre non-specificity makes it all the more challenging. Second, I believe genres function, consciously or unconsciously, as sort of cultural stereotypes. Genre hopping can be jarring and, in a sense, dissonant, because it makes us question our stereotypes.
 
There is an idea that music that hops from style to style somehow lacks integrity or authenticity. Fans want their favorite genres to retain their stylistic individuality; the genres to stay separate but (un)equal. The assumption seems to be that one should make music in the style that one was first exposed to as a child (one’s so-called “roots”). Well, I suppose, as someone who grew up on the wide open ears of ’70s radio and the White Album, that’s what I do.

Anyone who has gotten up to sing an original song in front of a crowd walks a tightrope between the twin poles of humiliating rejection and triumphant embrace. Regardless of what she is singing about, the singer-songwriter trades in intimacy. She makes herself vulnerable, exposes herself by the very act of raising her voice to sing her own song in public. She begs our indulgence.

But what makes us grant that indulgence? To come across, she must disarm and woo not only the hostile or indifferent crowd, but the indulgent crowd as well.

A beautiful voice, a catchy melody, a clever turn of phrase, a charming persona, a passionate delivery can capture our attention and seduce us. To make us hang onto every word – the singer songwriter’s holy grail – she must have something to say.

But what to say? The confessional singer-songwriter writes from her own life. But it is certainly not her life experiences that make us want to listen. The political writer tells us what’s wrong with the world. But political opinions don’t make us want to listen. The theatrical or comic writer makes observations about character or life in general. But a set of observations isn’t enough.

What we really are listening for are original and universal truths. That’s all. So that when she raises her voice in front of the crowd, we know it’s not about her, it’s about us all.

Being of a certain age – I’m 55 – and a music guy, I naturally share some of the perspectives of my late boomer cohort. Newer, we’ve learned, is not always better. We’ve experienced the depth of analog recording, we remember the visual richness of Super 8, we’ve watched Antonioni without a fast-forward button and understand the value of a longer attention span.

But sometimes the opinions of colleagues, friends and acquaintances in my demographic shade into cranky middle-age guy prejudice. Specifically when it comes to pop music.

I’ve been a casual-to-heavy listener to pop music since about 1966, and a lifelong student of the pop song. I tuned out briefly in the late ‘90s when my kids were little and tuned back in in the early 2000s. I make a point of listening to pop radio from time to time. Because to me there’s nothing better than a great pop song.

With this in mind, I decided to look through the top 100 songs from each year of from the last six decades. After scanning the charts, and listening to any unfamiliar cuts, I can say that current pop music (2012-2013) is no worse nor any better now than average. There are lots of mediocre songs that are popular, and some good ones, and occasional great ones. It was ever thus. This is the result I expected and was based entirely on my own subjective judgment about the songs on the lists.

This is not to say that tastes and programming decisions don’t fluctuate over the years to render some eras more fertile with creativity than others. The music of the mid-to-late 60s and early 70s seemed to yield more good hit songs than average, while the 80s were particularly rife with bad hit songs.

What this survey reinforced for me is the notion that pop music has more continuity than not, that it is primarily young people’s music, and that if you don’t like one song, just wait for the next one to come on.