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Ep. 170 – Cul-De-Sac Christian Mystic Hyped on Capital “T” Truth w/ Fire-Toolz
484 Plays8 months ago
Our guest this week is musician, producer, and artist Angel Marcloid, also known as Fire-Toolz! Angel grew up in church, and has seen their relationship with faith evolve substantially, over the years. Whether you’re talking about their music, visual art, or adventurous, open-minded approach to spirituality, Angel is a fascinating person and Fire-Toolz is a truly unique passion project! For links to anything and everything, go to www.linktr.ee/fire_toolz!
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Transcript
Interpretations of Christianity
00:00:00
Speaker
There are so many ways to approach Christianity in the Bible and you can pretty much get away with any way you go about it because you can pluck out all your verses that support your idea. You can project onto them what you think they mean and
00:00:16
Speaker
But you can also convince someone that Jesus was an anarchist, Jesus was a communist, and Jesus was extremely progressive and the opposite of a conservative and all that stuff. And really, any way you want. There's so much shit in the Bible.
00:00:36
Speaker
There's so much wonderful uplifting spiritual messages and there's also sexual assault and war and stuff like that. You can do whatever you want with the Bible and probably convince them that your way of looking at it is correct, which is why people dissociate from the original writings and the context and the culture.
Church Worship Practices
00:01:19
Speaker
I make, I'm making you. You make the new pieces. Every breath I breathe, I take in you. Every breath I take, I take in you, I think. You make me breathe, Jesus. What's the chance afterwards? You got to go whoop, whoop.
00:01:39
Speaker
That's what we always did. And you have to put your hands up like you're raising the roof when you do it. That's always when we did like harmonics on the guitars where you're like, you know, you, you just mute over like, what is the seventh fret and just do a waka waka.
00:01:54
Speaker
Why is that song in your head, Casey? Why did you start us off with that? I don't know. It's just stuck in there and I keep singing it and I keep pointing to April when I get to the whoop whoop part and she won't do it. I can't believe that, man. I think the problem is she doesn't have enough juggalo in her to get the whoop whoop out. Did you guys do motions to that song when you were? Yeah, for sure.
00:02:27
Speaker
Wait, neither of you. Neither of you grew up in a church that did like the flags and stuff during worship, right? Like American flags?
00:02:37
Speaker
No. Oh my gosh. Christian flags. You guys don't know about this? No. Color guard. Well, kinda. It's a Pentecostal thing where people have like flags and you just run up and down the, they're not like, they're not like the American flag or the Gadsden flag or not even the Stars and Bars, believe it or not, but like a white flag, just like celebratory flags. And then people would like dance around at the front waving the flag.
00:03:01
Speaker
you really you've never seen this that wasn't our vibe uh did they bring these flags from home or were they just like in the back of the church to grab wouldn't that no way they had their own flag
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah. So my church was not really into it, but we went to a praise and worship conference once with a lot of other Pentecostal churches like me and the rest of the worship band. And, uh, they, there were flags people there. I remember thinking it was very funny cause the worship leader, like we were having lunch. She was like, well, that's just, you know, that's them doing their thing. Like that's, that's the line. Is somebody dancing around waving a flag? Like that's weird. It's not snakes, thankfully, but.
00:03:37
Speaker
They're just everybody. They just have like six people doing like Mel Gibson at the end of the Patriot. Just. No, not even kidding. That's exactly what it's like. They're waving them back and forth and they run up and down the aisles like when they just have like a spirit break or something. The spirit moves in mysterious ways, I guess. A lot of the coastal churches. I'm sorry you went to dead churches. Yeah. No, I'm sure. And we celebrated with, you know, solemn silence.
00:04:07
Speaker
I'd say dead in celebratory flag worship, but alive in Christ. I think there was a select group of elder men who were allowed one amen per service. Oh man, there's probably sexual misconduct. Your services probably let out on time too, didn't they?
00:04:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So the one that I went to when I was really young in Georgia, that was a Southern Baptist Church. And it didn't, it was terrible. It just went on and on and on. But yeah, my church when I was, for most of my life in Michigan, that was all, they were pretty timely.
00:04:48
Speaker
Okay. What was like the average amount of time between the pastor saying, like, I'm closing now and him actually closing? Because at our church, an easy 30 to 45 minutes, like I'm closing, like I think a lot of other churches, the whole length of the sermon could happen in the amount of time that our pastor was closing.
00:05:06
Speaker
Oh man, that sounds awful. It was. That one was always tough. I feel like for me and my church, well, the one I went to is like a team. That's for you and your church. We serve the Lord. Absolutely. We will wave flags. Yes. No, it was, that one was pretty on time. The church I went to in Boston though, it was mostly on time, but those are some long sermons. They would be like 40, 45 minutes sometimes, maybe more.
00:05:33
Speaker
Dude, that is not a long sermon. Hour and a half easy. Hour and a half is honestly a fireable offense. And that's just the sermon. I'm not talking to myself. And worship could be an easy 45 minutes. Our church services were an easy two and a half hours. So when did they start? That's excessive. They started at 10am and they let out at like 12.15 to 12.45. Oh boy. We get we get past noon and I was
00:05:58
Speaker
I was itching to get out of there. When I was a kid at that Southern Baptist Church, I remember they would just have these altar calls that lasted forever, and you would just sing just as I am until someone finally gave up and went down and confessed to some sort of mortal sin.
00:06:15
Speaker
Just so the service would end and they could watch football. Yeah, when those services were going like that and you're on the worship team and you're like, my fingers feel like they're going to start bleeding any moment because I've been repeating the same little riff for like an hour, just like holding ambiance in the background. And then do you ever like, well, were you ever on a worship team?
00:06:34
Speaker
Uh, yeah, kind of. Okay. Not, not to that extent. I don't know if you ever did this. I, of course, I would never do such a thing, but eventually then you get tired and you start like seeing how much experimentation you can get away with without anyone noticing.
00:06:52
Speaker
I'm going to do the rest of this in taps. Seriously, or like really slow taps. I got eruption by Eddie Van Halen, which to be clear, I can only play the first like 10 seconds of just because it's the super easy tapping part. But I worked that really slowly into worship once in a different key. No one could tell the difference. It was fine. It's because they couldn't listen to that.
00:07:14
Speaker
I always killed me was crazy thought when we thought we were getting to the end of a sermon and then it was like The church I was at in Boston the pastor would be like
00:07:26
Speaker
And now, hey, we're rounding home plate now to bring it all back, to bring it home. I'm like, oh fuck, we have another 15 minutes left of this shit. Like you just know that it's not wrapping up. And it's like, as soon as the announcement and to wrap it all up, to bring it to a close meant that we were three quarters of the way done. And we were just gonna have to listen to him try to like connect the dots. That drove me nuts.
00:07:48
Speaker
I know at our church that was beginning to close really just means that like the second part of the sermon was starting and it could go as long as it needed to. I mean we easily we could make it 30 or 45 minutes after that regularly. That's so tough. It's just not fair. Like dude in class when I in my grad classes it's like
00:08:08
Speaker
You just, even in undergrad, I remember being like, what are these people think they're doing going over their time? Like we have other classes to get to, like, I don't, it's always bewildered me that people in a speaking role think that everyone is just so dependent on the knowledge they have to impart that they're going to be. God has to impart. Yeah. But you got to shift your perspective.
00:08:33
Speaker
But as somebody who does a lot of public speaking, like I do a lot of public speaking. And when you hit your time.
