Will 2010′s Most Important Christian Band Be The Same As 1999′s?

If you weren’t looking for it, you probably missed the 2008 return of Sixpence None the Richer, humble and unheralded, a return that, for me, sees their re-arrival in the midst of a second age of Christian music, which is retroactively furthered by the success of bands like Switchfoot and The Fray and their continued blurring of the line between secular and sacred music. Sixpence happens to be one of the last categorically Christian bands I began following just before I finished high school, the approximate same time my musical interests shifted from Nashville to Seattle. Sixpence also happens to be a band that officially broke up just as I was starting to pay attention. Their career as a band consisted of four studio albums and one EP; their best amounted to an assortment of songs for which they will be remembered by the widest-reaching demographic any professing Christian band could have aspired to at the time.

I am notoriously late to the party when it comes to anything of cultural importance. I began reading the essays of David Sedaris the summer of 2007, almost fifteen years after he read “SantaLand Diaries” on NPR. The first time I saw The Goonies, I was three years into college. Sufjan Stevens didn’t find his way into my iTunes until the release of Illinois, and Death Cab for Cutie had already released Plans by the time I picked up Transatlanticism. When Sixpence None the Richer presented their Best of in 2004, I’d only begun listening to their self-titled third album a few months earlier. As an album, Sixpence None the Richer is the one that caused all the fuss, rocketing the band to wide mainstream success when the WB used “Kiss Me” in an episode of Dawson’s Creek, just like when Jars of Clay’s hit “Flood” showed up on MTV but, like, times a billion. The record had two major hit singles, “Kiss Me” and a cover of a 1988 ditty by English rockers, the La’s, called “There She Goes.” Sixpence released their self-titled album in 1997 and, beginning in 1999, rode its success through the turmoil of their record label, Squint Entertainment, before they were eventually able to release their follow-up album, Divine Discontent, five years later, in the fall of 2002.

At its inception and all the way through its final days, Sixpence None the Richer was primarily a partnership between vocalist Leigh Nash and guitarist and chief songwriter Matt Slocum. There’s a cute anecdote about the two meeting at a church retreat in the early ’90s, in New Braunfels, Texas—a town where there is held an annual sausage festival (Wurstfest) to celebrate its German heritage. They named their effort after a touching parable by C.S. Lewis and released their first, full-length album in 1994, The Fatherless & the Widow. One year later, they stepped forward with This Beautiful Mess, and two years after that, their self-titled.

What’s surprising to me about Sixpence is the progress of their career. Take a look at the track-list for their Best of—there is only one track from The Fatherless & the Widow, two from This Beautiful Mess, two or three each from their last two albums, and about half a dozen from a bevy of soundtracks and compilation albums—and it becomes apparent that, steadily throughout the decade, people began taking notice of this alternative Christian band, reaching a plateau with their siren song “Kiss Me.” To anyone with a craving for the public eye, a plateau seems like something to be indifferent toward, analogous to Jason Alexander’s career post-Seinfeld. No one hates the idea of subtle ubiquity, just like no one ever hated neurotic George Costanza trying to become motivation speaker Bob Patterson before being canceled after only five episodes. No one ever really got on board with it either. Which is what is so surprising about the plateau Sixpence None the Richer managed to achieve. “Kiss Me” found its way onto movie soundtracks and television shows at a rate less-than-or-equal-to the rate at which high school students could add it to their mixtapes. “There She Goes” would eventually see much of the same success, with the addition of its use in birth control commercials. I challenge anyone to find someone in Western culture at the turn of the 21^st Century who had not heard of Sixpence None the Richer (or at least “Kiss Me”).

Right on the verge of being written off as a flash in the pan, Sixpence swooped in with Divine Discontent. Moving in the river of its predecessor, the band’s fourth studio album had continued success in movies and on television, and was distributed cooperatively by a revision of Squint Entertainment and Warner Brothers subsidiary Reprise Records. Their cover of a Crowded House song from 1986, “Don’t Dream It’s Over” was featured in the WB series Smallville about the same time it was hitting the Top 40 charts. Meanwhile, Christian radio saw fit to stick with the album’s first single, “Breathe Your Name,” a song more immediately direct in its spiritual conviction. The Sixpence sound had aptly matured, but everything else about the band remained relatively the same. They continued crafting artful songs about love and pain and faith, even enlisting the songwriting of Jason Wade, lead singer of the (then) ambiguously Christian rock band Lifehouse, for a song called “Waiting on the Sun.” Wade’s inclusion in the album’s credits caught my attention immediately. Here was a song written by a member of a secular band rumored to be Christian, performed by a band that seemed to be rapidly losing its sacred cred.

