“Wendy Darling” by Tyson Motsenbocker, Sunday, November 6, 2022

 

As the Christian Rock releases from Tooth & Nail have been ebbing in the current music market, the new Tyson Montsonbocker record is no exception. Motsenbocker explained on the Black Sheep Podcast that his third record, Milk Teeth, moves away from spiritual subjects but the songs are more rooted in stories about people he knows and about growing up and realizing that life isn’t exactly what his parents and teacher told him life would be. 

LEARNED THE BACKSEAT LESSONS IN A WHITE CHURCH VAN. But steering away from Christian and spiritual themes Tyson Motsenbocker doesn’t necessarily divorce Milk Teeth from his Christian upbringing. Instead, Milk Teeth sounds something like a Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, or certain Buzzfeed writers who write wistfully about episodes from evangelical pasts. For Motsenbocker on Milk Teeth, that evangelical past isn’t particularly devout. Today’s song, “Wendy Darling,” has a backdrop of youth group in the third verse, but even with that backdrop the speaker and Wendy had snuck off to make out or have sex in the “white church van.” The chorus alludes to high school parties that involves driving “like Magnum’s Ferarri” and “throwing up [Wendy’s] mom’s locked Bacardi,” which is actually a brand of rum, not vodka. But this isn’t a PluggedIn review. I think it’s fascinating that these kinds of stories can be told now on a Christian record label, showing a frankness not showed until recently. Tooth & Nail has always been the most progressive of Christian labels, but even until recently records were censored in the writing in the writing process.

THERE’S NOT MUCH TO DO IN A WHEAT FIELD TOWN WITH YOUR PARENTS AROUND. Tyson Motsenbocker named “Wendy Darling” after Wendy in Peter Pan, stating that Wendy is the character who grows up as opposed to Peter Pan who remains in boyhood. The speaker in the song has lost touch with Wendy until he “got up the nerve to call” her. After she went off to college, who she was is preserved in the speaker’s memory as the girl who played Nintendo with him, the one who went swimming in the cold Idaho/ Montana rivers in the summer, who went to house parties with him. But the second track on Milk Teeth listeners with a warning: “The old men say the decades don’t pass slow.” Time is the main theme and even the villain of Milk Teeth, an album that takes its title from another name for baby teeth that we lose before the age of ten. The album ends with the existential “Time Is a One Way Mirror,” but that is certainly a discussion for another day. For today let’s remember someone whom we lost to time. How has that person changed? How have you changed?

Read the lyrics on Genius.