"I was ninteen years old, eating grapes in a San Diego music studio, wide-eyed. I'm pretty sure I was grinning. I had been looking forward to this moment for weeks: The head of an independent record label had flown all the way from Nashville to hear my friends and I play music - our music.
We were young. We were green. We had dreams that couldn't pay the rent. We threw every song that we knew down on tape and drove our new friend from the record label, Charlie Peacock, back to the airport.
No one has ever heard those tapes.
Because the airlines lost Charlie's luggage on his return flight, the recording session will forever be remembered in gracious approximations. And that, my friend, is probably one of the biggest reasons that we were signed.
There are no coincidences in this story (and I'm grinning again). Over the past seven years, I've all but overstayed my welcome at the Peacock house. Charlie Peacock has become like a second father to me - a mentor in life and love and melody. I've driven his car, eaten his ice cream, and fallen in love on his front porch with a girl who would become my wife. So many dreams, so many melodies. All along Charlie was patient, teaching me how to sing a song, how to live a life of poetry.
"New Way to be Human" was a song I wrote at Charlie's house during a really difficult time in my life. I was at the breaking point. I was numb to the trends and the hype; I didn't care about the facade anymore. I wanted to sing a song about real life, to sing about the only compelling reason to keep on living-or rather, to begin to live. You see, living is not a simple matter of breathing and talking and eating. Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it. Perhaps our compass was wrong all along: Maybe wealth, fame, and power do not bring happiness.
So in this upside-down age, we turn to the singers and the dreamers to bring us back to reality. The poets speak highly of my predecessors. They tell me that to be human is a noble thing, that my species, made in the image of God himself, is the crown of creation that has been given dominion over all the earth. With this in mind I wonder at times if I'm truly human. Sure, I have opposable thumbs and I walk erect. I vote and mow the lawn and eat fast food, but the "crown of creation?" Not sure about that one. The life I live could often be deemed the banality that is the existence of a twenty-first-century human. As Pascal wrote, "What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depositary of the truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe!"
I know that things should be otherwise. I know that simple "existence" is not to be equated with life-surely not! What gift is breath! What a privilege to love and feel the pains and joys of youth. And even still, my life is so prone to mediocrity. I yearn to live and love and burn, and yet so much of my time is spent faking and forgetting, faking and forgetting....I carry out my disbelief with uninspired hands, my eyes shut, my emotions dulled, my spirit numb. In times like these I am in desperate need of truth to come to me like a blinding light, like a splinter in my soul, reminding me of the brevity of my time here on earth.
You see, truth can come in many wrappings, maybe a sunset, maybe a song. But many times the written word is the most direct way for my soul to collide with truth. Simple words can remind me of an inner thirst once again. I need these words like oxygen; I drink them in deeply, letting them fill all of me. New Way to be Human offers such words; it as an alarm clock for the soul, ringing loudly, welcoming the dawn of a new day. These are words that breathe, that make me long for a heart that beats in time with the kingdom of the heavens.
My heart is twenty-seven years old now; I have much to learn and much to be thankful for. I'm grateful that the New Way to be Human is more than just a song or a book or a cause. I'm thankful for these alarm clocks that wake my soul. And I'm glad to call you my hero-friend, Charlie Peacock. For that, I appreciate that the airlines still lose our luggage."
- JON FOREMAN of Switchfoot
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