"Summer Tongues" by Anchor & Braille, Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Stephen Christian talked about each Anchor & Braille record on the Taco Boys podcast 

when he was promoting his most recent project, Tension. He said that each record was made with different musicians, and his debut side project record Felt was made with local musicians in mind from around his hometown in Central Florida. Christian looked to friend and Copeland frontman Aaron Marsh to record the record, Copeland's drummer at the time Johnathan Bucklew and Gasoline Heart's Louis DiFabrizio on bass. When Christian debuted his LP, it seemed he had every intention of maintaining this small town sound. But then he moved to Nashville and started associating with other musicians.

TEAR OFF YOUR SKIN. The bonus DVD release with the Cities special edition shows the portrait of Stephen Christian as a lyricist, jotting down lines in notebooks as he sips coffee in Seattle. Then, in the studio, he'd drink herbal tea and at night inhale vapor for his falsetto notes on songs like "Dismantle.Repair." and "(*Fin)." Around this time, Stephen Christian seemed particularly prolific, releasing the novel The Orphaned Anything's: Memoirs of a Lesser Known and starting a non-profit organization called Faceless International. In 2008, Anberlin released New Surrender on Universal Republic Records, and the following year, Christian released his debut side project, Anchor & Braille's Felt. The songs on Felt are songs that Christian had been holding onto for a while. Christian talks about some songs like "Cadence" and "The Haunting" which became Anberlin songs that he had thought suited Anchor & Braille better until Anberlin talked him into sharing those songs with the band. To me, Felt sounds a lot like Cities--songs that Stephen Christian was writing at a time when he took a moment to process life after touring incessantly. There are visuals we get through the lyrics of enjoying old records and reading novels. We get late nights of wrestling with relationships. We get existential questions, and Stephen Christian doesn't propose the answer like he does in later Anberlin tracks. In other words, Felt feels like a record that doesn't have to conform with the standards that Anberlin had to.

SUNSETS IN GERMANY. But the influence for "Summer Tongues" seems to go further back than Cities, perhaps even taking influence from the early days of Anberlin. When the band started, there were several rumors band members spread about the band name etymology. The truth, the band set straight as early as 2003 in an interview with HM Magazine was that Stephen Christian was talking about all the places he wanted to visit when the band got popular "London, Paris, . . . , and Berlin," but dropped the d when saying the last city, pronouncing it as an berlin. "Summer Tongues" recalls those childhood, naïve memories of boring days dreaming about what the future holds. The music Christian and Marsh compose for the track further illustrates this mood, wistfully remembering the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals with a little bit more subliminal guitar. I chose this song today because of the dreams that 2008 held, when Anchor & Braille released Felt. I think about the dreams 0f 2003 and before, when Stephen Christian was daydreaming about all the places he would one day visit, when I too was playing Where in the World Is Carman Sandiego, thinking about getting lost at Kings Cross station in London, sitting in Tiergarten Park in Berlin, or wandering through galleries looking at Italian frescos. It's for the dreams of 2011, the year before Cornerstone folded, the only time I saw Stephen perform as Anchor & Braille at an intimate late-night show after Anberlin headlined main stage. But mostly it's for my sister: today's her birthday. She's the one who actually talked to Stephen Christian at after the show and got him to sing my copy of The Orphan Anything's. I don't really like meeting famous people, but I did get to meet Stephen and get a picture with him---all Cornerstone sweaty. For all those summer dreams and many more, wherever life finds you in 2022, let's enjoy "Summer Tongues."

Read “Summer Tongues” by Anchor & Braille on Genius.