00:08:42
Speaker
there's no mistake and everybody is very clear and everybody lets you know that you're there at your time. So like I can't imagine hitting that time period and then just being like I'm gonna you know it's one thing if it's like we went over time but it was because we did like Q&A or something like that right but like to just insist on talking for another like 30 minutes past the point at which you're supposed to quit.
00:09:10
Speaker
Well, it's like a sheer dominance move. But you say the time you're supposed to see that's interesting is like I was probably 14
Sneaker Culture and Politics
00:09:17
Speaker
or 15 before I ever played in a church. Like we just I think our our the youth band went and played at another church like as a guest spot type thing. I don't remember the details. But I was on the youth band and they had the monitors in the stage where they had like an actual schedule of here's what's next. Here's how long you have. And I remember being like offended at the time of like how
00:09:36
Speaker
How do you like schedule you know the move of god in like that like that's ridiculous like how do you and then i mean of course their sermon ended or their whole service ended at a really good time and that was nice but i remember thinking like i can't believe people do this like you play the song just all the way through just once normally like what.
00:09:57
Speaker
You don't go back and repeat anything. You don't flow. You don't do any of that. The spirit doesn't lead. But seriously, so I guess you guys grew up where it was a lot more scheduled of like, no, we actually have a flow to the service and here's how it goes and it takes the amount of time that it takes and then it's done. Yeah. It was dependable. You could depend on the structure.
00:10:17
Speaker
I also like yeah cuz as soon as you go past that time that people are expecting and they I mean even if there's no like rigid structure like people check out after a while and I think what's different about those spaces is you could convince yourself perhaps as a speaker that because you're sharing the words of the Lord that
00:10:36
Speaker
that people will be more open or that if the Lord wills they will be for those who have ears to hear you know they could you could just go like well I'm gonna this is the message that God gave me to give so if they've checked out it's on them I'm gonna deliver this as the Lord intended until we're done because
00:10:57
Speaker
Hell yeah. You guys want a bit of news? Yeah, absolutely do. Because I assume that there's a portion of our audience that is sneakerheads. Sneakerheads is what they call them, right? I have no idea. I think I know where you're going. I think I might have seen this story maybe only an hour ago. Here we go.
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, so sneaker con was this weekend, which I guess is a thing. I shouldn't be surprised by any sort of convention that there is because I went out at one point, April was a guest at a pinball convention. And so we went to like Pittsburgh and hung out for a weekend at a pinball convention that she was like paid to be at. That sounds awful.
00:11:46
Speaker
It was actually, it was one of the more fun ones because they had like, they had like seriously, like 250 ancient video games, like set up on the floor and they were all free to just kind of walk around and play all these old games. So it was kind of fun. But, uh, sneaker con, the level of douchebaggery at sneaker con has got to be high. It's got to be like, like if, if you had a, uh,
00:12:12
Speaker
You know, like one of those, uh, what, what are those things that you carry around and fall out that click when there's nuclear waste nearby? Oh, a Geiger counter.
00:12:20
Speaker
a Geiger counter, like if you had a Geiger counter for like potential day rape suspects, I gotta imagine that thing's just like click, click, click, click, click. What did you do with that sneaker card? You just wandered around with shoeboxes full of unworn sneakers to trade other people for their unworn sneakers? Like what else is there to do? You're just looking at sneakers. You pass up tips on how to get rid of creases.
00:12:45
Speaker
I have a feeling it's like just one after another like big room sessions with like some dumpy old guy from like Adidas or something that comes on stage. He's like, are you guys ready? And then they unveil a shoe. Is it just me or like modern sneaker culture? They're all hideous, right? Like I'm not crazy. All all sneakers that people are collecting are the ugliest things you've ever seen.
00:13:11
Speaker
Yeah, I don't really get it. Like there's some that are fine. None of them really speak to me, I guess, but like the ones that I never understood were the Yeezys. Like, yeah, how do you think a weird looking anything Kanye? I'm like, I don't, I don't get occasionally the things I don't get do catch on. So I'm not exactly the fashion guy. I haven't changed my style in over a decade. So don't look to me for fashion tips, but
00:13:40
Speaker
Like the shoes, the Kanye shoes that are kind of like the Crocs material that are like, it kind of looks like when like the, when the Venom symbiote first starts taking over your body. It's just like all squiggly and shit. It's like you just stepped into the fucking symbiote from Spider-Man.
00:13:58
Speaker
Glad to know that Kanye just dropped his new album like a week ago and it's horrible. It's definitely trash. It's definitely a man who has stopped taking his medication. Well, that's unfortunate.
00:14:12
Speaker
But I never really got into him. He had those giant boots that looked like kind of Mega Man shoes. Sort of. They look like you let the teenager at AutoZone fill your tires. The amount of air pressure in them that they're supposed to. They got those cool bubbles coming out the side. But Casey, wait, where are you going with the sneaker kind of thing? Because I don't know this story. Well.
00:14:37
Speaker
There's a new player in the sneaker game. Yeah, I hate this already. One, President Donald J. Trump. No. Launched his limited edition sneakers at sneaker con. Are you sure this is an AI, Casey? Yeah, it's legit. This is really so stupid.
00:15:01
Speaker
The shoes are wild. Honestly, the shoes are incredible in a wild way. Convicted sex pest and 78-year-old like Mango Mussolini went to sneaker con to launch a new shoe. Oh, oh.
00:15:18
Speaker
All of that, and 24 hours after he was ordered to pay $354 million in damages. He's like, we got to get those pre-orders. I got to do an Elon. We got to drop this and get people lined up.
00:15:33
Speaker
He's trying to recoup some of those legal fees. I mean this in the best way. I don't think I don't know which way I mean it. I don't think there's a lot of overlap between Die Hard sneaker heads and Trump's most loyal base. I don't know. Everything's overlap now, dude. There was a lot of people in the crowd and there was a lot of boos. But then there was also the funny thing to me was I watched some clips from the like announcement where he walked out on stage and he's like, wow.
00:16:00
Speaker
there's a great energy in here I've wanted to do this for a long time like he's been contemplating launching a like a gaudy sneaker for like the last 20 years it's not like a get rich quick ploy that he launched like 24 hours ago to try and recoup a portion of his earnings
00:16:20
Speaker
But yeah, there, there was, the funny thing to me was that there was like people holding up obviously like professionally printed signs, like campaign signs that said sneaker heads for Trump. Nice. Like they were already in the crowd. Like, are we supposed to believe that someone who just was furiously starts scribbling on a piece of poster board, they're carrying with them as soon as they saw him. Oh, these were printed. They were like,
00:16:43
Speaker
They were campaign signs. They look like yard signs that you would hand out if you were campaigning for Biden or something. So what do the shoes look like? Gold, right? So, okay. Well, the other day I was in Vegas for a work thing and in the Vegas airport, there is like little pagoda stores along the terminals that sell
00:17:07
Speaker
I mean, crap that no one needs and no one wants, like you, like there was at one point I was sitting across from a little shack store that had a, a, a purse that looked like a box of popcorn that was made of bedazzles. And, uh, that's what these look like. So they're like, uh, they look like a Converse all-star.
00:17:31
Speaker
And they're like a shiny gold, like the whole shoe is like a shiny gold with like a white sole. They have a big T on the side of them. And then the top like section where the ribs would be, you know, kind of around your ankle. That's like American flag colors. That sounds terrible. We'll post. I'll post a picture of it when I do an episode post. I'll put that. I'll put that in there, too.
00:17:57
Speaker
Okay, the main ones like the high top, you know, the Sunday sneakers, they're called the never surrender high top sneakers. They're priced at $399. $400. Oh, they're not $383. I figured I can just go for the name.
