Today we continue looking at my recent interview with former Vigilantes of Love frontman Bill Mallonee (Read part one here). Mallonee fronted the “critics’ darling” band Vigilantes of Love for many years before embarking on a solo career. He has long struggled with being “too Christian” for the “secular” market and too “secular” for the mainstream Christian market. Yet he has consistently worn his heart on sleeve, delivering moving songs and performances.

Today we pick up right where we left off yesterday (see part one of the interview here), discussing Bill’s move from being an elder in a Presbyterian house church to joining the Roman Catholic Church and his views on Calvinism and from there we move on to quite a few other issues, including Open Theology, Tom Waits and and trains.

• I hope you don’t mind if we touch specifically on a doctrinal issue. If I’m not mistaken, the original line to the song “It’s Not Bothering Me” from Summershine read: “God’s love shines through a prism, I’m so confused by Calvinism,” is that right? Are you still confused by Calvinism?

I have been and I don’t really want to go down that path too much. To me, I just don’t know that Scripture teaches it, it just seems like an untenable position and at the end of the day it makes God look capricious. If you pin a Calvinist to the wall, at least the numbers that I’ve talked to primarily say, “Well, the way it kind of works out in practice is that we’re all responsible to respond to God’s grace but only the ones God gives grace to will respond but somehow or another, you’re still culpable for not responding.” I think that that’s just theological double-talk. You can’t give that to somebody and expect a believing, rational person to understand that. That doesn’t make sense, that God’s not extending grace to you, therefore you’re not elect, so you can’t respond, but you’re still responsible for not responding? I mean, that just makes no sense at all. After a while, I just couldn’t believe it.

The book that kind of did it for me, and you may raise an eyebrow at this, and I don’t buy the guy all the way down the line, but Clark Pinnock’s Openness of God. Pinnock’s assertion is that the Calvinistic doctrine, if there is such a thing as “councils of eternity” and things have basically been decided, and that was Saint Augustine’s position in a lot of ways with that doctrine of double predestination, then you’re never really relating to God directly. That which you’re relating to is a will of God, it has already been decided. So it touches everything from prayer to the more salvific elements. So, you’re relating to this will of God, and he says that this is a static relationship and in some ways, it’s almost a fatalism because you’re always waiting to figure out whether or not you’re in or out. The only way you can, quote, know is this doctrine of “perseverance of the saints.” That doctrine meant nothing to me, just because of the turmoil in my own heart, I thought, “Gosh, if I have to look inside and grub around for something that looks like the work of the Holy Spirit, nine times out of ten, I’m going to come up with nothing, and, what have I done, I’ve taken my eyes off of the Cross, I’ve taken my eyes off the only thing that’s going to save me anyway.

I just thought after a while that there were too many incongruities inside of it, but, ultimately, I thought that it gave a poor depiction of God and God’s love and so I just had to abandon it. I couldn’t sign off on it.

• Where would you differ from Pinnock?

You know, it’s been a while since I read the book but I remember reading and just raising some eyebrows, but I couldn’t even comment on it directly. He edited the book and there were some other writers and I followed up on some of his other stuff and the other writers as well.

• Are there any artists you think are combining faith and art particularly well?

Part of the problem with that question and with CCM is that people see themselves as Christians and then as artists or as artists and then as Christians or something like that and I just think it’d be great if people just didn’t even think about it. So I don’t really know. I just think I’m a human being, there’s an image of God-ness in me, and then just go from there, what does it look like on the good days and the bad days. I don’t think there should be any kind of agenda in it. Are there any CCM artists I think are doing it well? I don’t keep up with it. I don’t buy records over there, I don’t visit websites or go to CCM Myspaces or anything like that. I’m not saying that in a haughty way, I just say that it doesn’t interest me anymore.

