"Invincible" by Aaron Sprinkle ft. Elle Puckett, Monday, December 11, 2023
Since Larry Norman asked in 1972, “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” Christian music was taking shape into what would eventually become a multi-million dollar industry. A big part of the industry became the testimony of the bands and artists who participated in the genre. The Christian musician was a poster child of what the evangelical message taught. The mostly clean-cut musicians didn’t smoke, drink, or use bad language. Because CCM doesn’t have a particular denomination, a Christian star neededn’t talk about belonging to a certain faith tradition--the less specific, the better. Inevitably, scandals befell the industry, but musicians would disappear from radio rather than having the scandal addressed. This created a kind of idolatry surrounding the faithful in the industry.
CASTING A SHADOW TEN FEET TALL. Tooth & Nail Records was always on the rougher end of Christian music, but the bands signed to the label were to a lesser extent, subject to morality policing. In 2017, Aaron Sprinkle released his final record with Tooth & Nail Records, Real Life before becoming a fully independent artist. The singer has talked about his journey into deconstruction on many podcasts, but perhaps most succinctly on the Growing Up Christian podcast. He talks about the results of the 2016 presidential election being the reason for him no longer attending church after so many evangelicals voted for Donald Trump and justified their vote as the Christian thing to do, and this created a church environment that was too different from Sprinkle’s already diverging spiritual journey. Real Life is an album written during the time of Sprinkle’s departure from church. On the Christian Rock 20 radio show, Sprinkle talked about the song “Invincible,” the album’s first track on the album. He explains that the song is about realizing that his heroes were ordinary people with flaws. Someone that the speaker thinks is bigger than any scandal suddenly becomes the center of one. And for Sprinkle's deconstruction, this was especially true of both the mega-church pastor’s fall from grace as it was the fellow deconstructor who renounced Christianity vocally.
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS UNDER CONTROL, IT ALL FALLS APART. Though Aaron Sprinkle started talking about his change in beliefs only after releasing Real Life, he had been on a journey for many years. And as Sprinkle was at the center of many of the bands on Tooth & Nail Records, fans of the label and its roster wondered how many other groups were not believers. According to Sprinkle, many. One of the interviewers on Growing Up Christian asked Sprinkle when his studio became a safe space for bands to start talking about their beliefs and non-beliefs. Sprinkle says that it “evolved over time.” He goes on to give a few examples: “It started with gossip. Did you know that he’s not even a Christian? He’s in the band, and [the band] know[s] it, and they still let him stay in the band.” Then musicians would start to tell Aaron that they weren’t Christian. Some of the artists could play along with the Christian component of the label. Some artists had to pretend to be Christian. Others simply had to “nod their head and go along with it.” Sprinkle goes on to talk about how he had a fear of facing reality, which caused his self-destructive behavior--alcoholism being a battle that he’s come forward with. He was working to produce Christian albums by some groups who didn’t believe the message of the industry they were part of, and he was also part of that as well. It could be quite the fall from grace if deconstruction didn’t become the trend hit had in the mid-‘10s. In “Invincible,” Poema’s Elle Puckett brings grace and redemption when she sings the bridge: “You didn’t have to be invincible / You got your shadow and a place to go.”
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