00:18:21
Speaker
The athletic shoes which feature a tee and the number 45 on the sides are priced at $199. The purchase of a pair of sneakers comes with extra laces and a Trump superhero charm. The website selling the sneakers also features a Victory 47 perfume and cologne for sale at $99 each. Whoa, what's that? What do you guys think that smells like other than like, you know, the insurrection crowd?
00:18:49
Speaker
Look at those. Those are so ugly. They're hideous. It's like the urinal mints in Trump Tower. Yeah, I'm not a sneaker head, so I guess my taste doesn't matter, but I can't imagine anybody thinks that looks good.
00:19:03
Speaker
What the, the hubris required to wear them is off the charts, right? Cause you don't know, like the idea of like sneakers, neutral ground, you could wear it doesn't define you. It doesn't tell people what you believe in. It's just like, it's a neutral ground hobby for all players, uh, all beliefs, all walks of life. And then you, uh, as long as you're a 25 to 45 year old guy, 15 to 45 year old guy.
00:19:33
Speaker
Well, here's a little blurb about, oh, sorry, go ahead, Sam. No, you introduced these and now it's like, this is just another identity marker, just another way to politicize every aspect of our worthless, meaningless lives. Yeah. Well, you know, that is the shortcut to, to meaning and purpose. That's for sure.
00:19:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's really fulfilling. All the people I know who gravitate towards such extremes seem the happiest. They're not constantly pissed about how awful everything is and that everything is unfair and their freedoms are being stolen. I don't know. But these will make you happy. These shoes are here to improve your overall mental health and well-being. Says with the rise of sneaker culture, signature shoes have moved beyond athletes to musicians, actors and more.
00:20:22
Speaker
Some politicians are now thought of as sneaker heads, which is slang for people who tend to rock particularly desirable sneakers. Representative Jared Moskowitz, Democrat Florida, reportedly has somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 pairs of collectible sneakers. And then they show him wearing like a, he looks like
00:20:45
Speaker
You know, any old white guy running a UPS store and he's in a new neon blue suit with a pair of like just chunky white and baby blue sneakers. And his pants are just like sitting on top of them. He he looks like a total jerk off. What was is there video of the
00:21:11
Speaker
the shoes being announced is there like, uh, has it had to have been like a panel and like an announcement in a crowd and went Trump was there. Yeah. I mean, there must've been time between court hearings or something like that where he just didn't show up. You know, he could, that's a possibility. Pull the old regalado move. Yeah. Right. I don't believe in this. This is fake news. Therefore I won't be there for it.
00:21:41
Speaker
Well, yeah. So you can go to gettrumpsneakers.com and spend $400 on those if you want to. If your investments in the Trump NFTs are not paying off the way you wanted, maybe the sneakers will hold their value a little bit better than caricatures of Trump lifting a bus off of a blackbird.
00:22:09
Speaker
Just those perfectly curated AI images. Yep. So we went to an antique store yesterday. I had to do a work thing this weekend, which was really boring and lame. And then afterwards we were driving home and I'm like, let's stop somewhere. So we stopped at this antique store in Topeka and they had some cool stuff in there, but I ended up buying this like ancient
Aesop's Fables and Storytelling
00:22:38
Speaker
I don't know when this is for I think I well, I thought I found a printing date on this but it's it's old it's a old old copy of a sops fables damn, I thought this would be a good way to just like You know, maybe just impart a little you know a nice lesson on to everyone. I
00:23:02
Speaker
Dude, I feel like we could hit this for a full up. There's a lot of good Aesop fables, and growing up, there was this cartoon that I watched. There were these VHS videos that we had, and there were adaptations of Aesop fables.
00:23:24
Speaker
And it was about these kids who were like transported to this like I don't know I guess somewhat magical land and there was a buffalo who was supposed to be like Aristotle or some sort of philosopher and There's all different like animal characters and they would read stories so like the ones that stick out to me were like the
00:23:46
Speaker
he that ball with the gold the magic thread if you pull it it would like skip forward in your life and the guy would just like keep pulling to get through shit they didn't like and then uh that's a movie called click with Adam Sandler yes really ripped off a great piece of cinema uh and then there was that obviously like the mightest
00:24:08
Speaker
the hand of Midas or whatever that was, uh, that one was in there, but I'm trying to remember what the, um, what the name of this cartoon series was. I don't know if it was syndicated or not, but, uh, stories are like the thing and the thing. Yeah. Yeah. And as a kid, I was like, are these Christian stories? And it was like, well, they're not exactly Christian, but you know,
00:24:31
Speaker
Are they supposed to be parables? I honestly don't can't remember. Yeah, they're basically parables. That's what they are. They're just like stories that yeah, it's a parable. It tells you how it just tells you how not to be an asshole, you know. Well, let's try one here. All right. And this one's got three characters so we can all kind of pick from them. The young mouse, the cock and the cat.
00:24:55
Speaker
Back in the day where you could just willy-nilly, no pun intended, throw around the word cock. So I pick the cat. I get to be the cat. Well, that makes – That makes Sam the cock for sure. Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. So Jeremiah is the brave young mouse. I guess so, but am I supposed to have a copy of this up in front of me?
00:25:19
Speaker
No, no, I'll read your lines for you. Oh, great. Okay. I'll be the brave young mouse as long as you read my lines. I think you're the hero of the story. I'm guessing that I'm the villain. Okay. A young mouse on his return to his hole after leaving it for the first time thus encountered his adventures to his mother or recounted his adventures to his mother. Mother said he
00:25:42
Speaker
Quitting this narrow place where ye have brought me up, I rambled about today like a young mouse of spirit who wished to see and to be seen when two such notable creatures came in my way. One was so gracious, so gentle and benign. The other, who was just as noisy and forbidding, had on his head and under his chin pieces of raw meat, which shook at every step he took.
00:26:07
Speaker
And then, all at once, beating his sides with the utmost fury, he uttered such a harsh and piercing cry that I fled in terror. And this too, just as I was about to introduce myself to the other stranger, who was covered with fur like our own, only richer, looking and much more beautiful, and who seemed so modest and benevolent that it did my heart good to look at her.
00:26:32
Speaker
Ah, my son, replied the old mouse, learn while you live to distrust appearances. The first strange creature was nothing but a fowl. That will ere long be killed, and off his bones, when put in a dish and in the pantry, we may make a delicious supper, while the other was a nasty, sly, bloodthirsty hypocrite of a cat, to whom no food is so welcome as a young and juicy mouse like yourself.
00:26:57
Speaker
This was definitely written when our public education system was a lot better at reading than it is now. Yeah, because I don't get it. I don't get that at all. Also, I feel like depending on the environment you're reading it in, are there characterizations going on here that are
00:27:17
Speaker
uh, directed towards groups of people that are not the kinds of people that mice want to be associating with. That's a little, little rigid. Well, I think the moral of the story is that appearances can be deceiving and the young mouse who wasn't wise to, uh, you know, the ways of the world's first time out of the hole.
00:27:41
Speaker
thought that the the the young cock with his, you know, flappy meat lips and his piercing cry was unappealing and possibly dangerous. But in fact, the sly and and flatter his cat was the dangerous one. It isn't just me. Is that a really lame story? He's like, I went out and I met these two characters and his mom's like, you got it wrong. The end.
00:28:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's essentially it. You got it wrong. I met these characters and came back unscathed and his mom was like...
00:28:15
Speaker
Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? I was like, but I'm fine. I don't know. They let me go. We didn't have problems. Maybe you had a bad interaction with a cat once in your life and have some- Stan really wants to make this about systemic racism. I just, I don't know. You know what? You know what he did? Pose your political garbage onto every single thing. This was written before racism. Did you get a published date on that?