The times that I have gone, I think that there’s sort of like this code that they’re speaking in and that if I understand the code, then I can pat myself on the back for being the codebreaker. But the code always comes back to contemporary Christian doctrine because that’s what they’re trying to put out. What I want to hear is somebody wrestling with their own flesh and blood and then coming up on the side of hope or affirmation or faith and it may not even have anything to do, at least on the surface, with, you know, like Tom Waits’ songs do that to me sometimes. He has this incredible, beautiful, fractured sounding way of affirming the beauty of humanity, even in its fallenness. It’s astonishing to me how well he does it. Now, he gets out there a bit too. He’s a fan of the bent and twisted, he’s always got that carny kind of vibe, that kind of whacked out carnival kind of vibe going through his music. I think that’s metaphorical for the fact that in a lot of his songs, we’re all freakshows on some level. It’s finding a metaphor that describes a spiritual crisis in our lives, which is, we’re freakshows, we don’t fit in. He’s great at that sort of stuff. Now, whether Tom Waits even remotely thinks about how to apply this to his faith, I don’t even think he gives it a second thought. I think he just intuitively writes stuff that lines up in that area, that’s what works for him.

• So, if Tom Waits’ musical metaphor is the carnival freakshow, what is yours?

I think that because of spending so much time on the road, mine is probably more of the “high and lonesome” thing. It’s definitely there. You try to connect the dots and sometimes the line between the two dots, if the dots are leading somewhere, sometimes those lines are blurred, or they’re just erased altogether. It’s easy to fall off on a detour that maybe you didn’t need to make. I don’t know how that translates into something 25 words or less, but the road has definitely been a huge metaphor for me.

There was a small book that I put out a couple of years ago that was really just a short prose/poem called Perishable Goods and it was about that, that whole thing of just playing in clubs night after night, drinking a bunch of coffee, three hours of sleep, on to the next gig, that kind of thing. It really does something to your faith after a while after you’re trying to find a safety net. But, I think that it’s also the thing that made the music, to me, it made it more authentic and more personal because it was my story, it wasn’t somebody else’s story. Sometimes when I hear the CCM thing, I want to hear your story, I don’t want to hear somebody else’s.

• Trains also figure rather prominently in your music, has that been an intentional metaphor as well?

Yeah, I love them. I grew up around them, and I had model trains when I was a kid. I lived near a train depot and that would definitely be a huge metaphor for me. Rain in deserts as well. It’s interesting that some of the artists who use these metaphors, you know Buddy and Julie Miller, they’re an interesting study because, the country artists tend to be able to take a real, straightforward spiritual song and stick it in the middle of a set full of “you love me but done me wrong” songs and it flies. So that to me is a whole-orbed existence. On some days, it’s Friday night at the bar and you went home with the wrong person and on some days it’s Sunday morning and Jesus is going to roll the stone away and they seem to be able to get away with all of it. I respect that because I think it’s kind of the way life falls out. It’s both and it’s all of that messy stuff.

• How do you think the rise of digital music affects an artist in your position?

That’s a great question. I think it’s either good or bad. There have been some gains and I’ve been lucky enough to own the masters of about 20 or 21 of the 25 records. So what I’ve done, is I’ve put all of those up on the website; they’re all up for a nominal fee, it’s not very much. You can dip into all of it. There’s even two free records up there because I figure, heck, if you like it, you’ll come get more. So that’s been good, the labels don’t control any of that. We even have our own store with all the albums available for download for a small fee. It’s pretty amazing to be able to get at all that stuff and of course you can hear it before you buy.

I also have my new work on a subscription service. Since I write about 5-7 new songs a month, I record them and put them up at www.BillTunes.com I’ve been doing this for two years now…and I’ve written 5 new songs a month for about the last year. They’re all recorded in my kitchen with me on guitars and harmonica and vocals and my wife, Muriah, on piano and back up vocals. CIRCA, just released 3 months ago, is a sampler of the Billtunes format.

The downside of all of that has been that, because there is so much stuff out there now, in a Pro-Tools/Myspace world, it kind of means that every weekend hobbyist is now as legit as anybody else. It’s like the pond is overstocked is the metaphor I like to use. That makes it a little harder for people to ferret through what’s out there to find out the legitimate stuff, or what I think is the more artistically on top of it stuff. And there’s nothing wrong with it, but it is the democratization of music in some ways, or the McDonalds-ization of music, now anybody can make a record in their bedroom and have it up on Myspace that afternoon and be seen as a legitimate artist, so I don’t really know if it’s a plus or not.

