Carlene Bauer is the author of a memoir, “Not That Kind of Girl.”
I grew up in evangelical churches that fixated on Jesus’ commandment to be in the world but not of it. On Sundays as a teenager, my sister and I would go to church and watch 120 Minutes every night, and even though our alt-rock excesses weren’t exactly of Factory proportions, we felt as if we were living some secret, black-lighted life as Christians who rocked. Music was the way I figured out how worldly I could be. I could stand at a concert among braver friends and pretend that we weren’t so different; that one day I might pass for unafraid and imposing, too. I no longer believe — I suppose I did figure out just how worldly I wanted to be — but I still can’t live without music. Here’s a list of songs that comforted me while faithful and not — consider it a recovering evangelical’s hymnbook.
1) A Sort of Homecoming, U2. Recently someone who’d grown up Baptist in the South told me he found his way out to liberation through Prince. Prince! I applauded this person for making such a mad dash for the exit — as a bookish kid I had been unable to see Prince as anything other than a person-sized tongue wiggling lasciviously. I told him that U2 started me on my road to rock “rebellion.” “But there’s no sex in U2!” he said. “Exactly!” I said. So much of sex in pop music seemed sleazy, or silly, or bewildering, because it was a cartoon of feelings that I’d yet to experience. But U2’s rock was free of money and sex. Many kids found this purity of heart and intensity of feeling in punk; I found it in U2.
2) It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),R.E.M. There was no sex in R.E.M., either. Or maybe my love of the band wasn’t about their lack of sex, but an admirable lack of romantic narrative, period. This song’s crashing together of jubilance and jangled nerves, with Peter Buck’s guitar grinding away like a plane circling as it downs, took the idea of apocalypse, which I had been told was coming any minute, and shrugged it off. Everything was rigged and doomed, I heard Michael Stipe saying, it couldn’t be fixed, nothing would save us, oh well, too bad, who cares, let’s make a song that sounds like buckets of confetti being let loose during the closing credits.
3) Can’t Hardly Wait, the Replacements. Apocalypse, I prayed, please pass over me, because I want to know what it’s like to be as torn up as Paul Westerberg sitting on a tour bus missing the one he loves. The Replacements were melody and havoc, the havoc legitimizing the melody, and Westerberg scoffing and yearning, his hair and voice a terrific mess. This song had a throwaway line that I clung to: “Jesus rides beside me / He doesn’t buy any smokes.” It was Jesus, in a walk-on role, looking pretty much how I imagined him — hanging out with broken-hearted sinners, just as the Gospels said he did, his own heart larger than his followers gave him credit for.
4) What Do I Do, Sam Phillips. In 1988, Leslie Phillips, whom I’d heard of but never listened to, left the Christian music scene, citing irreconcilable artistic differences, renamed herself Sam Phillips, and released “The Indescribable Wow,” a record full of 1960s-influenced songs that were exuberant though wise. Even kittenish (“If I set you on fire / Would you keep me warm?”). And critics loved it. Wait a minute, my 16-year-old self thought — you could leave the fold and Van Dyke Parks would arrange your strings? She’d defied those who’d told her there was only one way to make music, and that was to be upbeat and unquestioning about God. Her record was a lesson in how to leave home.
5) Evangeline, Matthew Sweet. Hey, 19! “Too bad the only man you trust / Is God above.” Indeed.
6) Brave, Innocence Mission. This song came from 1995’s “Glow,” which was in heavy rotation after college, when I was contemplating converting to Catholicism. Before I read Kierkegaard, I had this song, written by the band’s singer, Karen Peris (a Catholic herself). Her narrator confesses that faith does not always cast out depression and fear: “Oh I know it, I know it, here is God beside” but “the sky is tall and heavy / When I could be / brave.” And then: “Somehow knowing what you know / still you tremble out and in.” At the time, even though the music had the quality of bright, stippled watercolors, it was a radical admission.
7) If You’re Feeling Sinister, Belle and Sebastian. Stuart Murdoch was a semi-secret Christian, as I was when this record came out. I was living in New York and trying to pass for sophisticated, with mixed results. So I appreciated this lyric, and all his lyrics, because they were reverse backward masking: “If you’re feeling sinister / Go off and see a minister / He’ll try in vain to take away / The pain of being a hopeless unbeliever.” Which I would become a few years later. Cue…
8) Search and Destroy, Iggy Pop. I was 30 when I first heard this song, which a friend had put on a CD for me. I could tell you Iggy Pop’s real name — James Osterberg Jr. — but could not name this tune if I heard it on the radio. How had I missed this? Having drifted away from belief, I was ashamed that there were so many other things it had taken me too long to hear, see and feel. There were many times that my mental thrashing about — who am I if I don’t believe, and what is permissible if I don’t? — felt as frantic as this song.
9) Move On Up, Curtis Mayfield. I can’t sit in a church anymore, but listening to the soul and funk Felix Hernandez plays on WBGO’s “Rhythm Revue” can fool me, for a weekend hour or so, into believing that everything’s gonna be alright. The gospel in the music makes me hear the songs as Psalms — all of the anguish and leaping for joy — but with sex thrown in! (Prince, I seek your forgiveness.) The show is how I fell in love with this song, the percussion and horns making this almost as propulsive and frenetic as the Iggy Pop. But with uplift, hard-won and not saccharine, thrown in: “So move on up / To your destination / Though you may find / From time to time / Complications.”
10) The Pharaohs, Neko Case. “You left me wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting / Like the movies / And the hymns / I want the Pharaohs / But there’s only men.” In this song, from her new album, “Middle Cyclone,” Case is singing about a lover whom she idealized to a fault. When I listen I also think of a formerly religious consciousness waking up to a world without God. Impassioned solace for the disillusionment, romantic or otherwise, that comes with age.
11) It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City, Bruce Springsteen. And I’ll let the Boss give us this summertime benediction.
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