00:28:45
Speaker
It's like I'm looking at 1776 I can tell from the type and it kind of smells like cigarette smoke that this was written before Racism was a problem. Yeah, right. So, okay. Well, you didn't like that one. Let me read one more at that shorter a SOPS fables is a collection of fables credited to a SOP a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE Yeah jokes on you douchebag That's really old. Is it on me?
00:29:14
Speaker
I think it kind of proves my point a little bit. Okay. This one is called the old woman in the wine jar. And it has a fun little illustration of a lady sniffing a hole. The holes in the jar readers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If that's, if that's important context, you must know that sometimes old women like a glass of wine.
00:29:44
Speaker
The old women like a glass of wine. One of this sort once found a wine jar lying in the road and eagerly went up to it, hoping to find it full. But when she took it up, she found that all the wine had been drunk out of it. Still, she took a long sniff at the mouth of the jar. Ah, she cried. What memories cling round the instruments of our pleasure?
00:30:07
Speaker
That's the story? It might have been written before racism, but not before sexism. Nothing predates sexism. I can definitely see if you were out of beer, I could see you like picking up one of the thousand cans amongst your feet right now and sniffing it and going, oh, I remember alcoholism.
00:30:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, as I'm drinking a glass of wine while we're doing this. So cheers, my friends. Oh, classy.
00:30:40
Speaker
Yeah, I'm keeping it classy. Cheers to you. This is technically the start of my school vacation. I'm on February break next week. What's February break? That's the thing? Yes. In Massachusetts, we get it because too many kids killed themselves in February. What?
00:31:01
Speaker
It's Massachusetts. It's a tip to keep guns out of school. Yeah, yeah. It's great up there. It's cold and depressing. And they're like, let's we need to give these kids a break before something horrible happens. So we get February and then wait a month and a half. And then we get April vacation, too. So you also have spring break. Yeah. Yep. And.
00:31:29
Speaker
But don't worry, we'll still complain in March when I have to work four whole weeks without a three day weekend or any extra time off. Heroes are heroes. I spent my entire life never getting more. The last like few years of my life, I had finally gotten like three weeks of paid time off and the federally mandated amount of
00:31:54
Speaker
like long weekends, which is like five, I think. And then I spend one year in a school and I'm already like, this is fucking ridiculous. You're telling me March, I don't get one long weekend. Fuck this. I'm going to take a kind of school. Then we'll get March vacation.
00:32:14
Speaker
That's like, that's the call of arms. If enough kids bring guns to school in March, we get March break too. Greater love has no man than this, that he laid down his life for his students. Oh my god. Anyways, Sam, you want to introduce our guests?
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah, our guest this week is Angel Mark Lloyd, also known or better known as Fire Tools. She is a musical artist who blends a ton of different genres and
00:32:48
Speaker
stuff together. I don't know. It's really interesting. It kind of took me by surprise when I first heard it because it'll be like, like, I feel like the wrong word is EDM, but there's like a production component to it. But then there'll be like black metal kind of vocals layered over it. And it's, it's really interesting. But it did stick out. And we had a great conversation. She has a lot of the same kind of musical background that we do got into heavy music at a younger age.
00:33:14
Speaker
has incorporated that into some of her new interests. She defines herself as psycho-spiritual, hard, new-age music. That's what it is on Instagram. And that makes sense. It's really interesting stuff. Absolutely go check it out. Follow her on Instagram. And I thought this was such a neat conversation. She's a really interesting person, interesting background. And
00:33:37
Speaker
Vibrant colorful person a lot of color on this instagram. Oh my word Just that The her her room the room that she reported the episode in it's uh, it is just like pulsing LEDs and rainbows and unicorn it looks like you're it looks like if you
00:34:00
Speaker
you know, stake to homestead inside of Elisa Frank Trapper. There you go. Casey with the analogies. But yeah, that's awesome shit. Agile is cool shit. So enjoy our conversation with fire tools. Amazing.
00:34:21
Speaker
Hey, everybody, we are back with our guest fire tools, or as we will refer to you as on this podcast, Angel. If I even drop your name much at all here, I guess that happens where you just assume we're talking to you the entire time since we are having you on our podcast. But Angel, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, it's it's going to be fun.
00:34:46
Speaker
I'm excited. I feel like as we were just talking about briefly before we hit record that I'm very intrigued by your music and it's outside of my element, but I really
00:34:59
Speaker
I really like it and find it very fascinating. It's not my forte, so I don't even know how to classify it or think about it. I was reading your Wikipedia page, though, and I noticed that Wikipedia even seems to struggle to classify it. I want to say it's probably like 15. Yeah, so Wikipedia is really not good. It really needs some serious updates, and I can't...
00:35:23
Speaker
really do that myself it's really incomplete and the information that is there like some of it just like doesn't really matter like there are so many other things about my music or like my public my public persona i guess you could call it that should be on there but it's not i don't know what's going on with that yeah
00:35:41
Speaker
But yeah, go to Angel Mark Lloyd dot com. That's a better place for for information on me because I actually control it. Yeah, I know. Because whatever you change in Wikipedia, someone else is just going to be like, no, that whoever said that is actually wrong. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you about that person. It sounds like they did really minimal research, like read like one article and plucked some ideas out of it. I mean, I guess you could argue I did really minimal research since we started this off about talking about Wikipedia.
00:36:11
Speaker
That's okay. I'll fill you in. Perfect. But yeah, it's like the other awkward non-secreters you want to throw in before we start talking. It wasn't that awkward. I didn't think it was very awkward. Where are you joining us from?
00:36:28
Speaker
Um, I'm in a town about like, uh, one to two hours from Chicago. It just depends on where in Chicago you're thinking about. I used to live in the city and I do like put on my social media that that's where I'm from. Cause it's like kind of.
00:36:44
Speaker
I mean, this is still considered Chicagoland, but it's like way far out there. But I mean, if you tried really hard to dox me, you probably could, but I don't usually say what town I live in.
00:37:00
Speaker
I feel like you could probably look at a map of the power grid and just look for a throbbing flare of power usage. Yeah, that's how people in this neighborhood see me. They drive by my house and they look in the window and it's red, blue, and purple. I have this big TV above me right here that has a live stream of cat rescue on 24-7, so I literally have
00:37:28
Speaker
kittens right here live all the time. It looks like the fairy godmothers are having a fight about cake. Yeah, that's how I feel every day. Is there is it so much color and light coming from your house? And so much energy would like draw that parents make their children cross the other side of the street when they walk by it? Well, the thing is, there's a sidewalk on both sides of the road here.
00:37:55
Speaker
And I am the last house of this neighborhood. So people walk down the sidewalk, they get to my house, and then they turn around and cross the street and go back down. So I get to see everyone twice, including kids.
00:38:08
Speaker
Do you keep a nondescript outside or is the whole thing? I have a flag with a smiley face on it, a big yellow flag, but that's other than a few garden ornaments or whatever, we keep it pretty chill on the outside. I don't want my conservative neighbors to
00:38:28
Speaker
have some kind of a problem, I don't know. You got to try to draw any hate crimes. I just don't want to be, I don't want to be a target. I mean, the city, the stats say it's like half liberal, half conservative, roughly. It's like 50%, 51% or something. So it's not like I'm like surrounded by people who want to kill me. Just some people. 50-50 chance. Right, exactly. One of those neighborhoods that
00:38:58
Speaker
voted for Obama, but blocked affordable housing. Yeah. Blocked Obama, but have flipped and then flipped back and then flipped again. I don't know. Yeah. Well, you know, the boomer generation has to try on a new idea. Well, maybe it's not even fair to say it's the boomers. I think, I think us millennials are doing the same thing. I think it's probably the majority of the issue, but definitely not all of it, but don't worry.
