Happy anniversary, 'Beautiful Letdown'
Maybe some day I'll finally write a book about this influential album. But for now, this will do.
This Saturday, Feb. 25, marked 20 years since Switchfoot released their breakthrough album “The Beautiful Letdown.” It would go on to be certified double-platinum but the RIAA and would spawn hit singles like “Dare You to Move” and “Meant to Live.”
It also showed little teenage Jake that it was possible to make Christian music that actually sounded good and was edifying at the same time. (Funny timing. Much of the band’s ethos sprang out of the Jesus Movement, a change in Christian pop culture that is now getting its own movie made about it, also out this weekend.)
A while back, when we were in the throes of the pandemic, I submitted a pitch to 33 1/3 Books about doing a retrospective on this album. My pitch didn’t get approved, but I kept all my notes. Here’s a bit from the intro, unchanged from when I submitted it, in celebration of the album’s 20th anniversary. Someday I’ll get around to finishing the book, but for now, this’ll do.
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switch·foot
/swiCH-fo͝ot/
Adverb: Surfing or skating with one’s wrong foot forward
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The tension between entertainment and evangelization was there from the beginning. Switchfoot was founded by brothers Jon and Tim Foreman and their friend Chad Butler in 1996 in San Diego, Calif., as Chin Up. The trio started playing talent shows as a Led Zeppelin cover band before moving onto playing megachurches like North Coast Calvary Chapel in Carlsbad, where Jon and Tim’s father was a pastor.
The church gigs led to a record deal with the independent Re:think Records and a new name: Switchfoot.
“We all love to surf and have been surfing all our lives so to us, the name made sense. To switch your feet means to take a new stance facing the opposite direction,” Jon told Jesus Freak Hideout in 2000.
Their name was reflective of their ethos; their opposite stance in the face of so much watered-down Christian music was to create accessible songs that engaged with big spiritual questions without using the J-word. The band’s first album, The Legend of Chin, dealt with questions about apathy (“Chem 6A”), Ecclesiastical nihilism, (“Life and Love and Why”), the Gospel of Jesus Christ (“Bomb”) and growing up into a life of faith (“Ode to Chin”) -- all without beating the listener’s head in.
Despite their indie chops, Switchfoot was on a Christian label from the beginning. Sparrow bought Re:think before Chin was released in 1997, putting the band on the CCM track whether they wanted it or not.
“When Charlie Peacock signed us to his label, re:think, in '97, the label's goal was to release albums both in and outside the church, which definitely resonated with what we were doing – playing a campus pub one night and a church the next,” Jon told Christianity Today in a 2003 interview about The Beautiful Letdown.
“Then, when Sparrow bought out re:think, half of who we were was lost. Sparrow is amazing at what they do, but they're not in the same market as we're in now.”
From the beginning, Switchfoot was less interested in naming the ambiguous “Yous” and “Hes” in their lyrics than with experimenting with musical styles and getting at the deeper issues. Throughout the band’s history, Jon has been the most vocal on this stance:
"Some of these songs are about redemption, others about the sunrise, others about nothing in particular: written for the simple joy of music. None of these songs has been born again, and to that end there is no such thing as Christian music. I am a believer. Many of these songs talk about this belief... my life will be judged by my obedience, not my ability to confine my lyrics to this box or that,” he said in one interview.
The Brothers Foreman and Butler would end up releasing three albums with Sparrow from 1997-2000, each one evocative of the time it was released, but wholly its own. You can clearly see the band’s maturation through Chin to New Way to Be Human to Learning to Breathe. The lyrics become sharper, the themes more universal, the musicianship more confident. You can find secular similarities, like some hints of Smash Mouth or U2 here, a little Green Day there. By LifeWay’s own metric, Switchfoot was reminiscent of Everclear, Foo Fighters, Weezer and Bush -- comparisons the band probably would have embraced.
But those references feel more like organic influences than cheap imitations. Truly, there is no secular equivalent to something like New Way To Be Human’s “Something More (Augustine’s Confession),” which starts off with a dizi note bleeding into a synth riff that turns into a syncopated guitar verse with lyrics about one of Christianity’s most renowned saints. And it works.
