Music Day - She

Picture this.

North American Christian culture, 2003. At this time it was still a very common belief that video games of any kind were spawn of Satan himself. VeggieTales' Jonah movie was the only film that millions of Christian children had seen in theatres because all the others were demonic in some way (Harry Potter had magic, Star Wars had magic, The Lord of the Rings was simply 'too scary'...), and were you really a Christian if you didn't listen to Adventures In Odyssey every weeknight at seven o'clock?

Into this culture came a group of three women who found instant popularity with pre-teen girls with their inspiring, poppy, uplifting (in every sense of the word) melodies. Behind trendy, pop art album covers in bright purples, whites, yellows, and oranges, they sang catchy, bright songs with slick production. Were you really a Christian girl if you didn't have a ZOEgirl album in your CD wallet?

In 2003, ZOEgirl dropped their best -- sorry, third studio album, Different Kind Of Free. The pop sound had matured along with their listeners -- now solidly into their mid-teens -- and the record took on an acoustic R&B vibe (probably influenced by BeBe and CeCe Winans, Nicole C. Mullen, and Out Of Eden, who were all big names on Christian radio at the time). Even the bright colours of ZOEgirl's previous offerings were muted, with a palette of blues and greys decorating the album.

DKOF still offered uplifting, poppy lyrics in the first half of the album. The album kicked off with their trademark energetic songs of dedication to God. This is a simple goal, but difficult to execute well. Executing these well had always been ZOEgirl's strength.

But halfway through the album, the subject matter takes a wildly different turn. The electronic bass, staccato rhythm, and lower vocal register of Wait was the only warning the listeners got of the shift. It was skillfully subtle -- I doubt most people realised what Wait was about, as the topic of suicidal ideation was absolutely never touched in churches at the time -- but to those of us who knew, we knew. Those of us who already felt the cold tentacles of depression tightening around our souls and minds knew that song was for us.

In an artistic move both bizarre (given the subject matter) and necessary (given the parents of the target audience), the next song was perhaps the breeziest and most carefree song of ZOEgirl's entire career. Feel Alright was a stylistic, if less manic, throwback to Upside Down from their first album. It was also the song I skipped over the most (despite loving Upside Down when it first come out), because it was the least relatable and the least intellectually stimulating. But they had to put it there, because the following song was a doozy.

She was a slow burner for me. My best friend at the time, a year older than me and a pastor's daughter to boot, caught the significance of it immediately, but she had no way of expressing to me what she saw in her life and in the song. I found the song too slow and boring and brushed it off as album filler. But as our ways parted and I saw the absolute worst the evangelical church had to offer in the wake of my calling and my cousin's death, I began to see what she had seen... enough that when I found Daniel Amos' brilliant album Doppelgänger in 2013, I 'got it' immediately: the church of North America was extremely broken. In Doppelgänger, I could see the indictment of the church in the lyrics clearly. But ten years had passed by then, and I had forgotten about that soft little ZOEgirl song which had sharp teeth.

The other day, out of nowhere, my brain started feeding me lyrics: She's alone / Caught up in the undertow / Where it takes her no-one knows...

I started listening, and the rest of the lyrics arose from my dusty memories from over half my lifetime ago. Then I dug the track out of the bottom of my iTunes and listened to it for real.

What a ballsy song.

To release a song not only about teenage sex and pregnancy out of wedlock, but to also use that song to point the finger directly at the failings of the church on an album specifically targeted to young teenage girls would have been CCM PR suicide if not handled with kid gloves. So they tucked it in one of the 'filler' slots (it's track eight out of eleven), mellowed down the music so it wouldn't attract immediate attention, and trusted God would open the ears of those who needed to hear. My guess is that most listeners, like me, assumed it was a typical 'don't have sex before marriage' song (yes, those are a thing in CCM), and completely failed to see that they weren't placing the blame on the girl, but on the church that didn't have compassion on her.

She went to them for help

But blindly they cast the first stone

They could have taken her in

But instead they left her on her own

All alone...

And it worked. No feathers were ruffled, DKOF is still regarded as their best album, and ZOEgirl made another successful album before calling it quits.

I just... I am in awe if the finesse they needed to pull this off, especially at that time, and it worked. Nowadays critique on Christian culture in Christian music is more common (and still sorely needed), but at that time for a Christian band to make a song blaming the church instead of the girl was revolutionary. It was countercultural. It could have ended their careers. They could have been excommunicated from the church for a song like that, but they did it anyway. They hid a scathing critique in plain sight for those of us who needed the warning the most and they lived to tell the tale. And those teenagers in 2003 are now the ones calling out the hypocrisy of the evangelicals.

Maybe that's why I can never quite let this group go. I've always chalked it up to nostalgia (which is definitely a factor in my enduring love for them), but the more I listen with my jaded adult ears, the more I realise there was more to this little pop-vocal group than any of us realised.