There are times when a song will take root inside my head. Sometimes it is because the tune is catchy. Others because the lyrics resonate deeply. Often it is some combination of both. For the last two weeks, that song has been “Brand New Colony” from Give Up, the Postal Service’s one and only album.
Writing about the strange chemistry that makes you like a song is a fragile thing. Let me dissect something that is ineffable and lay it out for you. Yet songs often get their hooks in us because they are telling us something. Truth is, songs usually stick with me when they accidentally trip into the holy.
Not that “Brand New Colony” is actually a song about God. Ben Gibbard—who sings the song and is its main lyricist—does not seem to have anything ethereal in mind other than love here. His main gig, Death Cab for Cutie, came out with the song “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” which is a deeply gorgeous and firmly agnostic song about love, death, and what happens next.
“Brand New Colony” is about that very human kind of love, but I think that sometimes people find themselves inching closer to the sacred when they sing about “human” things than some do when they aim to sing about God. It’s not always the case, but I think it happens more often than we’d think.
Yet I am getting ahead of myself because it is truly only half the song that really reaches such great heights for me (I’m sorry to those who got the pun, but it was right there). The first part of the song is fine. It is a metaphor-fest in which Gibbard vows to be all of these objects—a phonograph, platform shoes, winter coat, etc.—that will support his beloved. The sentiment is sweet but it also veers dangerously close to being a twee high school love note scrawled on notebook paper.
When Gibbard ceases to promise all he will be and shifts to where he wants to go, the song finds another gear. There are so many songs that ache for a better place; the Staples Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” and U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” immediately leap to mind. That’s where “Brand New Colony” travels and that is when I start to love it.
“I want to take you far / from the cynics in this town / and kiss you on the mouth.” Very potent lyric when you live in a capital city during a special session of state legislature that goes sideways. But those lyrics probably seem still to be very in the vein of a love song. Don’t let the physicality of that line distract you. The Christian faith often tries to disembody ourselves when we think about God. We worry that if something is physical then it is some sort of obstacle to the holy.
Yet when I hear this lyric expressing the desire to kiss one’s beloved on the mouth, I hear something that is antithetical to how Christians traditionally think about “The Fall”: This is someone who wants to live their life completely without shame.
Think about it. It takes a certain level of freedom to fully kiss someone in public. Lots of people are self-conscious about showing affection around others. Some people have to deal with a 10 year old making retching sounds whenever people kiss (that is purely hypothetical). Kissing makes a lot of people super uncomfortable. Especially church people.
In “How He Loves,” John Mark McMillan includes a lyric about heaven meeting earth “like a sloppy wet kiss” and it seriously freaked some people out. To the point that some churches would change the lyric to “unforeseen kiss” to make it more palatable to their congregations (it also potentially makes the lyrics a heck of a lot more problematic, but I digress).
There is a vulnerability in that act of affection. To kiss someone on the mouth is to be fully present with that person. It is to be unashamed. In the Genesis story, the Fall happens when Adam and Eve experience shame and they hide. Shame is something that drags so many of us away from who God intended us to be. So in this act, I see something that is very romantic, but also something that is radically liberating.
Gibbard goes on to sing about freedom and taking on new names (a major biblical motif for those who have had encounters with God…or just had a Hebrew name and a Greek name). As his voice continues to climb, he talks about re-connecting with the ground beneath our feet. Then he comes to the final lyric that is repeated again and again: “Everything will change.”
Everything will change. That’s what I want many days. I think most of us do. “I know a place / ain’t nobody crying.” “I wanna run / I wanna hide / I wanna tears down the walls that hold me inside.” “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Everything will change.
There is a deep yearning for something better than what exists around us. I actually don’t think that this longing is tethered to any sort of culture or creed. We see pain, we see loss, we see people oppressed, we feel shame, and we ache for everything to change. I think in that hopeful, almost prayer-like refrain at the end is where I see “Brand New Colony” echo something holy.
Yet here is the tension that I feel obligated to mention and it is the tension that has been existent in the faith to which I belong from almost the beginning. The brand new colony is already here, but also not quite. I think songs like “I’ll Take You There” and “Brand New Colony” are good for us when they give us hope for the day when all things are made right. We just have to remember that those days are already breaking through in the present.
We trip ourselves up when we fence off God’s community to some Great Beyond. If that brand new colony is only “there” then we tend to neglect here. We ignore mandates to care for creation, we don’t take the steps to make the world safer for our children, we forget to care for our neighbor. We slip into the mindset that a citizenship in heaven negates a citizenship on earth.
Everything will change. And everything is changing. Yes, it is painfully slow and often imperceptible. Yet the Gospel message proclaims to us that the Kingdom of God, Reign of God, Community of God is here. As much as I want to ditch the cynics of this metaphorical and literal town and flee elsewhere, we build here. We build here alongside wherever God is bringing goodness into the world. So take heart, a brand new colony is here among us.