September 13, 2012
A few years ago, I attended a regular Sunday service with my family at our local Episcopal church. Everything in the church was the same as it always was—high-arched ceilings, moody recessed lighting, candles, and a general air of solemnity that struck even the sometime churchgoer with a pang of penitence. The service that day went on as usual until we arrived at the sermon and our rector stepped aside to invite a special guest: the pastor of a nearby Baptist church.
It is hard to describe what happened next: with a booming, insistent voice, the pastor commanded our attention. He had a fiery and emphatic delivery, playing with crescendos and decrescendos, allowing his voice to relax before pounding us with the next missive.
If the coffeehouse last Thursday night were that Episcopal service, the opener Christopher Paul Stelling would be that fiery Baptist preacher. Stelling would have been more at home—and this is a compliment—on a New York City subway platform, singing his songs of sadness and rage for the largely indifferent masses of passersby.
Seeing Stelling play in a coffeehouse setting struck me as a kind of confrontation: a fiery songwriter-cum-preacher getting worked up before a subdued group of liberal arts school kids. Up on stage, Stelling alternated between two distinct characters: between songs, the affectionate, bantering songwriter and, during songs, crazed folk-bluesman, whose facial contortions and bodily posture ventured into the realm of religious revivalists.
Religion and spirituality, if it weren’t already obvious from his onstage demeanor, are a big part of Stelling’s lyrics and attitude towards songwriting. The themes of ‘God,’ ‘faith,’ and ‘prayer’ are motifs throughout his lyrics.
“Don’t you feel like everybody is in a ‘scattered’ way kind of religious?” Stelling asked me in response to a question about the meaning of the ‘scattered’ religious allusions throughout his music. “We don’t know the answer to things, so we have doubts.”
But beyond serving as a platform for exploring religious ideas, songwriting also provide Stelling with a kind of faith and practice of its own.
“I’m a broken-down machine that I’m constantly fixing through writing songs,” Stelling added later. “My dad could take anything apart and put it back together again and I think that’s what songwriting is in a big way. Taking apart everyday things and putting them back together again.”
The therapeutic quality that performance and songwriting has for Stelling is captured in his stage presence: loud, active, and utterly confident. He might not be preaching for God (directly, anyway), but he’s preaching for something—which I’d label as the power of music.
Standing opposite Stelling in a lot of ways was the headliner, Andrew Belle. Belle—maybe more than any other songwriter who has played the Acoustic Coffeehouse series in recent memory—belongs there. The coffeehouse, with its cozy, receptive audience and candlelit tables, was his sort of scene.
Although Belle’s set eventually revealed itself as excellent—highlights including an insightful cover of The Smith’s “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” and a sprightly version of “The Daylight”—Belle seemed to initially take a back seat to the grit and howl of Stelling, still fresh in everyone’s memory.
As a performer, Belle played the contemplative, sensitive sort and harkened back to another golden-haired pop-rock god, effectively channeling Parachutes-era Chris Martin on several songs, emphasizing midrange verses and swooning, wordless choruses with a whole lot of oohs and aahs.
If you’ll indulge me now and return to that Baptist minister, the effect of Belle onstage after Stelling was a little like the effect of our regular rector stepping up to the mike after his impassioned Baptist compatriot. Cool and collected, Belle was just as talented a performer as Stelling, but his stage presence required a shift in audience appreciation.
Rather than allow the music to run into them headlong, the audience suddenly needed to let it sink in; for Belle, it turned to be a transition that everyone was more than happy to make.