“All Around Me” by Flyleaf, Thursday, November 30, 2023

The eponymous album by Flyleaf opens with a dirty, distorted bass on the song “I’m So Sick.” Then 19 seconds into the song, after lead singer Lacey Mosley (now  Lacey Strum) sings in an eerie, childlike voice, she erupts into a growl. While there isn’t a song on Flyleaf that quite matches the intensity of “I’m So Sick,” the grungy debut album from the Texas-based band proves that a female-led rock band has a place in the then male-dominated genre. The album was released in 2005. Christian Rock radio station RadioU had been playing the band’s demos before Flyleaf’s debut album was released.  The band toured relentlessly on their first album cycle between 2005 and 2008 before returning with their sophomore record, Memento Mori, in 2009. These tours with bands like Stone Sour, Three Days Grace, and Christian bands like Skillet solidified the band's place in both the Christian and active rock scenes.

I BEGIN TO FADE INTO OUR SECRET PLACE. In 2007, two years after releasing their debut record, Flyleaf issued their third single from the album, “All Around Me.” Unlike the album’s first two singles, “I’m So Sick” and “Fully Alive,” their third single was much calmer. While the guitars bring a rock element to the song, the heart of it is an airy ballad. And this lighter sound was what drove “All Around Me” to be Flyleaf’s biggest song of their career. Not only was the song a massive hit on Alternative and Active Rock stations, it was the Flyleaf song that crossed over onto pop radio. The song reached #40 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song, according to lead singer Lacey Mosley when speaking with the radio show LA Loyds Rock 30, is about “meeting God.” She goes on to explain that she sings the song “to God” and that the song is “really intimate.” Listeners may not be able to make the connection that the song is about Lacey’s relationship with Jesus from listening to the song with lines like “my tongue dances behind my lips for you.” Moseley acknowledges that not everyone will see the song as a worship song. She says “You can think about [‘All Around Me’] as a relationship between two people in love, too. I never think about it that way, but what’s so cool about that is I think there [are] parallels everywhere – in everything in life. I think that that parallel is something that God wants to communicate to us, that he gives us relationships like that, an intimacy like that." 

THICKENING THE AIR I’M BREATHING. Most of Flyleaf’s general market listenership probably wasn’t thinking about an intimate metaphysical relationship when they listened to “All Around Me.” And while Mosley talks about the song having dual meanings, it transforms me back to high school when many of my peers and I were confused about the line between intimacy with God and with another person. Biologically, teenagers have a heightened sex drive, and this is a modern problem for a society that doesn’t encourage teenagers to reproduce. There are many proposed solutions to this problem in the world, but evangelicals counter sexual desire with abstinence. Getting teenagers on board with this agenda takes a lot of rationalization and a lot of manipulation. The church tries to distract teenagers from sex by avoiding the topic or shaming those who have sex. One of the ways that distracted me from my base desires was worship. Songs and sermons that talked about almost “boyfriend/girlfriend” intimacy between Jesus and you made me put off understanding who God made me to be.  Sex was always treated as the dessert on the shelf, always for later. For now, there was God. Most of the time, I kept a line open in constant prayer with God, sort of how you text a partner throughout the day. Of course, there was pornography and masturbation and intimacy with others, and the church made us all feel like we were cheating on God if we enjoyed anything sexual. I’m not writing this out of anger, as I wrote many of my earlier blog posts. I still talk to God, and I think that certain elements of my experience (and the millions of other evangelical teens who grew up in purity culture) may be beneficial in understanding God. There are certainly times when it’s nice to know that an all-powerful God is helping you out. But the flip side of constantly being watched with judgment when you get horny has probably not left any one of us better for having gone through that.

 Read the lyrics on Genius.