00:39:27
Speaker
They're going to die before we do, and then we'll live in a utopia. We were just having a discussion about the things that go away when boomers die out, one of them being ambrosia salad. Yes. Wow, you're right. What about those weird fruit cakes with jello and stuff?
00:39:53
Speaker
They're kind of like a cliche in movies where your neighbor brings you one. Those, those will be gone. Cause my grandmother, you know, that's like grandmother vibes, but that'll, that'll
Consumerism and Shopping Trends
00:40:03
Speaker
be gone. No one's going to make those anymore. Probably. They don't appear in a cartoon without hair in it.
00:40:11
Speaker
the rolling toothpick dispenser at restaurants. I have a feeling that goes away. It might go away, but that's cool because you don't have to touch them at all. It's like a little free vending machine. In fact, I should get one of those. I'm going to put one in my bathroom and then I won't have to brush my teeth anymore. I can just use little picks. I don't think those are for sale for residential use. I think that's strictly commercial.
00:40:38
Speaker
Oh, no way. You go on Amazon. If you type anything into Amazon, it exists. It doesn't matter what you type. You'll find you have to have a Cisco account. Casey, that. It is true, though, Amazon's like. My my house is just a bigger and bigger pile of like very specific gadgets and like storage utensils. Oh, thanks to Amazon.
00:41:05
Speaker
Well, thanks, Amazon. Thank you, Jeff. Daddy, daddy, Jeff. Yes, Jeff. Well, all right. So let's get into a little bit because our conversation online, you really piqued my curiosity with some of your interest. There's a lot of overlap of interesting, interesting interests. Sure.
00:41:32
Speaker
musically, spiritually, religiously. So let's start the way we normally do on the religious front. Where did you grow up and was religion or Christianity a part of that upbringing or did your interest in it in an academic sense, it seems, come later? Let's start from the early days.
00:41:54
Speaker
Yeah, the academic stuff came like way later. But so I grew up in a family that was just like, as Christian as they needed to be in order to sort of get away with not being called heathens. So it was like Easter, Christmas. You know, once in a while, my dad would like make some comments about the Lord or something like that. But my family wasn't
00:42:24
Speaker
It wasn't really religious. I know my mom was trying to push to go to church for a while, because I think she was just looking for something. And so we kind of went through a little phase when I was young where we were going to church, but I hated it. So I finally convinced her to stop making me go. But then I discovered Christianity in a different way from friends who were going to youth group and stuff.
00:42:53
Speaker
And I started going with them and then of course I was just exposed to their brand of Christianity, which I guess when I was older I finally understood some things and wasn't just completely tuned out like I was when I was a little kid.
00:43:12
Speaker
So I got pretty into that. I ended up becoming a like a youth leader. It was a non-denominational church. They liked it. It was stupid because it's a denomination. You're just not calling it that. But usually with non-denominational churches, it's a bit more laid back. So I guarantee you, if I walked into that congregation looking like this, they would be really nice to me. But if they knew that I like
00:43:41
Speaker
use she her pronouns. That's where the problem would be. So basically, I'm saying that like, you can be a freak and go there like there it was, it was comfortable. You know, it embraced the weird kids like around the youth time in my life.
00:43:59
Speaker
like new metal was like a pretty big deal. I mean, it's like early corn, early Limp Biscuit albums. Yeah, whole chamber and stuff. So all of the all of the kids my age who went to that youth group were like in the parachute pants and had the spiky hair and the ball chain. They got a lot of everything. Well, what's your look? What was your look as you delved into that world? Orgy?
00:44:23
Speaker
I really loved Orgy. And, you know, they had tight, shiny clothes. They wore makeup. They played heavy music and their guitars sounded like keyboards, which I was very fascinated with. So that was kind of my look. I still have the parachute pants sometimes, but I had a lot of shiny clothes, you know, like stuff you would buy from Hot Topic, like in the, you know, early 2000s and stuff like that. So invincible era skillet.
00:44:50
Speaker
Yeah. Speaking of skillet, I really, uh, I was jamming alien youth around that time. Now I look back and read those lyrics and I'm just like, Oh my God, this is horrible. Yeah. He didn't get any better at writing. No, no, he got way worse, but that album kind of slaps. It's like pretty heavy at times. And it was a huge change from there, like earlier stuff. So yeah, I was really obsessed with that for a while. Um, I feel like, uh,
00:45:17
Speaker
Even back then, it was like, you were so starved for, I mean, I didn't really get to listen to secular bands, but like, so you were so starved for like heavy music that you liked things knowing that they were bad. It was like uncomfortable how like lame they were at times, but you still had, you had to make do with it because it was all you had.
00:45:40
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, my, you know, my youth pastor never had any issue with secular music as long as the content wasn't like, you know, not like wholesome. Like I got him into bands that were secular even. Yeah. Just, you know, no F words or any taking the Lord's name in vain or whatever. But, um, which kind of ruled out a lot of new metal, didn't it?
00:46:07
Speaker
It did rule out a lot of new metal. So we just listened to, um, well, I don't know. Zeo has some pretty crazy lyrics at times, but I don't think my pastor knew that. So we could listen to that. And then of course we listened to Ludacris slash Norma Jean. Yeah.
00:46:24
Speaker
There was some, there was some other like new metal. The Zeo was a Christian band at that time. They were at that time. They've always kind of like treaded the line like in a really weird way. I still don't care. It's true. Lyrically, they definitely did. I mean, I knew kids when I was still really into Zeo and very, very Christian. And when the funeral of God came out, people were like,
00:46:44
Speaker
Yeah, well they knew that album title was gonna make people lose their shit Yeah, I think it was just like a fantasy story, right? Isn't that true? Wasn't it just like a like a concept or something? Yeah, I think it just had a lot it yeah a concept of the idea of I mean essentially it's like the God's dead idea like culturally God's been been buried I think they're going for
00:47:12
Speaker
Yeah, and that's that makes sense. They've always been a little bit I think ahead of the game when it comes to criticism of that stuff. Yeah, so I was into that for, you know, a good chunk of years until my until like 23 or so like I finally just like one day I was just like, like, no, this isn't right. There's so many problems with this. It's like I'm tired.
00:47:38
Speaker
of pushing myself to believe things that I just knew weren't true. And I'm not talking about like, you know, God's existence, or like, you know, I don't have Jesus rules. So it wasn't really like that. It was just like, it was the fundamentalism and the literalism with the Bible. Because I'm just like, there's no way that happened.
00:48:04
Speaker
And they were like, well, it didn't, you know, like God was doing stuff like that back then. Um, you know, to establish like a history and establish the Bible and like, you know, nobody's walking on water or sending to heaven now, because like that kind of stuff doesn't need to happen anymore because we have the Bible. So that was a convenient justification. Quite as good a job as a walking on water and ascending into heaven though, is it?
00:48:29
Speaker
No, no, it's really not. I mean, yeah, so I mean, they thought Jonah was really in the whale, they thought that the world began with, you know, Genesis, and there's like, two at least creation stories in Genesis, and they, they wouldn't acknowledge that, because they believe in like, univocality of the Bible, meaning like,
Bible Interpretations and Truth
00:48:50
Speaker
It's not written. They don't realize it was written by all of these different people at different times and different letters being sent to different churches for specific reasons, and every writer have their personality, but they don't want to look at that.