It’s an interesting thing, an ex manager and I had a talk last week about this and he was telling me that, even though everyone has thrown the paradigm or the model of the old school record label signing artists kind of out the door, it is working for some folks. He thought it was working well for country artists. He said that those artists actually have more of the traditional model now. When they put out a record, it’s like the old classic rock motif, they put out a record and it shows up in Wal-Mart or Kmart or something like that because most people that buy country music, they like hard copy, they don’t download a lot whereas indie kids, that’s about all they do, they don’t really need hard copy.

I think there’s something missed when you don’t have the hard copy. Just last week my wife and I went out and bought the new Springsteen record. I just wanted to see it, put my hands on it, look at the lyrics, the photos, but you don’t get that experience with a download necessarily. You get the music and so the music can integrate into your iPod as you hit shuffle and it becomes a virtual backdrop for your virtual life, I’m being cynical now, but you see the point. But I think there are other ways to listen. Bruce Springsteen for example, here’s a guy who’s been around the block, what’s he saying on this record? Strange enough, there’s religious symbolism coming up all through the record and I don’t think that’s just a coincidence, I think he’s really at a place in his life where it’s, you know, “rock n’ roll has done me well and the spirit of human love and affection and I’ve been luckier than most men, but really, there’s deeper things here.” You know, he’s got kids, he’s thinking about these things. He’s also a disgruntled Catholic! I think he called himself a lapsed Catholic once.

But I like having hard copy. My wife, Muriah and I actually at this point are trying to figure out at this point whether we just buy a digital or a small replication machine just to make available copies of the records at shows, just hard copy to put in people’s hands. To me, the live show and the delivery is what’s kept us going. We don’t have a formal agent right now booking us, we don’t have a formal label, there’s nothing at all underneath of us except fans. We’re doing mostly house shows, old VOL fans having us and it never seems to hurt. When we play these things, there might be 5 to 10 people who have heard of us but they’ve invited another 20 people who haven’t heard of us and we always seem to do really well at these sorts of things. When we’re able to put hard copy into people’s hands they really seem to appreciate it. That’s kind of what I’d like to see even though I know the indie world runs almost completely on downloads now.

If you walk into a Border’s bookstore now, you can tell that they’ve made less and less space for recorded works. It is really shrinking and it’s sad, except for the major label stuff. I kind of miss it, but you’re talking to someone who was alive when the LP was in fashion.

• Who are some of your musical inspirations?

I think the early Dylan stuff, I still love Dylan. I’m a big Neil Young fan, although I think he’s released some really weird records. I think that Living With War record is a travesty. I know he’s in your face about it but it just has all the subtlety of a jackhammer, it’s just in your face and it just sounds like a rant. I’m not actually won over, I’m actually offended by it, even though I share a lot of his views. It’s a ridiculous war in a lot of ways and where were the weapons of mass destruction so the average listener or voter or whoever is left with all these questions about it anyway, but I do like Neil. I think a lot of his older electric stuff back in the Crazy Horse days was fabulous stuff. I think he’s a great rocker. Even the indie guys like him just because it’s so raw and visceral. “Out of the Blue Into the Black,” whatever version of it, “Hey, hey, my my,” those songs were incredible, that would be one of my top ten favorite songs. It has such a simple, in your face sort of riff, but it’s really a song about the industry going south on an artist. That’s that line, “Once you’re gone you can’t come back.” It’s a phenomenal song and it’s so well done.

Dylan, Neil Young, early Wilco stuff, especially up through Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, along with Uncle Tupelo. I’m a big fan of Jay Farrar and Son Volt. I think he’s probably more of a poet of the road than a lot. Am I acquainted with the Woody Guthrie catalog and Johnny Cash catalogs, yes, but not song for song. I listen to it along with Hank Williams.

