I tried not to write a book about Christian rock.

I tried fiction, but gave up after a teacher couldn’t get me to fix the ending to the story where a seventeen-year-old kid loses his virginity in the freezer at a convenience store.

I tried “music journalism,” writing stories nobody read about bands I didn’t care about for a tiny newspaper that hardly paid me anything.

I got a couple of college degrees.

No matter what I do, though, I can’t escape the fact that pop music and Christianity have made me who I am, and whatever else I try to write, pop music and Christianity is what keeps coming out.

The compulsion to understand the three-way relationship between music and faith and me has been on my mind since at least the time I heard “The Hardway” by dc Talk and “Jesus He Knows Me” by Genesis. I started writing about Christian rock in my parents’ basement at age fifteen, in a zine called Toxic Chalk which ran for four issues as a ClarisWorks document on my dad’s computer.

Fifteen years later I have too much of the sticky residue of pop radio and Christian bookstores, of punk rock and youth group, of Catholic school and garage bands, of Christian college and smoky rock bars, stuck to my soul not to write a book like this.

Here’s the thing, though: I wrote a book about listening to music. Reading is just sitting and looking at words somebody made up, and listening doesn’t even require looking—you can sit motionless, with your eyes closed, in a dark room, and do it. Surely there is no more passive activity than reading a book about listening to music, because what is going to happen? Will there be a story? Can there be one?

Surely, people don’t want to sit reading page after page about what somebody thinks about music. After hundreds of pages of ideas, thoughts, and feelings, it’s easy to respond like the Dude in The Big Lebowski: “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

We want scenes, real things that happened to real people who have led lives more interesting than ours. We want to know what they have done, and how, and why.

What I have done, mostly, is listen to music. And one of the things about listening to music is that on the surface there are no stories, no scenes—just noise travelling through the air, past the cochlea, into the brain.

Nothing to see here, folks. Every significant musical moment in our lives looks the same, and on the surface it is the same, because what is essential in the music scene, the personal action and reaction you get from music, is hidden.

Still: with pop music there is something, something that spins out of control, that lends itself to skips and jumps in consciousness—songs remind us of things that happened, things that happened remind us of songs, songs remind us of songs, and in the course of a three-minute guitar ditty we have traveled the entire world without moving.

Cue up “Hell” by the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and while we are grooving to their North Carolinian faux-calypso, I will be thinking about the girl who bought me the first Squirrel Nut Zippers record for my seventeenth birthday and wondering where she is now.

I’ll think of the first time I saw the video and the argument I had with my best friend about whether or not the girl singer was a man—she wasn’t—and I’ll think about what exactly Hell is, and whether or not it is something I should be worried about, and whether the guy who wrote the song was being jokey or maybe serious, or if the fire-and-brimstone is just a convention of the genre refracted through postmodern ’90s irony.

Songs move, and they move us, so quickly, and in such mysterious and personal ways.

So I wrote this book, and even though it’s just about a guy listening to music, there are, at least, some stories—about church camp, and youth group, and college radio, and being in an unsuccessful indie rock band, and not being in a Chinese death metal band—and I hope these stories move in the way pop songs do.

Because a book that’s about listening to music should also be about how listening to music makes us who we are. And so my book is an exploration, an idiosyncratic and opinionated and particular one, of a self shaped by the oddly intersecting pillars of the American evangelical Protestant church and the American popular music scene.

It plays out to a soundtrack of Michael W. Smith and Audio Adrenaline and the Newsboys and MxPx and PFR and mewithoutYou and Sufjan Stevens (among hundreds of others, many—spoiler alert!—not Christian bands at all), but my purpose is not really to talk about “Christian music,” examine what it is, why it exists, or whether it is any good.

Instead, I just wrote about stuff I’ve listened to, and the result feels less like a book to me than an mp3 playlist, a collection of pieces about listening to music and having faith and how they have made me, and a lot of people like me, and maybe you.

Also, there are a lot of jokes about dc Talk.