Before we get into specifics about the record, talk about your upbringing as far as religion. You grew up in the Bible Belt, and if you listen closely, you hear elements of spirituality throughout your Superdrag songs. What was your religious experience growing up?
My mom and dad are both real active in the church. My dad was a deacon and held other offices in the church. In fact, the church that we went to was about 50 yards from our house. The church property backed up to our backyard. When I was 10, I was baptized and confessed Christ. I would never say anything to discount that phenomenon for any person, no matter what their age, but the understanding that I have of the gospel now and what it means versus the understanding I had at age 10 is huge. It’s night and day. Thankfully, 10-year-old kids are not in the world, for the most part, getting chewed up and spit out.

All that being said, I used to play during the services. For a while there, when I was probably in 10th grade, I would play bass while the choir would sing. We were there all the time, until I was probably 18 or whenever I moved out of the house. Obviously, the church, the scripture and everything associated with that was a huge part of my upbringing. When I started writing songs, I rebelled against it, almost from the very beginning. Now I look back and wish that I hadn’t been so flippant. I wish I would’ve picked some other taboo things to say rather than what I did say. But I can’t change that.

To answer your question, it was a big part of my life. A big conflict for me was not wanting to be a kid from east Tennessee that grew up in a Baptist church but instead wanting to be John Lennon or Pete Townshend. I would read all of the biographies and go, “If I want to write a song as good as ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ I’m going to have to take acid or I’m going to have to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead.” Now, of course, I realize that was foolish.

Do you call yourself a Christian now or do you call yourself a Baptist?
The trend is to move away from a label. In fact, there are people from all kinds of religious backgrounds who attend the church we do. The church that I went to as a kid was a Southern Baptist church, the dreaded Southern Baptists. They get a bad rap a lot of the time and probably for good reason. They definitely have policies that I strongly disagree with, that I don’t feel speak for me. I don’t feel that Jesus Christ is a campaign manager for the GOP. I strongly resent that. It’s despicable that honest, Christian people like my grandmother are guilted into voting for a Republican because they think if they don’t, they’re not Christian. That’s horrible. I try to strip all of that away from it and only look at God’s work. I don’t look to the president or anybody else, if I can help it. I try to go straight to the source.

Now, on to the record. “Me And My Girl” and “Nothing Gets Me Down” don’t specifically address the subject of God, but if you read between the lines, “Nothing Gets Me Down” is clearly about your faith. Did you consciously say, “I’m writing this new type of material, I need some other material to balance it?” Or was it just a natural process?
“Me And My Girl” springs to mind first in context of the question. I had been thinking about how in scripture, there’s no marriage in heaven, other than the marriage of Christ to his church. There won’t be husbands and wives in heaven. But elsewhere in the Bible, it says that we’ll know one another. I got to thinking about that and thinking about Wendy, of course, and just wanting to write a love song. But I think you can have a song about loving your wife and loving the Lord at the same time. Ultimately, any love we have for one another springs from him. I was thinking about how the grave isn’t big enough to hold us. That was the other thought I had when I was writing that song: “A hole in the ground couldn’t hold what we’ve found/We’re no longer bound to the things of this world.” To me, it’s kind of overtly gospel-focused but definitely not in a late-night infomercial kind of way. There’s a lot of rote stuff in Christian music, just like you have in any kind of music.

With “Nothing Gets Me Down,” I started writing that song when Superdrag was on tour with Guided By Voices. I had a couple of verses, but I was never able to finish it. It’s a real personal song. I’m not sure if I’m trying to encourage myself or encourage other people with it, but it definitely didn’t come out of a contemporary Christian music rhyming dictionary. That’s a lot of what turns certain music fans off about any record you’d find at a Christian bookstore. It seems so scripted. I’m not trying to put anybody down, but I definitely didn’t want to be influenced by that. I wanted to keep my whole method of writing and recording intact. I wasn’t looking to change up and all of a sudden start using a drum machine or put drum loops everywhere.

Those two songs, they may have less imagery in them than the others that we may traditionally associate with the Bible. Then you have “Jesus Gonna Build Me A Home,” which is an extremely white version of the Staple Singers. [Laughs] No, probably not. I flatter myself by saying that. Overall, I just wrote a bunch of songs and picked my 12 favorite ones, just like we always would do. If there’s any bridge between this stuff and the Superdrag stuff, it’s just honest feelings.

The other song that struck me was “The Kind Of Heart.” Not just because it’s a gorgeous song, but because you seem to address some of the skepticism that people might have about your new music and about people who undergo a rebirth. The lyric that strikes me the most is, “Sometimes I find myself at a loss for words/When taken at face value, it seems so absurd/To believe in a love that comes on like that.” Even though you’ve undergone this transformation, it almost sounds like you’re acknowledging that it might seem a little bit weird to some people.
Yeah, it’s going to. It’s a supernatural thing, and there’s an awful lot of mumbo jumbo out there. You can go into any bookstore and find a bunch of material about the supernatural. Anytime you put your eggs in one basket about something that is not seen but yet is believed, people are going to question that. Obviously, I spent a lot of time questioning it myself.

