This post is adapted from the introduction to Joel’s new book, Sects, Love, Rock and Roll, available now from Cascade Books. 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…

The recorded version of “Seven Swans” on Sufjan Stevens’ album of the same name always seemed a bit too subdued for the apocalyptic revelation it presents. Stevens opened his recent show at the beautiful Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, BC (and all the shows on his recent tour) with that song, alone, spotlighted, scraping timidly at…

“I found the safest place to keep all our tenderness / Keep all our bad ideas / Keep all our hope / It’s here in the smallest bones / the feet and the inner ear / It’s such an enormous thing to walk and to listen” —The Weakerthans, “My Favourite Chords” I need to be…

For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading through the final pages (finally!) of my upcoming book Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll, which is a collection of essays about faith and popular music, mostly in the 1990s, and the musical twists and turns life (mine and others’) has taken since then. For the most…

Sixpence None the Richer is my favorite band. I used to be embarrassed to say this, particularly in 1999, when their bouncy pop song “Kiss Me” became a ubiquitous, worldwide radio hit. I knew, and know, that the band was more than this one song, but “Kiss Me” on the radio, in 1999, was the…

Ever since I decided to stop trying to know everything about new music (I really recommend this; it’s very liberating), I’ve been able to focus on my favorite genre, which the good people of ImageUpdate recently made fun of me for: “Recording Artists Who Kinda Sound Like They Might Be Christians.” I thought I might…

I knew that there was rock music in China, and I was determined to get as involved in it as I could—which turned out to be not very much, since I have the Chinese vocabulary of a three-year-old child. It doesn’t help that Chinese people are, as a rule, very polite and complimentary to foreigners,…

If you’re like me, you like listening to music all the time. And if you’re like me, you are also now in a graduate program in language and literacy education, which means you do not have time to do anything except read incomprehensible books about sociocultural theories of language. Perhaps you are not exactly like…

For most of my life, I’ve never had a really fun summer job. I’ve bagged groceries, sat alone in an office and answered a rarely-called hotline, and shouted in English at Chinese schoolchildren. But I guess I’ve finally paid enough dues, because this summer, I have decided on a new job, and one that I…

Though I was born prematurely, I’ve begun to think that I was really born late, about ten years too late, because I was born with a love for films in which the most pressing issues are high school graduation and how to talk to girls, and consequently I missed all the best ones. This genre,…