To understand the crossover tension, one must look back to 1995’s This Beautiful Mess. At this point in their career, Sixpence None the Richer had garnered notable success within the Christian music industry, winning a Dove Award that year for Alternative/Modern Rock Album and drawing the attention of veteran performer Steve Taylor as he was forming his own record label called Squint Entertainment. Taylor saw his own success throughout the ’80s as a filmmaker, solo artist, and member of the short-lived band Chagall Guevara, up through the early ’90s, during which time he drew a surprising amount of attention from MTV. Squint became his pet project shortly thereafter, through which he produced the third Sixpence album. I find it no happenstance that, in the midst of Taylor’s influence, Sixpence None the Richer broke from their success in the marginalized genre of Christian music and grew into a formidable pop phenomenon.

With their success, Sixpence also drew criticism from a conservative audience that did not think a supposedly Christian band should be widely known for a song so cavalier about physical affection. What the mainstream saw as desirable in the song “Kiss Me,” the traditionalists found detestable. Or, if not detestable, suspect. Later, a similar controversy would be struck over a song topping the Billboard charts all year long in 2001. The Malibu band Lifehouse released their single “Hanging by a Moment,” from their debut album No Name Face on DreamWorks Records, a label out of Nashville that was being distributed by Interscope at the time and carried the likes of Rufus Wainwright, George Michael, and Randy Newman. It wasn’t until their second studio album, Stanley Climbfall, that Lifehouse’s faith warranted attention enough to sign a deal with Christian mega-label Sparrow Records to allow current and future records to be sold through the Christian Booksellers Association. In effect, the DreamWorks-Sparrow agreement runs the same course as the treaty between Squint and Reprise, only in reverse, placing Lifehouse and Sixpence None the Richer in exactly the same position—the alternative to Christian Alternative—but with opposing trajectories.

With the advent of Divine Discontent, there appears to me, nowhere else Sixpence could have gone. The band had transformed from a small homebrew in, of all places, New Braunfels, TX; from a fourteen-year-old, angelic vocalist and a guitar guy, not much older, who left a band called Love Coma (!) for arguably just as questionable a pursuit; to become the biggest Christian-to-mainstream crossover story since Amy Grant nearly a decade earlier. They were important; we just didn’t know how important at the time. Their music had been used in dozens of movie soundtracks, TV shows, and compilation albums, to the extent that the only possible way to evaluate their success, to present their best, would be to gather all the tracks that had brought them attention or had been the direct result of the attention they were being given.

For most bands, a Best of album consists of the major singles from the major studio records, and maybe a few B-sides for kicks. For Sixpence, the B-sides, the covers, the rarities were the very bread and butter of their success as soon as the harmonium faded out the chorus of “Kiss Me.” And, as it goes with personal evaluation, assessing your best means redefining your ideas of success if you have any intention of reaching higher. Two teenagers teaming up to play music at a church camp don’t expect to be pop stars on a global scale, but the need for a Japanese version of your biggest hit has a tendency to blow even the most ambitious delusions of grandeur out of the water. Sixpence handled their success gracefully, but eventually, in 2004, saw no choice but to separate. Presumably, the band had brought Leigh Nash and Matt Slocum as far as it could. The Best of Sixpence None the Richer was their final offering, an attempt to please an audience grown so steadily and widely over the course of one and a half decades.

For four years, Nash pursued her solo career, releasing Blue on Blue, an introspective pop anomaly that vaguely resembled an indefinable fraction, best understood while simultaneously squinting just-so at Slocum’s new pursuit, the unfortunately-named rock group Astronaut Pushers. Separately the artistic pieces remained intact, and it was in early 2008 that Nash and Slocum announced the reuniting of Sixpence None the Richer, pairing the news with two new releases—the Christmas album The Dawn of Grace and an EP called My Dear Machine—and the promise of an LP by 2010.

The attitude on the EP is determined. Whatever directional ambiguity caused the breakup seems as though it has been addressed and subsequently worked through. Sixpence seems to have a new resolve to completely uproot the fence between the secular and the sacred, hunker down in the murky midlands of faith and real life. They remain true to their spiritual roots while approaching it with a level of honesty and creativity being carried out by Switchfoot, The Fray, mewithoutYou, bands whose mainstream success has not shied them from bold proclamations of faith.

Retail stores haven’t seen much of My Dear Machine, but four songs and a dirigible on the cover are small rumblings of a greater return. Sixpence None the Richer spent 12 years moving into the middle of everything—movies, TV, and the intersection of life and faith—and appear to have taken time to reestablish the direction they would take as a band. Christianity is a faith that does not occur in seclusion, away from experience; and, with experience comes the necessity for steps forward and backward, away and toward. Sixpence stepped out of sight for a time, which I think will serve them well as artists attempting to reach the widest audience they can, with their best.