For our second entry in songs for those morose Sunday mornings when the Tab choir just won’t cut it, we start with Ben Folds’ “Jesusland,” off his 2005 album Songs for Silverman.
The relevant facts here are that 1) Ben Folds is non-religious (and not Jewish, contrary to popular belief), and 2) he was born and raised in North Carolina, right in the heart of the U.S. Bible Belt, amidst all the brooding anxieties that such a setting produces. 2005, recall, was shortly after the re-election of George W. Bush and the ascendancy of the Evangelical electorate that enabled him throughout all the worst excesses of the Iraqi invasion (and beyond).
Ben Folds never explicitly references the war, or the president, largely because he doesn’t need to: the very title “Jesusland” was a derisive term at the time for southern Christian conservative voters. Folds, however, deploys the term not mockingly but tragically; like his fellow southerner Martin Luther King Jr., in Birmingham Jail, he “Take[s] a walk” past all the countless churches dotting his home-state and asks, “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?” And why was their such a chasm between what they professed and how they acted?
Utah is not generally lumped together with the Evangelical South (for both denominational and geographic reasons, obviously); nevertheless, back when I lived in Salt Lake City, “Jesusland” was still a song that resonated far too strongly when I went for those lonely Sunday walks in a futile effort to get out of my own head. There, too, in that tragic land of MLMs, smog, and Summer Sales, I beheld “beautiful McMansions on a hill;” I would see “Billboards quoting things you’d never say” crowding out the majestic view of the mountains along the I-15; and though there were no “crosses flying high above the malls,” there were great and spacious malls aplenty, weren’t there. In such moments, I couldn’t help but absently wonder whatever happened to the banner of Zion and the United Order that this territory was first settled under, whose Law of Consecration we supposedly still covenant to keep in those very Temples that now overlook the malls and suburban sprawl. I, too, have felt to “hang [my] head and pray/for Jesusland.”
These are of course uncharitable (if honest) thoughts; but sometimes when you get into those Sunday moods, the best you can do is just write off the whole day as a wash. Hence America’s 1975 Classic Rock standard “Sister Golden Hair,” with its opening line of “Well I tried to make it Sunday, but I got so damn depressed/That I set my sights on Monday and I got myself undressed…”
As with many an old-timey Blues-inflected number, it’s a song to a lost lover that could just as easily double as a song about one’s relationship with God: “I’ve been one poor correspondent [my prayers have indeed been spotty lately], and I been too, too hard to find [especially to my ministers]/But it doesn’t mean you ain’t been on my mind.” The song can be read as a plea directly to the Almighty in our loneliest moments: “Will you meet me in the middle, will you meet me in the air?/Will you love me just a little, just enough to show you care?” Cause sometimes you go to Church, try to slap on a smile, but then confess, to yourself if no one else, “Well I tried to fake it, I don’t mind sayin’, I just can’t make it.”
Of course, none of us can make it. That’s why the Atonement exists. Sometimes that Sunday morning moroseness is really just an awareness of one’s own nothingness (“which thing I had never before supposed”), of being “even lower than the dust”–that is, of a broken heart and a contrite spirit, the only way we can approach the Kingdom.