• You’ve mentioned the British Invasion influence. That certainly made its way into Summershine

Summershine and Perfumed Letter definitely. I’ll tell you how that actually came about. We were on radio, on AAA radio, Adult Album Alternative. In the mid ‘90’s there was this fledgling format and there were about 90 to 100 of these stations across the U.S. that were emerging from about 1992 up until about 2000. These stations were going a little bit deeper into records and we were actually on about 90% of those stations in the top 10. So we’d get into a city like Philadelphia or Chicago or Minneapolis or Boulder or Denver or San Francisco and there’d be a AAA station and we’d look at the top 10 and it would say Counting Crows, Melissa Etheridge, Cracker, Vigilantes of Love, Indigo Girls, Matthew Sweet, it was amazing and it was all over the US.

So, we were getting this massive radio support that didn’t translate into numbers. It’s because those stations also play a little bit of everything. There’s such a huge, multi-faceted format that a heavy rotation song, which, we were in heavy rotation on a number of those stations, on a modern rock station, a heavy rotation song is anywhere from 18 to 24 times in a week, but heavy rotation on a AAA station is 6 or 7 times a week. It’s very much a listener’s format and that’s all good for the listener, but for the artist, we weren’t selling any records. Our label, Capricorn records at the time, was scratching its head not understanding. But I understood it. You’ve got to play in the morning during drive time, at lunch time and at drive time in the afternoon and then one time before everybody goes to bed, that’s the rotation you need to sell records.

At that time, MTV was still playing videos in the mid ‘90’s so we said “please, we want to make a video.” The sound at the time was very much like what you hear on Summershine. We were rockier maybe, but they wouldn’t do it. We felt like we needed the visual connection and we were a pretty good live band too.

But anyway, Summershine was a deliberate attempt to get back on the AAA charts. That record came out two weeks before 9/11 and then when the towers came down, that was the end of everything for a lot of folks. The record industry didn’t even crank back up for a year after that, so our label basically pulled the plug on the record. We pleaded with them to re-release it about three months into 2002 and they wouldn’t do it.

It’s funny you mention this because I just listened to that album about two weeks ago in the car. It was the first time I’d listened to it in about 5 years. We may put that record out again, a friend of mine who is an engineer, re-mastered the record so the guitars sound a little fuller with a little more bite to them. Tom Lewis is his name. That record for us, we were in the studio for 30 days, and that was a long time for us. That was kind of our Yankee Hotel Foxtrot record. It’s just such a beautiful album in a lot of ways, it had string sections and ‘70’s keyboards and mellotrons, it was just really a beautiful record that had nice pop songs on it.

We were just in tears over it. Gary West at Compass Records is the guy that put the kibosh to it. I told him that we had spent a year thinking about that record, recording it, living it and here it was and he was telling me he couldn’t put it out again and give it another birthday. But there were actually other labels out there doing that. Ben Folds’ Rockin’ the Suburbs was released at the same time. His label gently pulled the record and re-released it about 5 months into 2002 and it did fine. But they wouldn’t do it, they said they didn’t have the resources, so the record died a death and I broke the band up after that.

• That seemed to be the last appearance of the Vigilantes of Love name.

In some ways that could have been a solo record. Kevin the drummer, Jake the bass player, that was the last time that incarnation of the band was together.

• Are there any plans to resurrect the Vigilantes of Love name?

I think we’re just going to go with my name at this point. If there was a chance to resurrect it I’m not sure what it would look like. If a label to us and said we really want that name, we think there’s some mileage in it, I would consider it. But I had so hoped that by this time there would be a label deal so that I could put a new name in place.

The weird thing is that when I started releasing the solo records, the publicist that was hired, I kept thinking that there was going to be an automatic recognition, “Oh yeah, that guy from the Vigilantes of Love,” but it was surprising to me, she came back and said, “Bill, I have gone to all these newspapers, all these magazines” and people were saying that they knew the Vigilantes of Love name but had never heard of Bill Mallonee before.

