29 Songs: I. Michael W. Smith “Lamu”

We are to picture our hero at nine years of age, just beginning to leave behind the towheadedness of childhood and enter into the more sober dull brown of youth and adulthood. (Gray, at the time of this writing, is still some distance off, but one or two advance scouts have been spotted in the territories.) He would repudiate the notion that he is an ordinary boy, but in photographs and other forms of memory-jogging, he looks the part. Perhaps there is some small awkwardness in the way he bears himself or interacts with the world — he has never been graceful — but he is slender, and unselfconscious, and can fit himself into quite remarkably small spaces.

He is a reader. That is his identity, the first (and often only) thing outsiders notice about him, or at least speak to him about. He’s shy, but has not yet embraced shyness as an identity, simply preferring the companionship of books to people, especially people he doesn’t know. He takes books everywhere he goes, and one result is that his memories of reading are quite varied: Bunnicula is the back of an old pickup truck parked in front of the Tucson house, Heidi is the lower branches of a mulberry tree in the front yard of the Phoenix townhouse, The Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics is the great big lichenous rock under the oak in front of his grandfather’s house in Yarnell. And Five Children and It is a nighttime softball game at a public park; his father is playing with a group of guys that were either from work or church, he can’t remember at this distance. It is a long and boring game and he has not yet learned the rules or rhythms of sports; he wanders off and reads on a jungle gym in the dim light that reaches from the field.

On the way to the game, and possibly on the way back, the cassette in the minivan was Michael W. Smith’s The Big Picture, and it is new and wonderful and strange music to the boy, and his head is full of it as he reads; not the words, which he would memorize later on many subsequent listenings, but the thick, urban, synthesized sound of it, a sound which he would later be able to identify as mid-80s, a sound the roots of which he would be surprised, later in life, to identify in Thomas Dolby and the Buggles and Van Halen and Gary Numan and the Cult.

Christian music is all he has ever known, either the worship music which he hears live in church, strummed by cheerful men in beards and slacks, or the Christian pop on the radio, on records, and increasingly on cassettes as his eighteen-year-old cousin, who lives with them, expands her musical horizons from Barry Manilow and Barbra Streisand to include Steve Camp, Second Chapter of Acts, and Michael W. Smith. It’s her cassette that’s in the minivan, and four or five years later he will ask her to mail it over two international borders so he can hear it again.

The Big Picture was released in 1986, and in the larger arc of Michael W. Smith’s career, it represents an anomaly, an attempt at au courant hipness and youth appeal that he would soon abandon for the more predictable and safe adult-contemporary market. He notched a couple of low-level hits on secular radio, but soon retreated back into the comforting, undemanding arms of Christian bland-pop, applying his talent for orchestration and urgent melody to easy sells like worship music or Chicken Soup for the Soul-themed albums.

But for a nine-year-old who had never heard of U2 or Prince, let alone Hüsker Dü or Run-DMC, Michael W. Smith was as hip, as exciting, and even (on some level) as dangerous a music as he’d ever heard. Heavy guitars were vaguely identified with the devil, but on this album shiny hair-metal guitars wailed, screeched, and soared, especially on the second side, which got heavier and heavier until “You’re Alright,” the self-esteem-anthem closer, was honest-to-goodness hard rock — even heavy metal, in a glossy Judas Priest kind of way.

The gloss was how he got away with it, of course. There wasn’t a single dark crunchita-crunchita on the album; guitars only played lead, not rhythm, and studio synths and big echoing drums did the rest. And though the cover of the album was a trippy floating-head-and-picture-frames montage, Smith’s own photo showed a pleasantly dorky young man (who looks not unlike a bearded, tease-coiffed Chris Kirkpatrick) in a floridly somber silk shirt; this was not a threatening dude.