A lot of people gravitate toward that lyric. A lot of people I’ve played the record for, they really like that lyric. I was thinking a lot about reading between the lines of what Jesus did when he laid his life down willingly and just trying to connect the dots and sing about it from a sort of everyday life point of view. Everything from war right on down to acting poorly toward one another, every human manifestation of what’s negative, what’s hateful, what’s unpleasant about us—he just sort of took on all of that. That’s what I was trying to write the song about. The first verse is kind of a laundry list of atrocities that Christ ultimately conquers over. In the second verse, it comes back and says, “Now, what did he just say? How is that right?” And it’s not right. It’s not right that the one pure one paid that price.

With that song, I was also able to incorporate a lot of musical elements that I was dying to put on the record. I really wanted to have some Kevin Shields underwater guitar. I wanted a mellotron flute sound, in kind of a Prince, Around The World In A Day way.

Anybody who listens to the record with any kind of attention should be struck by how honest and emotional it is, and there’s clearly a lot of love throughout the record. What kind of trepidation did you have in releasing this type of record? It’s not much different musically than what you’ve done before but clearly is lyrically. How much did you think about how it would be received?
I am concerned about how it will be received, for sure. I want it to be something people will like. It’s my way of serving people. It sounds funny to say that because there are missionaries or people from the Red Cross right now in Fallujah rebuilding people’s homes and feeding people. Making a record doesn’t compare to that, but I feel like that’s the best I can offer up. I do worry about how it will be received, but not so much because I have doubts about the songs or the words or what it says; my biggest worry is that anything I do on a record would reflect poorly on what the big picture is and what the truth is. I wouldn’t want anybody to say, “That guitar solo sounds like crap, so I don’t care about Jesus.”

It’s hard to look back on 10 years of working and building a thing and then turn around and do something you know will turn people off. It’s inevitable that some people are going to listen to [the record] and go, “I like (1996’s) Regretfully Yours, how can I like this?” That doesn’t come out of any contempt. I definitely don’t want to offend or bum anybody out. I wouldn’t want them to feel like I was a traitor or anything. But at the same time, this is how I honestly feel. This is what I really believe, from the very core of my depths as a person. The best I can hope for from Superdrag fans is a fair shake. I don’t expect anything more, and I don’t feel any sense of entitlement. If they don’t dig it, there will be no hard feelings.

If you don’t mind indulging me, I’ll tell you what my reaction was to the record at first.
I’d love to know.

Based upon your past work—I don’t want to say it’s odd or strange, but it is a little disconcerting to hear overtly spiritual words from someone who used to write a different sort of lyric. So the first time I listened to the record, I thought, “This might take some time to get used to,” though I was enjoying the music. So I took a step back from it and thought, “OK, this is an incredibly honest record. This is where John is at these days, and he’s expressing it in a very emotional way.” The record then becomes much more compelling in that context. When I listen to it now, the initial concerns I had don’t even hit me. I just take the record in the way that you wrote it, and I think it’s really moving.
Well, thanks, man. You just made my day right there. That’s the desired effect. A record isn’t going to save anyone. Songs are just songs. But a record can be a platform. Mine says, “Here’s a guy, and this is what he believes about Christ. This is who he believes Christ to be.” [My record] poses the question, “Are you willing to entertain the thought of Christ or aren’t you?” I’m not a preacher. I don’t have that gift at all. I’m not a missionary or an evangelist. But I feel [my music] is a ministry because of that one kid that walks up to the T-shirt booth and wants to know what you’re going on about.

Your reaction means an awful lot to me because I know that you really dug (2000’s) In The Valley Of Dying Stars. That record was a personal high water mark, and it was also brutally honest. The fact that you like that album on one hand and are willing to sort of look at this different thing in the same way is really meaningful to me. And I hope you’re not the only one.

I doubt I’m the only one. Your fans seem to be willing to follow you anywhere.
Well, I’ve yet to run into anybody that’s disgusted with me. But I’m prepared for that.

Let’s wrap this up with another Superdrag question. You talked before about hearing the older Superdrag stuff. There’s a compilation of unreleased material that’s coming out. Do you see any problem releasing material like that since you’re of a different mind in terms of what you’re writing now?
No, that stuff is what it is. We were the people we were at the time. I don’t have any problem with saying, “Here’s our first session we did in 1993, for better or worse.” The only people that want to hear it have all of the other [Superdrag albums] and take them to heart. And those are my people. If I can get the record into the hands of every one of those people, I would consider it an unqualified success. I have a lot of love for them, no question. If I ever thought that they thought I was trying to pull a fast one or do something shady to them, it would really hurt me. The only reason to release anything else that Superdrag did would be for that reason. I just want to give them what they want, man. If I’ve got anything in a shoebox sitting here in my house, I want them to have it.