“Broken Heart” by Falling Up, Tuesday, April 13, 2021

 

The BEC in BEC Records is short for Brandon Ebel Company and is an imprint label of Ebel’s other company, Tooth & Nail Records. Today, the label serves as the Contemporary Christian side of Ebel’s business, just as Solid State serves as the heavier music side; however, the distinction between the label imprint have not always been so defined. Case in point is Falling Up, whose career started as an explicitly Christian band but later became the creative outlet of vocalist and songwriter Jessy Ribordy to write his science fiction song lyrics. By the band's third record, Falling Up had become much less about Christian music, and much more about abstract sci-fi landscapes, littered with Greek mythology. And after the band's fourth album, the label and many fans had lost interest.

IN THIS MOMENT SYNCHRONIZED INSIDE. But let’s go back to the single that helped the band sell over 50,000 albums the first week of their debut Crashings’ release—“Broken Heart.” This was February of 2004. Linkin Park had redefined the rap-rock genre by mixing electronica and nu-metal. The prior year, Evanescence had released Fallen and harder music had found a spot on Top 40 radio. On the Christian side, Thousand Foot Krutch was killing it with their move to Tooth & Nail and their move away from rap-rock. Christian music could be explicitly Christian or not, and no one seemed to care either way. In fact, crossover success was seen as a pretty good thing. Groups on Tooth & Nail were finding their way onto Warped Tour and MuchMusic, MTV2, and whatever video stations that were still playing videos. Kutless was still a rock band and Jeremy Camp was a rocker with CCM appeal. And the mastermind behind this new wave of Christian Rock was Aaron Sprinkle, producing hit record after hit record. Crashings is an intense album that leaves you wondering where to categorize it, and the lead single, "Broken Heart," is a good example of the genre-bending style of the record.

WILL I LEARN TO LET IT GO? I remember when I first heard "Broken Heart" on the Saturday night program on the local CCM radio program. The song gave my stereo a workout. Everything about the song is intense--guitars, bass, electronics, drums--all at times fighting for control. What wasn't intense, though, were Jessy Ribordy's vocals. If you stripped the music away, you'd end up with a kind of emo-sounding *N-SYNC. When I both the album, it was on pretty regular rotation in the car. The middle tracks got a little stale, though the song "Jackson 5" was a massive collaboration between their friend Jon Micah Sumrall (Kutless) and Ryan Clark (Demon Hunter) and rapper Paul Wright. Crashings was a sonically-driven master plan for the future of Christian Rock that ultimately never came to fruition. Falling Up's success peaked on the first record. Their follow up, Dawn Escapes, explored further sonic directions, but Ribordy's vaguer lyricism that ultimately lost much of their Christian audience. Now there's very little talk about Falling Up's Christian radio days. The band had many fans until their end in 2016, but they are often excluded from the conversation on Bad Christian and Labeled. In some ways, it's like the band never existed. 

JesusFreaksHideout interview with Jessy Ribordy from 2015

https://genius.com/Falling-up-broken-heart-lyrics