I Want More Than My Lonely Nation

🎧 Something from the archives for the 20th anniversary of my favorite Sad Campus Walk album

Hey friends. I could probably begin by acknowledging what a heavy time it’s been, but then again, when could I not start there? The horrors persist, and I have so little to add.¹

I’ve been wanting to write something here after a full, wonderful few months of writing mini-essays for Summer Art Club.² Then I was reminded that last weekend was the 20th anniversary of an album that meant a lot to 22-year-old me. Let’s do something a little different and go back to my ol’ music writer roots! (with subtext commenting on the horrors, for a little treat)

About 6 years ago, I wrote a retrospective on Switchfoot’s 2005 album Nothing is Sound for

The Rabbit Room

. Reposting here, with a touch of editorial polish and a few footnotes. Hope you enjoy this throwback gem of angsty Christian-adjacent alt-rock!

The year was 2005. I was a junior in college, and it felt like the world was both beckoning me to a wide open future and coming apart at the seams.

We may joke about the “dumpster fire” of recent years, but I feel like the fire sparked long ago. I just didn’t notice the smoke until the turn of the millennium.

I was finally old enough to vote in a Presidential election. Twitter and iPhones didn’t exist yet, but I was just starting to notice the ugliness of partisan politics. The wounds of 9/11 were fresh and raw, the War on Terror was just beginning, anyone with cable TV could pick their 24 hour news cycle poison, and I spent my days commuting between my small town bubble, my Christian radio job, and my university classes in Orlando.

Also, the certainty I used to feel in my faith was beginning to crack. Just a little.

If anything, I needed music to capture the vague despair and fear and anger in the air and spin it into hope. I needed Switchfoot, a band I’d casually enjoyed since high school, and a record called Nothing is Sound.

Of all the bands I loved in high school (the time of life that supposedly shapes your musical tastes forever), there’s something about this band that continues to stick.³ If you listen to their early work — especially 1998’s New Way to Be Human — you find some pretty philosophical songwriting under the carefree surf-rock sounds. Skip ahead twenty years to 2019’s Native Tongue, and you find relentless hope in a world that seems to be perpetually on fire.⁴

For me, Nothing is Sound might be their greatest achievement. It came just two short years after they broke big in the mainstream, but it was considered a commercial flop. Instead of peppy melodies and self-aware anthems, the sound took a darker tone and the lyrics dwelled on empty consumerism, disconnect, loneliness, and war. It’s Psalms and Ecclesiastes and Lamentations all at once. And somehow, in all that, it lands on hope in the end.

Permission to be angry. Permission to lament. Permission to, in spite of it all, not lose hope.

Just what a quiet, uncertain, and confused young woman in a lonely world needed.

I want more than my lonely nation

The album opens with dirty guitars and an introduction to an unnamed character: “she turns like the ocean / she tells no emotion… she’s been breaking up inside.” I’m only now realizing how 22 year old me, growing up and discovering the complicated ache of the world, might have recognized herself in this nameless “she.” The aggressive, dark-tinged rock hints toward a rage under the surface. The lyrics address a weary loneliness, frustration, and longing to see the world set right.

Two years before, this band declared “We want more than this world’s got to offer,” and it felt like a fist-pumping empowerment anthem. But here, the desire takes on a whole new urgency: “I want more than my desperation / I want more than my lonely nation.”

But how can the world be set right when the people tasked to care for it appear to tune out, chasing after empty pleasure?

We’re just numb and amused
We’re just used to bad news and
We are slaves of what we want

Or consider this line from from the lead single “Stars”

Stars looking at a planet
Watching entropy and pain
And maybe start to wonder how
the chaos in our lives can pass as sane.

Then there’s the Bob Dylan-inspired rumination “Happy is a Yuppie Word.” As the specter of war loomed large and the economic prosperity of previous decades came to an end, this song meditates on the failure of empires and empty consumerism, tapping into the well of full-on Ecclesiastical lament:

Everything fails
Everything runs its course
A time and a place
For all of this love and war
Everyone buys
Everyone’s got a price
But nothing is new
When will all the failures rise?

And so the story goes. “Nothing is new,” says the author of Ecclesiastes, and “Nothing is sound!” screams a rock band’s singer into the pain. Nothing is steady, “nothing is right-side right,” and when I hear these words, I’m once again sitting on the university quad, wondering about the future and the pain of war and the violence of words and talking heads on TV news.

And even now, nothing is new, is it? The second-by-second social media news cycle. The pundits escaping the boundaries of cable news and pontificating from my phone. Even Instagram squeezing pristine influencers and finely targeted ads between pictures of friends and their kids and their vacation photos.

I can’t help but think “Easier Than Love,” a song about commercializing sex to distract from loneliness, is an apt lament for the disconnection and perfectionism of the Instagram age: “It’s easier to fake and smile and brag… it’s harder to face our souls at night.”

More than ever, I understand the unbridled roar of a line like “I pledge allegiance to a country without borders, without politicians.”⁵

Nothing is new indeed.

But these scars will heal

If there’s one thing that has marked these songs for so long, it’s this: joy is inescapable. Somehow, even as they rail against the empty promises of a materialistic American Dream, there’s a hope that can’t be suppressed.

You hear it in the album’s most joyful track, “We Are One Tonight,” an anthem of solidarity that would almost feel out of place if it wasn’t such a necessary counterpoint “And the world is flawed / but these scars will heal,” the song declares against all odds.

Somehow, in the midst of fear and fighting and loneliness, healing waits. There’s still beauty, still sunlight limning the shadows, still friendship and love and waves to catch and songs to sing.

When I listened in my early-twenties angst, I might have overlooked the more joyful songs. When I listen today, I cling to them.

“Daisy,” the album’s closer, brings it all full circle. We began with a woman who is “breaking up inside,” and we end with a gentle invitation and an affirmation. I’d like to think these two characters are the same person:

Let it go,
Daisy, let it go
Open up your fist
This fallen world
Doesn’t hold your interest
It doesn’t own your soul…

We can’t escape this world. We can rage against injustice, interrogate our desires, sit in our loneliness, and keep our gluttony in check. We can choose to numb out and be just another consumer, or we can be fully alive in the world as it is.

If I had any quibble with these lines today, it would be that this fallen world does have my interest, as I imagine all it can be. It’s a promise and a shadow of the world to come… and well… “the shadow proves the sunshine,”⁶ doesn’t it?

But no, it doesn’t own my soul either. Sometimes I just need the songwriters and poets to remind me.

1. This essay still stands though.

2. If you want to do your own solo run through The Artist’s Way and would find my posts and reflection questions helpful, you can still check it out behind the paywall! If the cost is a barrier, send me an email or a DM and I’ll get you sorted 💛

3. I feel like I’m waxing hyperbolic for a mid-aughts Christian rock band lol. But the older I get, the more I relate to these songs.

4. They’ve released two other things since this original writing, but these days I’ve been listening to Jon Foreman’s solo work more because I’m old or something.

5. Was this the theme song for my first post-election angry drive last year? MAYBE.

6. And there are still songs I didn’t mention, so I’ll leave with this bonus: THE BLUES Y’ALL. You bet I spent many a New Year’s Eve with “it’ll be a day like this one when the world caves in” playing in my headphones over and over until the clock turned midnight. This is quite possibly the most sad girl thing I have ever done.