Growing up in Washington to a religious family, I bet Noah never could have guessed meddling with his electric Epiphone at age 13 would have sparked such a prodigious following, accumulating since the sensation Saints & Liars, released in 2009. After fiddling with the post-hardcore scene in a group called Beneath Oceans, Noah Gundersen began performing lyrically raw songs with a neo-folk twinge, similar to the aroma of The Civil Wars and The Head and the Heart. Various members of his family accompanied him, namely his talented sister embracing the stage through violin, cello, and piano. His interview with Sojo three years ago gave his audience clear knowledge that he is not a Christian, but values the universal and powerful aspect of spiritual themes. He mentions that inspiration and music is a spiritual experience for him and shares several convictions that echo Scripture's words such as family, love, honesty, and giving.
"Saints & Liars" is permeated with sincerity, unearthing his struggle with spiritual concepts. Jesus, Jesus portrays his indictment with proclaimed believers: “Jesus, Jesus, there are those that say they love you, But they have treated me so damn mean.” In the song Oh Death, Noah takes from Ecclesiastes 12:7 and 1 Corinthians 15:55, to express his struggle with whether there is life after death. He ends the album with the song Middle of June, in which he portrays that if there is a heaven, he is ignorant of how to get there. Throughout the next few albums, Noah utters several heart wrenching lines. His songs capture the mass audience's battles with themselves, others, and spiritual matters. He pronounces, “I wanna be less like my father and more like my dad” in the song David, and shares his view of God's absence and weakness to deal with the evil of the world in the song Fire, describing Jesus as a man “dressed in the rags of poverty” sitting in a stained glassed church where “the light shines like red blood.” His song Family echoes the resounding cry of many who are perplexed with the evil's people perform, and the album "Ledges" is imbued with his desires to love and start new, the fragility of life, addiction, and change. The maturity in Noah's writing is fervently profound. In light of this, the unvarnished fragrance of the show Sons of Anarchy has featured Noah Gundersen in two different volumes of the soundtrack. He apprehends much of humanities struggles, engaging people from all religions with the breadth of his music.
Finally, we come to Noah Gundersen's latest release titled "Carry the Ghost." Since its release, it has gained attention from KEXP, American Songwriter Magazine, No Depression magazine, AbsolutePunk.net, and many others. "Carry The Ghost" experiments with rock-based sound, powdered with anthemic, driving, tunes, meanwhile maintaining the unrefined weight of his lyrics that so many hold dear. In his interview with No Depression, he voices how “A lot of this album is about coming to terms with the gray. There’s a little bit of black and a little bit of white in our world, but mostly it’s just gray. Coming from my background, that has been a little difficult; there was a lot of subconscious stuff that I didn’t really realize I hadn’t got over” [1]. Much of this album divulges Noah Gundersen's desire to accept the past because it forms a person, but he also expresses not wanting to repeat his past mistakes. There are a few lines in which he shares his growth in handling relationships from Slow Dancer: “Light me up again call me a snake and a liar / And I will be the fire that keeps you warm.” His song Jealous Love states, “I don't want no jealous love...I don't want to be a crutch.”
Show Me The Light is a remarkable song. He reminisces on his love for a woman and his battle for her attention with Jesus. He reflects how he pretended at church when he didn't care less about her religion, yet later understood that her presence showed him the light. In contrast however, his song Empty From The Start seems to respond to Jesus, Jesus:
I think I heard a good man say
God is love and love has made us
But have you seen the news today?
I
have and I think God is gone away
If he was ever there anyway
Here he seems to have made up his mind that God is not there, yet he “learned to ask the Lord for forgiveness” in the song Topless Dancer.
Empty From The Start seems to paint the strongest ideal that Noah holds onto. SongFacts interview with Noah Gundersen reveals that during the writing of this song, Noah came to the conclusion that “the only thing worth loving more than myself is loving someone else and making someone else feel less alone” [2].
I have never met Noah Gundersen, yet have had the pleasure of seeing him live on Biola's Campus during a Spring 2014 Eddy. I would love to present a steady battle that I noticed Noah seems to be at war with during the course life, and I believe Christian or not, we battle this same thought process.
The issue is this: the world is depraved and the idea of God appears true, but he never seems to show up. Even Christian's appear so often to be no less immoral than the world. Therefore, we go our own way. However, all that values Scripture breathes connects with the core of who we are, and so we figure that yes, love is absolute and pure, but I can do it alone; if God is there, he sure doesn't want anything to do with the world's corruption.
Life is frustrating, confusing, painful, and there is often no hope. We come to these conclusions at times when all we do is look horizontally at the world. People are messed up, no matter what religion. However, ο Θεός είναι αγάπη, God is love. Despite what happens on earth, “I, the LORD, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed. From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from My statutes and have not kept them. Return to Me, and I will return to you” (Malachi 3:6-7). It is vital that we follow God, not other people. The less we allow Scripture to be our truth, everything else can seem right.
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- Elliot,
Gwendolyn. "The Seeker: Noah Gundersen Is Coming to Terms with
the Gray." No
Depression.
Freshgras LLC. Web. 30 Aug. 2015.
. - "Noah Gundersen : Songwriter Interviews." Noah Gundersen : Songwriter Interviews. SongFacts. Web. 30 Aug. 2015.