00:49:04
Speaker
I kind of slipped out of that even though I really missed my pastor because he was such a cool guy. The pastor or the youth pastor that you connected with? The youth pastor. I mean, the main pastor of the church, I mean, he was kind of cool too, but I recently revisited their webpage to kind of see what's going on because it's been almost two decades, I guess.
00:49:27
Speaker
And, you know, I like I looked at their site and I was looking real deep into their like, what would you call it like their mission statement or whatever, see if I could find anything like the state of there. That's always a category statement of faith.
00:49:42
Speaker
Yeah, because that's kind of where that's a lot of times where like homophobia pops up. Because they kind of want to make sure that you know what they stand for, but they don't want to like, make a big deal out of it.
00:49:57
Speaker
so their workarounds are funny too because if they don't want to say if they want to be like subversive in a bit in a way they'll say instead of like we believe that marriage is between one man and one woman they'll like they'll skirt that and be like we believe in the creation account as it happened and then they'll just kind of like dodge some of the other shit instead of get specific about what they believe
00:50:21
Speaker
Yeah, there's just so many contradictions in the Bible, and that's made me really appreciate it, you know, later in life, like looking at the diversity and all the different kinds of writing in there. But yeah, it was just seen in a way that I feel is just like really horrible and damaging. And, you know, the people there, the pastors and everything, like they have degrees, but they went to colleges that like,
00:50:50
Speaker
taught them, like, kind of the current way of looking at things, current translations and, you know, and just kind of like, I guess, like Neo Calvinist and, you know, meets like, well, I guess evangelical has to do with Calvinism too, but
00:51:13
Speaker
Oh, I don't remember where I was going with that. But yeah, like those the colleges like Liberty University, like they teach you to be a pastor, but it's like, it's like hardly academic. I mean, these people aren't learning now. I'm not going to say they're not learning the original talk about my alma mater that way. Won't have it won't have it.
00:51:35
Speaker
Yeah. So I went to the church's YouTube channel and poke around and see if people were still cool or whether they got really evangelical or conservative, because I know there's been a lot of polarization. And the first video that came up was that senior pastor complaining that Maryland, where I was from, passed a law that allows people to put their preferred gender on their driver's licenses.
00:52:01
Speaker
And he's just like so sad about that, about what the world was coming to. I'm just like, come the fuck on, dude. So yeah. It's like everything is so politicized now and it's like at the end of the day, we've talked about it quite a bit, about how like it's clearly the most important thing
00:52:23
Speaker
to almost everyone. I know. Like that's a problem plaguing the church right now. I was just I have a buddy who's still a, you know, a critic, a Christian in the traditional sense still goes to the same church I did when I was a kid and stuff. Smart dude. But, you know, I was telling him about like, dude, you can't tell me that like most people, like their faith is more important to them than they're like,
00:52:50
Speaker
their identity in a political sense because that's all that they talk about, that's all they post about and everything has to go through that lens in order to like make it out. It's definitely a lens because there are so many ways to approach Christianity in the Bible and you can pretty much get away with any way you go about it because you can pluck out all your verses that support your idea. You can project onto them what you think they mean
00:53:18
Speaker
But you can also convince someone that Jesus was an anarchist, Jesus was a communist, and Jesus was extremely progressive and the opposite of a conservative and all that stuff. And really, any way you want. There's so much shit in the Bible.
00:53:40
Speaker
There's so much wonderful uplifting spiritual messages and there's also sexual assault and war and stuff like that. You can do whatever you want with the Bible and probably convince them that your way of looking at it is correct, which is why people dissociate from the original writings and the context and the culture at the time and how that influences what the
00:54:08
Speaker
Scripture might mean and everything. So yeah, thinking about getting a hold of my youth pastor, because I want to talk about some shit. I want to be like, come on, man. You really don't think that this is a thing, right? Look at the Hebrew. This is what it says. This is what this scholar says it means. This is what scholars agree it means. Like, what do you have to say about that? I'm like, what do you say to that? Well,
00:54:34
Speaker
It doesn't mean that. I mean, what do you do at that point when you got scholars there like arguing with you? So yeah, it's just the least academic position in the church that you can have. That's it. It's a weird mix because they it's like a faux academic approach because they, you know, they'll they it's just so insulated that they they cite their, you know, they cite sanctioned
00:54:59
Speaker
academics who report the things that they need them to yeah every little they rub shoulders seldom with the actual like academic and there is disagreement within academic the academic academic world is disagreement and i think that's where just like.
00:55:17
Speaker
what I find fascinating as you go, oh, this is where people are, this is where people are having the conversation at a higher level. And we should learn and glean from that and not just go, I'm, I'm, I'm looking to, to tickle my need for certainty. So I'll just like, I'm just gonna, I'll sift through every idea until I land on the one that makes me feel good about myself and my belief in the world. Yeah, that's what they do. And I swear most of them don't realize they're doing it.
00:55:46
Speaker
So when you were in high school and you start attending youth group, was there, I mean, as a teenager, I imagine you started considering questioning, thinking about your sexuality or gender identity. How did that come into play for you in high school?
00:56:05
Speaker
Well, I've always been like a weird dresser ever since I was in elementary school, but mostly middle school. I'm just more adventurous with fashion. Therefore, I became like just a total weirdo in everybody's eyes. You know, I have my like
00:56:21
Speaker
freak fans who you know listen to what I listen to and everything and then you know everyone else um but I did this weird thing where I would like try to make friends with like the jocks and like the preppy girls and everything um because I just wanted harmony and unity between everyone so I try to like make friends with those people in the church how could you
00:56:46
Speaker
Well, eventually it kind of caught on that, you know, I was a Christian and I was a little bit outspoken, not super outspoken, but I, you know, I had journals like online journals and I would just like write about a lot of stuff. So people got to know that I was like cool, but like a weird Christian person. And I think a lot of my friends
00:57:14
Speaker
just kind of didn't talk to me about it and we're just like cool with it and like didn't make it an issue. Once in a while we get into like a theological conversation but it was never heated or anything. They just kind of like let me do my thing I guess.
00:57:29
Speaker
But yeah, fell out of it, did my atheist phase like a lot of people do, and then found meditation or psychology, then found meditation, then found Buddhism, then found Hinduism, and now I've kind of arrived back at a completely different version of Christianity that is actually amazing. And learning
00:57:53
Speaker
how fallible and flawed the Bible is, has been one of the main things that has gotten me excited spiritually. Because it's it's truth. Truth is what gets me hyped. Not like something I'm trying to like, okay, Noah's Ark really happened. Like, come on, like internalize this Noah's Ark really happened.
00:58:15
Speaker
Like, no more of that shit. No more of that shit. I just, you know, if Christian teachings resonate with me, I go with them and if they don't, I throw them out and it's great. What is it about?
00:58:29
Speaker
What do you think it was for you about coming back to it from the perspective of that it's clearly fallible that made it, what about that made that more appealing to you and more related to truth for you?
00:58:48
Speaker
Because it just it made it made the Bible human again. And I realized there's so many different perspectives and ways of thinking in the Bible from all these different people. And it was just encouraging to see all of the different ways like people
00:59:08
Speaker
would have their relationships with God. And so much of it is just horribly, horribly misogynist. I mean, women were just straight up property. If women were sexually assaulted,
00:59:24
Speaker
She was in huge trouble and sometimes the men would get away with it depending on the circumstances. There's so much awful stuff in the Bible. And so being able to see that and be real about that and be fine with it
00:59:43
Speaker
It kind of makes me just like trust in like my spiritual like connection with the divine or whatever you want to call it Because of truth, you know, and I know none of these like academic data are necessarily Infallible, I mean it's still people like doing the studying but like it's so much closer to truth and
01:00:11
Speaker
And truth gets me hyped. Like truth with a big T. I don't necessarily mean like facts. It's like something a little bit more abstract than that. That's hard to explain. But yeah, and then then I started just paying like, I don't even like the Bible much. I don't like reading it. It's too hard to read. Anybody who's being introduced to Christianity, if someone hands them a Bible and says start here, they're just going to get fucked up.
