At the time this post is published I will have jumped up and down with all the fanboy enthusiasm in my 23-year-old body. On Saturday the 26th, my brother and I are seeing Coheed and Cambria at the Orbit Room in Grand Rapids, the first time I’ll experience the progenitors of rock and roll epics like “Welcome Home” and “The Running Free” live. Only in the last year and a half have I really turned into a true Coheed fan. Sure, I jammed to “Welcome Home” on RockBand in high school, but I didn’t really dig into their material until I randomly stumbled upon a series of live performances on YouTube (here is just one example).

Last summer I spent waaay too many hours watching these videos, engrossed with this crazy-haired enigma crooning overtop songs equally aggressive and palatable. I felt like what I imagine fans of Zeppelin or Aerosmith or the Stones felt like in the 70s, when rock and roll bands were larger than life entities and phrases like “axe-wielder” were used for lead guitarists. I mean, try and watch this performance of “Welcome Home” with a full marching band and not get chills.^[1] The more I listened, the more Coheed started to epitomize rock music for me: the precise musicianship, the hair, the Geddy Lee-like vocals, etc. And while I’m usually a sucker for lyrical content (hence my affinity for hip-hop), I didn’t look at Coheed’s lyrics for months. The music was enough.

Not so for Gwyn, my wife. See, each one of Coheed’s seven LPs is a concept album that takes place within a universe created by lead singer Claudio Sanchez in a graphic novel series called The Amory Wars. Each song, then, has to be placed within the context of the overall story; otherwise the lyrics make little sense. Admittedly, this makes it difficult to climb into the story as a new fan. So each time I would show Gwyn a song she would ask what in the world Claudio was singing about. At first, I answered with something like, “I have no clue,” but as I learned the story I would try to explain. This was useless. “Nope,” she’d say, “I’m not going to sit through a 30 minute story just to listen to one song.”

She had a point, but that didn’t stop me from listening to Coheed. I spent some time researching the backstory, but eventually I started letting the specifics slip. With the general outline of the universe mapped in my brain, at times I interpreted the lyrics on my own while other times I merely got lost in the sound. For example, I know “In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3” (the song played in the first YouTube clip above) with lyrics like “man your own jackhammers! man your battlestations!” takes place on a battlefield. That setting alone is enough for me to get caught up in the song’s climax. Sometimes I even tear up, and I’m not sure why.

I think the reaction is similar to the one I have to Sigur Ros. I cannot (or don’t bother to) make any sense of the words, so I interpret the mood of the song in a way applicable to the world I inhabit. This is not a good model for reading scripture, but it works with music. Sigur Ros’ “Glosoli” narrates my most triumphant moments, and Coheed’s “The Crowing” those times in life (big or small) when I know some significant change has taken place and there’s no going back.

Needless to say, Gwyn is not coming to the concert. But I’ll be there, probably screaming my head off, probably for no reason, except that I don’t know what else to do. It’s no wonder John Calvin was wary of music in worship. It can seriously make you feel.

Brad Zwiers

Brad Zwiers (’12) graduated from Calvin College in 2012 and Western Theological Seminary in 2015. He will not be graduating from any more schools. He often stares at books he wishes he could read but knows he will not finish and goes for long walks with his wife, Gwyn. Sometimes he plays basketball and always he follows the greatest sporting club in the world, Liverpool F.C.