I want to do something a bit different and introduce you to Youngest Son.
I first discovered Steve Slagg through his writing. His blog was the very second blog I discovered that was written by a gay Christian around my age, and he and other writers online wrote with more honesty and courage than my undergraduate self could muster. Eventually Steve and I connected online, and he told me about Youngest Son—his singer-songwriter name—a few months before the release of All Saints’ Day. His first EP, Pigshit and Glowing (2007), was enticing and unsettling; I think he was the first artist I heard who used the word “horny” on an album with such overtly Christian material. (He employs it in “Craters of the Moon,” an unrelenting track recalling a road trip he and his late father took when Steve was young.) That album is an electrifying menagerie of emotional highs and lows, ranging from the manic “Derek” to the gentle “Hands” to the astonishing, desperate masterpiece “Corpus Christi,” which chronicles a young gay woman’s conversion to Catholicism.
Because the music was as honest and courageous as Steve’s writing, encountering Youngest Son felt like uncovering a secret treasure—here, miraculously, was music that got me and my specific little niche. The niche wasn’t “gay Christians,” really, since Steve only directly touches on gay themes in his music from time to time (though his website says he’s “working on a new batch of songs about growing up gay in the evangelical church”). It was more like music that got why faith was so complicated for me—so seemingly full of beauty, and struggle, and heartache, and ecstasy. I first latched onto Steve’s music because it seemed to speak so clearly to my experiences as a gay Christian, but I soon realized his songs still fit when my faith was complicated for other reasons.
Ultimately, what perpetually draws me back to Steve’s music isn’t so much the gay Christian themes; it’s the aching, naked vulnerability. The songs are autobiographical, full of in-jokes and whatever you call the tragic inverse of an in-joke (an “in-groan”?). “Stephen, I need you tonight / No one else thought this place was as crazy / We lay with Jeff on the floor on your birthday / All night / Lay for hours and talked about / How things would never be / All right,” Steve recalls in “Untitled Memory Song” about a friend who committed suicide. Due to the essays he writes to provide context for each song, even lines from old hymns—like “We go in faith, our own great weakness feeling / And needing more each day thy grace to know,” which the attendees sang at his dad’s funeral, and which he covers on his newest release—come across as candid disclosures. He slips from snapshots of life in Chicago to lines borrowed from well-worn liturgies to earnest pleas of prayer, his lyrics equal parts graphic, playful, and reverent.
The two most recent releases from Youngest Son, All Saints’ Day (2012) and All Souls’ Day (2014), offer a stunningly poignant meditation on grief and faith, largely in response to a series of three staggering losses Steve suffered over the course of a year. “There’s a weird poetry in loss,” Steve writes in the essay accompanying All Saints’ Day’s “Cathedral Pines,” and his goal in both albums seems to be setting that poetry to piano and strings. (“You start to get tired of the poetry of loss,” he later confesses on the essay for the same album’s “Wake.”) Both albums are tinted—well, saturated—with hues of tragedy; when he mourns, he mourns hard (See: Saints’ “Wake” and “Faith,” or Souls’ “Quiet Revival”), and when he laughs, it sounds like the kind of laughter that erupts only after your tears are spent (See: Saints’ “Untitled Memory Song” or “Long Year,” the latter being a gut-wrenching song I can only describe in the language of “laughter” because of its title’s hyperbolic understatement.) The albums are far from sullen or macabre, though; “All Saints’ Day Baptism Liturgy” from Saints, among others, acknowledges that resurrection and death are opposite sides of the same coin: “The day of the living is coming / But today, today is the day of the dead.” The final song of the collection, Souls’ cover of “We Rest on Thee,” offers a tender, sweet respite that’s pleasantly wistful.
Thus far in my life, I’ve not experienced severe losses like Steve has, so listening to these two albums feels somewhat —I don’t know, voyeuristic? Touristy? In any case, after I discovered All Saints’ Day, it quickly became the de facto soundtrack for my evenings, especially on road trips across Texas as the sun was setting and the highway served as a metaphor so blatant it felt a bit hokey. For that reason, I felt a mixture of eager anticipation and cautious apprehension knowing All Souls’ Day was coming this summer; I wanted the beauty but knew, in the case of these albums, it would be beauty from pain. In any case, Souls is an effective, moving companion to Saints, continuing the former’s autobiographical exploration of loss and hope with glimpses at funerals (“Anticipate Your Arrival—Quiet Revival”) and a spiritual experience from Steve’s teenage years (“Lake Superior”).
There’s a greedy part of me that wants to claim Steve exclusively for the gay Christian subculture; because as much as that subculture needs role models and advocates and bloggers, we also need musicians and artists and poets. Nevertheless, Steve’s music covers big, even universal, themes, and his honesty and courage should appeal to a wide spectrum of people for whom the Christian faith may be complicated. Consider this my exhortation for you to explore the work of Youngest Son—the music, of course, but also the affecting essays and gorgeous artwork that accompany the music on Youngest Son’s website.
Youngest Son’s newest EP, All Souls’ Day, comes out July 29. You can find it and the rest of his music at Youngest Son’s website.
- tejaswoman liked this
- gaynchristian reblogged this from omoblog
- thankyouredball reblogged this from omoblog
- macandcheese90 liked this
- juliabusko liked this
- cappiestuff liked this
- dorotheian liked this
- ssilversunfrenzy reblogged this from omoblog
- ssilversunfrenzy liked this
- omoblog posted this