"Afterthought" by City of Auburn ft. Stephen Christian, Sunday, February 2022

If you search "City of Auburn" on YouTube, you'll find several YouTube channels for city councils in various states. But today, we're not talking about any of those places, nor Auburn University, located in Auburn, Alabama. We're talking about a small Christian Rock band with about 32,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. The band comes from McKinney, Texas, and have released several EPs starting with 2014's Soul Searcher, which was a solo project of lead singer Michael James Osborn at the the time. For City of Auburn's second EP Spinning in 2018, the band recorded with producer Matt Goldman. You may recall Goldman is especially known producing most of the Solid-State era Underoath records as well as producing a wide range of mostly Christian records from Casting Crowns to The Chariot. 

I'M TAKING THE NEXT TRAIN. You may also recall that Goldman is also responsible for recording Anberlin's demos that garnered the interest from Brandon Ebel at Tooth & Nail Records. Drummer Nate Young returned to Goldman to produce the drums on Anberlin's Lowborn. So, working with a connected producer, City of Auburn was able to secure a featured spot on their 2018 EP with Anberlin's lead singer, Stephen Christian, who wrote and contributed the second verse of the song. However, a guest spot with a superstar of Christian Rock has yet to propel streams to City of Auburn. A move like this would have sealed them into a major label in the '90s and early '00s. Despite a marketing campaign, sponsoring The BadChristian Podcast to promote Spinning--the ad featuring today's song which features Stephen Christian--the band hasn't cracked Christian Rock radio stations like RadioU or ChristianRock.net. The band put out a video for "Afterthought" back in 2021, perhaps in hopes of promoting the single. However, Stephen Christian doesn't appear in the performance video, making the video a bit cringy to watch. 

I'LL TRAVEL BACK TO THOSE PLACES WITH YOU. City of Auburn released two new singles last year and is rumored to release music again this year. While the band hasn't garnered radio play, they have been talked about on IndieVisionMusic and JesusFreaksHideout, where they were featured on their indie compilation, Songs We've Been Trying to Tell You About, Vol. 8. And as controversial as it it, I'm going to feature today's song on 2022+ because the music video was released last year, meaning the single was still being pushed in 2021, of course replacing the song for a newer one should other City of Auburn songs strike me later this year. Today's song, though, has been encouraging me through very hard times the last few months. I added it to one of my playlists that I listen to in the morning, often before work. "Afterthought" reminds me that "everything will work out fine." It seems that everything is going to work out, even if it's not exactly as I planned it. It seems that everyone will be okay. It seems that 2022 will be a year of change and opportunity for new starts. Everything will work out fine.



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