The band had already amassed a huge following by the time Learning to Breathe came out in 2000, but that album would put them on the road to stardom. Breathe was nominated for a Best Rock Gospel Album Grammy, but it was “I Dare You To Move” that put them on the map. Mandy Moore used the song, along with others from Breathe, in her genre-defining tearjerker film A Walk To Remember. Breathe became the band’s most successful album until that point, selling more than 500,000 copies.
Once they were done with their Re:think contract, they were free to make the album they always wanted.
They needed to make a statement. They brought in longtime touring member Jerome Fontamillas and got to work on what would become The Beautiful Letdown.
"This was the most freedom we had ever felt while tracking an album – no record labels, no distractions, just four guys making the record we'd always wanted to make,” Tim told Jesus Freak Hideout at the time.
It certainly sounded like it. The guitars are loud, the ballads are big, the lyrics are philosophic with a hint of tongue-in-cheek humor and the synths are aplenty. It’s Christian enough to listen to in front of your mom and cool enough to listen to in front of your friends. It was a game-changer for me as a little VBS kid hearing it for the first time at 13 years old. Was it possible to have the best of both worlds? Actual, good music that respected Christianity without devolving into parody?
As it turns out, yeah. And I wasn’t the only person who felt that way.
The album would sell more than 2.6 million copies and spawn two huge hits, “Meant To Live” and “I Dare You To Move” (a reworking of the Learning To Breathe track). It was inescapable. One Tree Hlll used it for an episode. The O.C. used “I Dare You To Move” in a promo spot, the band shot a Spider-Man 2-themed music video for “Meant to Live” and Smallville used the album’s “This Is Your Life” in an episode.
The Beautiful Letdown walks the tightrope between sacred and profane and sometimes gleefully dances on it. Switchfoot was already good at performing that balancing act, but their fourth album was where the high-wire act was perfected. They became the poster boys for “We’re not a Christian band, we’re Christians in a band,” a marketing move that would later help artists like Relient K, Flyleaf, Underoath, Pedro the Lion and Sufjan Stevens find crossover success.
This semantic clarification would help The Beautiful Letdown sit on top of the Billboard charts for 38 weeks, a record for a Christian act that would not be broken until worship artist Lauren Daigle spent 39 weeks atop the charts in 2019 for Look Up Child. Daigle’s album was the result of crossover radio play, but that business model has become more and more rare for Christian artists in the age of Spotify and the increasingly blurred lines of genre.
The Beautiful Letdown also became a crossover phenomenon because of its band members’ faith and the way they chose to express it -- or not. There’s not a single mention of Jesus’ name on the album, but the lyrics to “On Fire” mention being “on fire when He’s near you.” While the opening riff to “Meant To Live” harks back to grunge, the lyrics are more hopeful for redemption than anything else. That song also continues the band’s early themes of confronting apathy and searching for wisdom beyond everyday routine.
The album’s structure also follows a pattern of duality. The 11-song track listing follows a strict fast song/slow song pattern throughout, opening with a hard rocker and closing with a ballad.
The superstardom that would result from the success of The Beautiful Letdown would enable Switchfoot to start charities and other nonprofit initiatives, but the album sales would never reach the height of 2003. They’re still together today, and have actually added band members instead of breaking up. The band is now a five-piece consisting of Jon and Tim, Chad Butler, Fontamillas and Drew Shirley. They have released seven more albums since The Beautiful Letdown, each one getting more comfortable with the worship music aspect of the CCM genre. They continue to surf the opposite way, though; their Covers EP released in early 2020 includes Switchfoot’s take on Frank Ocean and Vampire Weekend.
The Beautiful Letdown is clearly Switchfoot’s line of demarcation in their discography. But more than that, it’s the line of demarcation for the entire Christian rock genre.
And it all started with a hard rock song influenced by C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, John Steinbeck, U2 and Nirvana.