It was strange and the thing about it was that Vigilantes of Love was always a rotating door of musicians. The band had so little commercial success that we were always losing somebody. You know, to a day job or another band, so we were always filling the ranks with the next guy to play bass or drums or whatever. I was the only consistent guy and I was writing all the songs anyway, so I actually think we hired the wrong publicist. I think the story was a good story but it didn’t carry the day so when Paste magazine had their record label for about five minutes, they put out the first solo record, Perfumed Letter, which was in some ways, very much like a Beatles album, a little like Summershine but a little trippier. Full of singles, even the label said, “Yeah, we’ve got 3 or 4 singles here.” There was a song called “She’s So Liquid” and another one called “Life on Other Planets” that they just loved.

But that record sold, once again, here’s fate at it again, but that record sold less than 1,000 copies. But here’s the story, Paste records had hired a distributor to get the record in stores. The distributor, before the album was actually released, was under a suit from other labels for something, so the lawyers came in and seized all the intellectual property and shut it down. 7,500 copies of that record were pressed. I got 1,000 instead of a cash advance, I got some copies which I sold pretty quick. They sold around another 1,000 but 5,500 copies of that CD are still locked up in a warehouse in New York City. You can’t break an artist when you can’t find his record and at that point, and I’m not minimizing this, I was mildly suicidal. I couldn’t pay the bills, I couldn’t do anything.

That record was the official solo record and it was shut down. You only have one chance to make a good first impression. It really was like, VOL was over, a good history with a bit of a sad ending, so here’s the solo record and it went off the diving board into a pool with no water. The Paste guys were incredibly upset about it but they couldn’t do anything about it. So that was the end of the association with those guys.

Fetal Position, My Year in Review and Locket Full of Moonlight were internet-only releases through Paste and they did real well as far as internet records go, but the very first, official solo album, official meaning that it was going into retail and press was Perfumed Letter and it sold 900 copies. Here’s the backlash on that; whenever I approach a label and talk to an A&R person, that’s the record they’ll type up. You can hear them go on SoundScan, they can retrieve all of those numbers and I can almost hear it on the phone, them saying, “uhhh, that first solo record….” I say, “Yeah, I know, 900 copies,” and you can just hear it immediately, they’ve lost interest.

I think that’s because A&R people, labels, they actually listen with their math, they don’t listen with their ears anymore. They want to know how many records you’ve sold to your massive ground-swell, indie following of fans. That’s’ again, a lot of CCM bands that come out of church environments, they actually do have a lot of fans. But for me, never really being embraced by the church, I can’t show the numbers. I can show them the music and I think it sounds great, but unless you listen aesthetically as opposed to listening with your math, I don’t stand a chance and I tell them that.

So anyway, the last VOL album, Summershine, which I think could have done great, dove into a pool with no water and the first solo album, Perfumed Letter, was the same kind of scenario, so I was pretty distraught by 2001.

• How did you come out of that distress?

Well, I didn’t do very well. I went through a divorce. My ex-wife and I had drifted so much over the course of time. I look back over it now and I think, I was on the road 180 shows a year, how is some relationship not going to suffer? After a while, it was like the family became the epicenter and the marriage itself became somewhat secondary.

Then I met a woman on the road and married her two years ago. Any friends that I had in “evangelical world” sort of just left at that point. I understood their anger because my first marriage, for many had become sort of an icon for left-of-center young Christian families. There were people out there who liked Vigilantes of Love and they just pointed “to that great Bill Mallonee, he’s got two kids and he’s a songwriter and he’s on the road and he’s a Christian and his wife is there with him some times and she’s such a strong supporter and aren’t they great?” Part of the problem was that the marriage started getting icon status among some folks.

Somebody should have stopped me to take my spiritual pulse, saying, “I see you up there, I see you playing, and giving it all, but you don’t even have a pulse right now.” I just didn’t know it at the time. I just kept going. I knew I was running on empty but I kept thinking it was just a dry spell.

• That brings up the interesting question of how local churches can best support artists.