Which doesn’t mean that it’s bad, soulless music; in fact, it’s quite accomplished, especially the multifaceted, complex arrangements (a classically-trained pianist, Smith started out as an arranger, studio musician, and songwriter for the likes of Amy Grant; his first album was tentatively titled The Michael W. Smith Project) and the colorful, immediate kaleidoscope of sounds. He’d studied his Trevor Horn and his Brian Eno; and of course, the vast majority of his youthful evangelical audience could be relied upon not to know where he got his ideas.

The nine-year-old boy had no idea, but he did know that the music was surging and shining, a perfect correlative to this sultry urban night in 1987. Looking out of the tinted windows in the back of the minivan and seeing streetlights reflected on chrome and the flash and twinkle of headlights, stoplights, even a star or two between the fathomless black shapes, listening to the music made him feel grown-up and sophisticated, off-balance but in motion. And though it rarely mentioned the name Jesus or said anything explicit about God, a well-read, highly-churched nine-year-old could easily parse the Christian message in every song.

Almost. The opening song on the album became a source of fascination for him. It was called “Lamu,” and in the song Lamu was the name of a tropical island where the narrator attempted to escape from the bustle and social inhibitions of civilization, only to find that conscience and a moral sense were still with him regardless of how far he tried to run. Years later, the boy would write and perform in skits with the same basic message, and in hindsight it’s obvious that the island was a metaphor for the various forms of escape — drugs, alcohol, sex — which pastors, youth ministers, and parents have always attempted to dissuade teenagers from. But he was a literal-minded boy, and the opening verse,

Here we are on a boat out on the sea
Off the coast of Africa
Heading for peaceful shores in a nest of strangers
To an island hideaway

with its specificity of detail (and brazen non-rhyme), made him wonder if perhaps it was based on an actual incident, some kind of attempt at a real-life Fantasy Island gone horribly wrong. Like Lord of the Flies, only he wouldn’t read that for another seven years. There was even an hint of sex in the song, though the reference was of course negative. But on the whole the song struck him as being unusual, even daring, for a Christian pop song. He was pretty intimately familiar with Christian pop songs, and (ironically, considering the frequency of parables in the Gospels) they were almost uniformly blunt and unsubtle about their message; Smith’s allegory of conscience was a window, even if a small one, into a wider, more unpredictable and artistic, world.

Apart from one attempt to communicate this feeling to a friend, who only looked at him strangely, he never really told anyone how much he liked the album. Michael W. Smith was a girls’ musician, mostly — at least everyone the boy knew who liked him was a girl — and his nerdy good looks, oversensitive nasal voice, and shiny pop instrumentation (especially on every other album besides The Big Picture) weren’t very manly. The boy knew, as if by osmosis, that boys were supposed to like heavy sounds and threatening postures, and Michael W. Smith was pretty wimpy, even (though it would be five or six years before the boy knew what the word meant) faggy.

(About a decade later, the boy would wonder if he was perhaps gay, but the simple test of thinking about naked women convinced him otherwise. Still, he was grateful that he hadn’t grown up in public schools, where his physical awkwardness and slightly feminine tastes would have exerted more social pressure to — he still wasn’t very knowledgeable on this point — make him gay.)

But that was okay; the boy didn’t have many friends who could make fun of him for listening to what he liked, and he listened to The Big Picture frequently, especially the first side — he was still a little scared of the second side — which, in addition to “Lamu,” contained the anthemic (and actually very good) “Wired for Sound,” the sensitive plea for virginity “Old Enough to Know,” the Jesus-comes-to-a-Springsteen-song “Rocketown,” and the huge, “you can make it if you try (but stay Christian)” title track. It was the sort of album that parents were supposed to give to their Depeche Mode-listening teenage kids to show them that hey, this God stuff can be cool and arty too. Apparently it wasn’t very successful; Smith’s next album was much less outré, and then he did a Christmas album (a superb Christmas album, but a Christmas album), and it was all downhill from there.

Or maybe it was just that the boy was growing up and learning more about the world and listening to many different kinds of music by then. But that’s another song.


(“Lamu” on iTunes. The Big Picture at Amazon.)