Music Mondays: God or Girlfriend?

There is a built-in tension with Christian music. It seeks to express all the facets of our relationship with our Creator - a relationship based on love and intimacy that is very much true, genuine, and amazing. But depending on how it is expressed, it can easily venture into sappy love-song stuff. 

I'm certainly not the first to point this out, but often times CCM can turn out a product that is eerily similar to secular songs that croon superficially about romance. And every once in awhile, the opposite can be true - a surface-level love song can seem to be speaking of the spiritual. 

So for the next few weeks, I'm going to feature some songs that I've always been confused or conflicted by - songs that teeter on the edge of young-love-sappiness instead of theological wonder.

But to start things off, I want to zig instead of zag. Here are a couple songs from my college days-era that go the opposite direction. These are pop music hits that hint at something deeper if you think real hard.

"Hanging by a Moment" - Lifehouse

A band that has Christian roots, it struck it big with this their first single. It feels like the first hundred times I heard it, I only heard the "love song" part of it. And then when you think of their roots, the rest of their catalog that seems to have spiritual overtones, and then realize the chorus goes: 

Now I'm falling even more in love with you
Letting go of all I've held onto
I'm standing here until you make me move
I'm hanging by a moment here with you

Huh. Makes you wonder...

For the record, the lead singer keeps it ambiguous as well.

"Everywhere" - Michelle Branch

Another single from the early 2000's that launched a career, "Everywhere" was part of Branch's album The Spirit Room. By her own admission, this is a straightforward love song, but Christian detectives all over the U.S. bought into a deeper meaning. And it's easy to see why: 

'Cause you're everywhere to me
And when I close my eyes, it's you I see
You're everything I know that makes me believe
I'm not alone
I'm not alone

[Verse 2]
I recognize the way you make me feel
It's hard to think that you might not be real
I sense it now, the water's getting deep
I try to wash the pain away from me
Away from me

I'm an authorial-intent kind of guy, not a reader-response interpreter. I embrace the meaning as intended by the author. Sometimes it's easy to cheat and re-interpret a song based on what I feel, know, or have experienced. Probably not much harm in doing that with something like this.