01:00:35
Speaker
They're just going to be, brain is going to be ruined. They're not even going to know like what to do. It's just, Bible is the worst thing to hand someone if you're trying to pitch any kind of like spirituality. So I like to read stuff from other Christians who have much more of a spiritual connection and more like mystical experiences. Like I love reading Meister Eckhart and St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross and Thomas Merton.
01:01:05
Speaker
Like that's my kind of spirituality and like huge fan of Richard Rohr. I've listened to so many of his books and his podcasts and everything like that. And yeah, so like that's, that's my, my, my brand of Christianity is extremely progressive, extremely like in a way, like self centered, like trusting yourself and your intuition.
01:01:30
Speaker
um and it's very it's very loving and it's peaceful and there's no violence and there's no judgment and there is an embracing of other traditions like because my main interest is is like mystical Christian in academic Christianity right now I still like don't like to call myself a Christian because like so much of my philosophy is rooted in buddhism
01:01:55
Speaker
and Vedanta Hinduism, but I find that mystical Christianity just works with that. And so I don't have a particular spiritual association with any movement or religion so much as I use Christianity as a framework for a lot of things, but it's not the end-all be-all. I mean, it's just concepts. It's just people trying to put
01:02:23
Speaker
into words and into sights and sounds like what they're experiencing with the divine and Christianity is one way of doing that.
01:02:33
Speaker
Yeah. Hell yeah. I love that. I resonate with a lot of that. It feels like there's the, when you're talking about like Buddhism in Hinduism, it's like mystical Christianity, it pulls the spiritually beneficial practices and aspects of, that are tried and true across religions and like kind of restructures it in the framework.
01:02:55
Speaker
of Christianity. And I, one of the things that you said that stuck out to me, uh, that about the way that, oh boy, the thought is slipping my mind. Uh, it was about just the way that, um, the things that the things in Christianity that line up with
01:03:16
Speaker
Your own like you're kind of your personal ethos based on your own personal spiritual journey is Something that would be frowned upon from our evangelical. Absolutely But ironically though they they say the same thing in different words they go well that doesn't sit right with me because I'm guided by the Holy Spirit and
01:03:37
Speaker
And so they do the exact same thing and they just word it differently and think that it's a superior way to look at the world. And that's, I think what's a little bit frustrating to me is that we're all doing similar things using similar tools and, um,
01:03:54
Speaker
Obviously coming to different conclusions, which I think kind of harks back to what Casey was talking about with what's, you know, you're naturally possibly more conservative, but your main, your main concern is your, your political ideology.
01:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Making sure that the world functions the way you need it to in order to feel safe and happy, which is what we all want, right? We just need that world to operate differently. Yes. Oh, no. That's where we can connect with those people. All of us want what's best for the world and ourselves and our neighbors. They just happen to think what's best is
01:04:29
Speaker
you know, eradicating trans people and Trump and all that stuff. It's just so weird. I mean, God, like if evangelicals just took a simple course on the history of Christianity and the Bible and like the Jesus legacy, they would
01:04:48
Speaker
they would either like like go crazy or like they would have to like intentionally dissociate from all of it and just call it the devil because there's no other way to like learn about that stuff and then be like no
01:05:08
Speaker
They'd call it a conspiracy theory so that way they can keep them there. Yeah, exactly. No, that's true. That's true. Well, that's just what the academics want you to think. People have a tendency to explain everything away without having to... I want to say that's a big difference.
01:05:24
Speaker
between people who have gone through major shifts and then are continuing to look at new information versus people who haven't changed their mind in 45 years is like, yeah, yeah, we've, we've gone through the effort. I'm not, I don't know. I don't want to like, you know, tutor on horn or anything, but like,
01:05:39
Speaker
I think a lot of millennials especially have gone through the effort and I've seen millennials go. You said you had your atheist phase too so you understand this. We see a lot of people go the other side they just switch fundamentalist teams and they're just still no fun and they don't know how to engage and have a conversation or think rationally.
01:05:55
Speaker
We've seen that too. But I think what we're, you know, we do see a lot of like, if you can look at someone who's in their 50s and they've never changed their mind about anything. And they've been when they've come close, you've had conversations and they go, Oh, that's really interesting. And then they forget all of that and go back into the same.
01:06:14
Speaker
the same understandings they've always had. That's like a big red flag for me. If you've changed your mind about things, I would be more interested in talking to someone who came to evangelical Christianity in their late forties, who lived their party life. Those people who have that salvation story, that testimony. Maybe they were in Hell's Angels, whatever. I would be more interested in having conversations with them because at least they've changed their mind about something.
01:06:44
Speaker
And I think that, you know, you can you can just flip teams and double down and deeply ingrain yourself in the same thing. But I think there is something to be said for the brain, like just your being able to change your mind about something at a later stage in life, because we really encrust ourselves in our beliefs as we approach our 30s.
01:07:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly true. I mean, if anybody believes all the same stuff they did 50 years ago, they're pretty much just saying, I am more misogynistic and sexist and homophobic than the people around me who have changed their mind. Because 50 years ago, that's how
01:07:27
Speaker
you know, people thought. Same thing with racism. So yeah, it's really alarming when people don't evolve. It's uncomfortable to evolve a lot of times, but I mean, how else is the world gonna survive if we don't evolve and change our minds? And not being dogmatic, we gotta try so hard not to be,
01:07:53
Speaker
Dogmatic like there's some things I guess that you can you can be dogmatic about maybe like like human rights I guess but like You know other than that. We just we have to be open. I wish we could have more level-headed conversations with Evangelicals and stuff like that like I try to on on you know comment sections of Instagram and Twitter and stuff I really like engaging in
01:08:17
Speaker
that conversations and meeting new people and talking about our different ways of seeing things, but it usually doesn't go well. I feel like a good, just like very current example of that kind of like protectionist mindset that everybody's prone to is
01:08:42
Speaker
Like the stuff going on between Israel and Palestine. Because I think regardless of which side of that issue you find yourself on, there's a lot of inherited knowledge that informs your position on that.
01:09:03
Speaker
whether it's one way or the other, whether you think that like, you know, Israel is God's chosen people and they, you know, just need to have their own land and they're surrounded by all these Muslim countries. You know, we've all heard these arguments that are like handed across from generation to generation without like really any, there's no really historical understanding of what that conflict is look like. And the same goes, you know, on the flip side of it with, you know, people that kind of want to whitewash
01:09:34
Speaker
the ugly things that people on the other side of that conflict have done. And really what's hard about it and what's ungratifying for the casual onlooker that just enjoys a bit of disaster porn on the news or performative
Complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
01:09:56
Speaker
activism on social media that doesn't do anything for anybody. What's ungratifying about it for both sides is that if you actually look back at the history of it, you don't even have to go back clear to the beginning. You can go back 30 years and just look at what's gone on. There's some really ugly stuff on both sides. There's bad blood there that is understandable if you were the person living in Gaza or a person living in Jerusalem.
