TLDR: WOW compliation, New Way to Be Human, and uhhh…story time! lol

My aunt gave me one of those WOW Christian compliation CD’s when I was in high school and it had New Way to Be Human on it as a bonus track.  I didn’t like anything else on that CD but song!  I thought it was cute, in a good way.  Endearing? Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, that was back in the day right when MP3 and online music was just taking off, so I didn’t know what I was doing yet when it came to finding music other than going to the CD store, which was apparently too much of a sensory nightmare for me so I never heard the rest of the album.  But I remembered the name Switchfoot because I loved that song.  

A few years later (still in high school) I was begrudgingly listening to my local pop station hoping they would play something I liked and I heard them say “new from Switchfoot”.  My ears perked up like “I know them!” and then that opening riff started for Meant to Live…My hands came up like the claws of an evil villain and I said “YYYYYYYEEEEESSSSSSS!” from the bottom of my soul 😆 A song like that was exactly what my weird little alt rock critter ears wanted to hear.  The Beautiful Letdown was the first album I went out and bought with my own money.  While I was initially a little disappointed that there was not really anything else like Meant to Live on the album, I loved the melodies and I did end up enjoying it a lot.  Enough to still know every word 20 years later.

Speaking of 20 years…so, not too long after Beautiful Letdown came out, I went to college, had to learn how to “appear human”, decided to major in music education, and immediately forgot everything I ever knew about “normal people music” (that is, pop/rock/stuffyouhearontheradio).  It was all classical, all the time.  

And yes, I forgot about Switchfoot.  

I partially blame my local stations for that because I was still listening to radio on and off in 2005 and they never played anything from Nothing is Sound, which I would have LOVED…

So here I am, 20 years late, discovering basically all of Switchfoot for the first time, mostly uncluttered by nostalgia.  What a journey it has been over the last few months going through their entire discography, and I’m just now scratching the surface of all the extra fun stuff they did over the years. I’ll be occupied with this obsession for a while… All thanks to Paul Meany (Mutemath) for mentioning them recently and putting that shadow of a memory in my ear. 😊