It’s a tough thing because most Christian artists that I know have a certain amount of distrust for the local church. They don’t think the church understands them and because artists are so stupid anyways, there’s a degree of solitude that we need to create. That’s a good thing, we need it and people can benefit from it when we’re inside that solitude and we come up with something that resonates with other people. You need a solitary environment to create it, and at the same time, most artists that I know are extremely quite and humble and laid back about that sort of thing. So there’s a tendency for them to already sit on the periphery of institutionalized Christianity. So it makes it that much easier for them to drift maybe a bit outside and what they really need is maybe something like a loose collective of people together. I don’t think even necessarily other artists, just other people.

The house church that I was actually talking about earlier, my wife and I were actually the oldest couple in that church because it was a church ministering to the students at the University of Georgia, but we were 10 years older than most of those students. That’s great for the students to watch me, but I didn’t have anybody to watch. I didn’t to ask what the next stage of life was supposed to look like. Once again, the 180 shows a year, the touring like crazy, what did it do, I had 1,001 acquaintances, but no friends whatsoever. Seriously, there was nobody I could call up in the midnight hours if there was ever trouble.

To a certain level, I was sort of put up on this pedestal as being the articulate Calvinistic spokesperson for the faith and, you know what, I did it. I rose to occasion and did it over and over and over again. But at the end of the day there was no one to support me. Doug Burr and I have had some of these conversations just because Doug and I tell him to keep close to his fellowship and his wife. You need to have someone there encouraging you all the time and I didn’t have it. My bandmates were often 15 to 20 years younger that I was and there was the tendency for me to be mentoring them rather than the other way around and it was very difficult for me to divulge my heart and expect something in return. It was all very high and lonesome and it went right back into the songs. That’s hugely important for a Christian artist, find other people with whom you can wrestle with the big issues and work it out.

• How can the fans help?

It’s funny because Muriah and I were having this conversation last night. I would love to be able to make another record that’s a studio album. I’ve got like 50 songs and I told Muriah, out of those 50 songs, I think at least 25 of them could be great band songs. So to be able to assemble the band, record the record and then be able to go out and play that record for audiences and try to get a larger fanbase again. I’ve still got the songs, I just don’t have the resources anymore to do it. In some ways, to find someone who was the quintessential patron of the arts, that would be great. Because, like I said, two years ago, this year was a little better, but two years ago was just extreme poverty. I thought they were going to cut the heat off. I just couldn’t find work, it was ridiculous. So that would be great to find an investor.

• Who are some artists you currently listen to?

Like I said, we bought the new Springsteen record. We don’t buy a lot of records, partly just because we’re so broke. I listen around on Myspace. There’s a guy out of the western mountains of North Carolina, a band called Sparklehorse, they’re pretty cool and have actually worked with Tom Waits. I’m a big fan of that sort of approach. I think he creates a neat world to live inside that’s pretty special.

Are you familiar with the work of Peter Case? He’s got a new solo record, I think you would really like it. I played a show with him about a month ago. It’s called Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John. It’s really a good record. The packaging isn’t real ornate or anything. It’s through a little label up in North Carolina called Yep Roc. It’s just solo acoustic, him doing what Pete does. I think he is one of those guys who affirms human life with a little bit of the ratty, rugged edges on the outside, but ultimately, underneath, is a genuinely sweet spirit.

I thought his first three records for Geffen were just really good. I think T-Bone Burnett helped him out a little bit on some of that stuff. But he was one of the first guys, basically when he lost his record deal and I think that was back in the mid ’90’s, he threw a couple of guitars in an old beat up car and just hit the road and he’s done it like that ever since. A critic’s darling but never seems to sell a ton of records. That’s sad because I think he’s very underrated and under-appreciated.

• Do you read much?

Not much, but since it was the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s On the Road, I’ve read probably 4 or 5 of his novels this year. I’m reading Desolation Angels right now. He is an interesting study. British poet Steve Turner, a Christian, wrote a book about Kerouac called Angel-Headed Hipster, and Turner’s thoughts made me read the books in a new light. Kerouac got very upset at the end of his life, he died at 47 and was an alcoholic, died of esophageal hemorrhaging, which you don’t do without drinking a ton of alcohol. It was a sad story, but all of his life, he was raised an old school Roman Catholic and its funny because his books are always peppered with these prayers to Christ, he never turned away from the church. He wanted the church to be something bigger and broader and so he got so upset with his fanbase that just grabbed all of the hedonistic parts out of the books.