01:10:25
Speaker
Yeah, and there's propaganda too. Even when you go research things, if somebody was challenged by somebody on the other side and being like, just look it up, you can find things that act like, that are posing as historical accounts and documentation, but it's still twisted. I mean, I haven't seen a lot of that on the Palestinian side, but
01:10:55
Speaker
You probably wouldn't. Because Google does that fun thing where you're more likely to see search results that are based on previous search results and how you frame a question. They're pretty tuned into what your bias is.
01:11:12
Speaker
Is, uh, is, is real really the aggressor here? Like the way you would phrase something like it, it'll just filter results based on previous searches and what they know about you, uh, from search history. So it's like, you're, I mean, it's a bias machine that you're, this is something my dog likes to do. Just like take beds and blankets and just flip them over and carry them around. So if you see her doing that, enjoy laser pointer, that's just moving around.
01:11:40
Speaker
It's an automatic, uh, laser, like a cat toy. So it comes on when I'm not around or busy or whatever, but it doesn't look like there's any, Oh, they're not playing with right now. It comes on like every once in a while. Uh, sorry about the interruption. I just figured if you were looking behind me and like seeing what Layla was doing, you'd probably be like, what the hell is going on?
01:12:04
Speaker
I'll take this sidebar because I had a Westie. She's since passed. She was a wonderful pup. She's taken too early. She got cancer.
01:12:16
Speaker
She, we got those laser things as cat toys. And then at first we were like, oh, this is cute. My dog loves it. And then we're like, oh, this is like an unsafe problematic toy for this dog. And we ended up looking it up.
01:12:35
Speaker
And it's like, you probably shouldn't have these around certain dogs because they'll hyper fixate. And this dog, my dog would literally like. Wouldn't be able to stop chasing it. And every time we would turn it on, it got to a point where if we turned it on, she would chase it and chase it and chase. And then she would just like freeze and then like have accidents on the floor. And then like, Oh my God. Yeah. It really like a seizure. I said like.
01:13:01
Speaker
I don't think she was seizing, but they're just like, they get so fixated on it that they can't pull themselves away, and they'll just piss where they're standing because they just don't. Your dog is just literally reliving the tunnel scene from Willy Wonka every time you get the laser pointer. No. Oh, God. That shit is scary.
01:13:19
Speaker
Yeah, it was wild. We had to hide it. Lena can't see that well, so I haven't seen it bother her anyway. She doesn't even pay attention to it, and the other cats like chasing it around. I think things are going okay, but I'll keep my eye out for a problem. There's a history podcast that I really like, and the guy's a sub-stack, and occasionally on his sub-stack, he'll take a Bible
01:13:49
Speaker
passage and he'll kind of give like a you know, sort of it feels almost like a sermon or something like that. But you know, he definitely approaches it from more of like a literary
01:14:04
Speaker
you know, academic sort of stance and examines it in a way that's like contrary to the, you know, the sort of like cut and paste doctrine that I grew up with. And I was, he had this like several part series recently on the book of Job and, you know, it's kind of the premise that he starts out with. He's like, you know, one of the things that
01:14:33
Speaker
makes Christians really uncomfortable when we start talking about the book of Job is that, you know, I happen to believe that God is the aggressor and antagonist in that situation. Like God is the bad guy in the story of Job. And then he kind of teaches the whole thing through from that perspective. And it's really interesting because in the end he kind of like makes the case for the idea that like, you know, God's nature changes after Job.
01:15:03
Speaker
And that like, he thinks it's, you know, Job really gave God an understanding of what it was like to live as a, you know, to put him in the shoes of a human, you know, one of his creations that like, what is it like to lose family members? What is it like to, you know, to be tormented by all these different plagues and stuff in a way that like, maybe he'd never
01:15:28
Speaker
felt, you know, really understood before it gave him a better understanding of what it was like to be human. And, you know, I mean, is that I don't know. I don't know. It's interesting, though. And I was talking to my wife about it. I'm like, you know, I, we would never be able to talk about that passage in that way, growing up because it doesn't line up with
01:15:50
Speaker
our doctrinal understanding of it. Because the Bible is inherently perfect and it was written and inspired by God and it is to be interpreted literally. It really robs so much of the actual meaning that it has for you.
01:16:11
Speaker
I don't know. I feel like we really like I really missed out on a lot of that stuff because I was so worried about memorizing the right way to look at things. And in the end, like it didn't mean anything to me. You know, when I was finally honest with myself about it, it just doesn't it doesn't mean anything to me to know all these right answers about this stuff. You know, and I don't know. I think that's like the downside of like this protectionist
01:16:40
Speaker
dogmatic way of approaching religion that I think eventually has hurt the church and has led to the point that it is now where it really doesn't mean anything to a lot of people. And that's why you look elsewhere for those cultural identifiers on Fox News or whatever. Yeah, exactly. I have a hypothesis. Oh, sure. Go ahead, Angel. Go.
01:17:07
Speaker
I don't lose that thought, but I was just gonna just comment on Job stuff, I guess. Yeah, looking at God as the antagonist, that's really interesting. I think that something I can get out of all of that is kind of like, I really love the idea of life being horrible, but maintaining faith.
01:17:31
Speaker
But you have to look at God differently in order for that to work. I have a song called The Great Allower, which is something that I got from Richard Rohr, and he talked about God in that way once. In a way, God's just kind of like, y'all do your thing, I'm here to help.
01:17:59
Speaker
But and it's like an experiment and like we're fucking it up really bad, but it doesn't mean that God's fucking up necessarily. And so I think that there's lessons to be learned when you're suffering and your family's dead and you have no money. I think that you can still have very strong faith because you're not pinning your circumstances to like an act of God.
01:18:25
Speaker
So I find Job valuable in that way, but it was just one person's, or several people, I don't know actually who the author is, their way of talking about what their experience was. So this person, if he was real, which he might not have been, you know, went through all this crap.
01:18:45
Speaker
And that person's interpretation of their experience is that God was saying those things and being like, you know, sorry, I like killed your family. Just don't lose hope in faith.
01:19:02
Speaker
I know that sounds really bad and it looks bad. And it is kind of, I don't know, it's kind of shitty in a way, but like, I don't know, I think that we can get some value from it as long as we look at it differently from the way our childhood churches taught us, which is kind of what you're saying, you're talking about a new perspective, which I really
01:19:21
Speaker
value. I wonder if that's academically sound. There's probably some kind of consensus about like what Job means or whatever, but yeah, you have to be willing to look at it differently than you were told to.
01:19:35
Speaker
There is almost some like interesting things that kind of tie into this in that story too, because I'm trying to remember exactly who played what role in that story. It's the oldest dated book.
01:19:56
Speaker
Um, so written before Janet written, but it's, yeah, it's the earliest written book. Um, so you get a little bit more of an idea of what the theology of the time was when it was written and where it was, how it meshed with, you know, ancient Judaism. Uh, but I, my understanding it, so it starts out with a divine council. They call one of the characters Satan in English translation. Um, essentially it's just the accuser.
01:20:26
Speaker
So it's an accuser, it's kind of like a court like setting. So it was like, you have the accuser, you have the person who's like defending Job, right? Which is God. So then you just get this, like, this back and forth because, you know, it's also that was a time in which, not that it's not now, but I think the concept, like you mentioned, Angel, is just like,
01:20:48
Speaker
The concept of faith and I think that was more of a virtue than it is now then so you go like yeah, God's like look at this man of faith and then The accuser who is also would have been a kind of an equivalent of God with the soul divine counsel It's more of like
01:21:07
Speaker
this idea of a plurality of gods. And he goes, well, you know, or they go, I think that, you know, I just don't think that I don't think this person really has a faith that you think he does. And then they just kind of argue about it. And in God's character goes, all right, I'll let you do this. But these are your only rules. You can't do X, