“Glass to the Arson” by Anberlin, Saturday, October 1, 2022
When recording their debut record Blueprints for the Black Market, Anberlin spent time in Seattle writing the lyrics for the album. During their 2020 livestream We Are the Lost Ones, between songs and banter, the band told stories about where they drew inspiration for some of the most beloved tracks on the record. Viewers heard stories about using rhymezone.com to complete “Cold War Transmissions,” seeing their producer Aaron Sprinkle play a cover of The Cure’s “Lovesong” at a karaoke night—his arrangement would end up on Blueprints, and a story about an arsonist devastating Seattle at the time of the recording.
INNOCENCE DERAILED. "Glass to the Arson” is the fifth track on Blueprints for the Black Market. It's certainly not one of Anberlin's most poignant lyrics: it's not a storytelling song and the lyrics never made a deeper connection with me like later Anberlin songs; it's the passion in Stephen Christian's voice along with the Joseph Milligan's guitar solo that show the band's potential. The lyrics don't even appear in the album leaf for Blueprints, as they did in future records, making the lyrics to the record feel secondary to the music. This is not say that none of the lyrics on Blueprints are good. The ends of the record see "Readyfuels" "running hot tonight" and "Cadence" "burning like Joan of Arc." The middle of the record, though, sounds like a naïve pseudo-European band dreaming about life experiences foreign to them. The potential that was fully realized on Never Take Friendship Personal and Cities. Stephen Christian has talked about the difference in lyrical quality between the first and second Anberlin albums due to fans feedback, which inspired Stephen to write more emotional songs. "Glass to the Arson" certainly needed an English teacher to look over the song for coherence. It could have been a riveting true crime song through the eyes of an arson(ist), the CSI or even Seattle-based Station 19 fire investigators looking at the density of smoke on the glass of a mansion in Laurelhurst. Maybe there's an incredulous look from the Sargent when a probationary firefighter raises a theory until investigators discover the D-ring from the arsonist's harness on the second floor near the window where he climbed in or perhaps the blood when he cut himself on the window.
WE ARE THE ARSONS. When I was in elementary school, I was terrified of fire. The fire safety education assembly was so graphic that students had to have their parents sign a waiver in order to watch the video. The video talked about how houses had electrical fires, maybe someone left something on the stove and stepped out for a second, but one of my biggest fears was a log falling out of the wood stove in the late fall or winter or a chimney fire, like what happened to the neighbor down the road. As I got older and watched television programs about arsonists, I started to have the fear that someone perhaps hated my family enough to burn down our house late at night. And I wasn't as scared about dying in a house fire as a family member dying, or us losing all of our things--stuffed animals, pets, toys--or even someone getting severe smoke inhalation and going crazy for the rest of their life like on the episode of Adventures in Odyssey about the burned down mansion. My nightly prayers were asking for protection from all the different ways that the house could burn down. I thought if I didn't ask for all of them every time, perhaps a way that the house could burn down that I forgot to mention would happen. Sure, the fire in "Glass to the Arson" just signifies a passion to destroy and it's not scary like my childhood trauma, but if we're entering spooky season, I would say that fire was one of my biggest fears as a child.
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