The point that Steve Turner was making was that in the long run, Kerouac was trying to integrate something that looked like a compassionate Buddhism with Christianity. That wasn’t his goal, but towards the end of his life he was always a seeker. The crazy thing is is that in the last two books of his that I’ve read, The Dharma Bums and The Desolation Angels, that’s exactly where he’s coming up. He couldn’t buy into the impersonality of Buddhism because it doesn’t leave you with anything. That would have meant that all of his creativity, the guy wrote like a madman, all of his creativity would have been for nothing. He has visions of the Cross and keeps coming back to Christ and hoping that there’s something bigger and broader than just going out and living for kicks, which is what he had gotten really good at.

It’s heartbreaking, but I think he was a really good to great Americana writer and very original. I can’t read all of it, but if someone goes in on something like Visions of Cody or something like that, that’s a good place to go. I think On the Road is in many ways actually an inferior book compared to Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. But that’s what I’ve been reading lately is a couple of things by him and then little bits and pieces out of Karen Armstrong’s History of God. She was a disgruntled monastic who seems to have an ax to grind. She’s an epileptic and therefore given to that area of the brain that sort of shifts things around but she’s telling her story I’m reading because at the end of the day, I don’t know anything about Islam. I’m pretty sketchy getting into the beginnings of Judaism anyway and that’s why I’m looking at that book.

At this point, I don’t have a lot of time to read. I write 5 songs a month. They go up on a subscription service called BillTunes. That’s what I do, that’s my output to the world, they’re recorded in my kitchen, my wife and I, she’ll put some pianos and vocals on it. They’re all done live on one track because we don’t own any recording gear really. That’s been our way to pay the rent for the last two years. So, at the end of the month, it’s like “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to write five songs!” I keep copious notes and lyrics lying around and I’ll pick up the guitar and can usually write five tunes in a week to eight days.

• What’s your typical writing process?

When I’m on the road I write a lot of lyrics and then come home and guitar parts come later as I try to wed those things up. They don’t necessarily have any kind of point of integration until then. I’ll keep a journal and write some ideas down as I play guitar and sort of chase them down over the course of a few days. It tends to start on guitar and hopefully there’s a library of lyrics to draw from and start pushing things around and then do some editing. It’s a lot of fun, it’s a bit like waiting until the last minute to take an exam. I think I’ve written about 50 songs over the last year or so and that’s about the clip I run at.

• Writing from a Christian perspective, how do you justify language some people might find objectionable?

I think its just a matter of being authentically human. I don’t think I’ve ever dropped the “F-bomb,” on a song before. That’s a pretty harsh word on any level. If somebody else did, it wouldn’t bother me, it’s just that I think artists sometimes use language just to get a rise out of people and I do think that can wound sensitive consciences. I don’t consider that I’m making music for Christians, I’m making music for people. So, depending on what sone you’re referring to, I might drop the passing, you know, the lyric in “Flowers” which is “getting your sh*% together.” If I’m playing in a church crowd, it’s “getting your act together.” Especially if there’s kids in the audience, it doesn’t come out that way and sometimes there are though my wife doesn’t think I should be playing for kids but adults and be able to say what I’m going to say. We all know what I mean but I don’t want to wound somebody and make them think that it’s OK for Christians to just frivolously use four-letter words, no, I don’t believe that. Language should be a way that we hallow life and not tear it down but there’s also a realistic side to things too.

• Anything else?

You know, through 16 records or whatever it was as a band, we really tried to punch a hole in something like widespread acceptance and Vigilantes of Love just became kind of a cult status. I don’t think we ever had the resources we needed to bust through, it was a critic’s darling band pretty much from the beginning. The problem for me now as a solo artist is that we’ve become so tweaked to expect the next flavor of the month and something new but I’m not new anymore. But I’m tried and true and if you want a tried and true artist, I’d be your guy.

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• Read part one of this interview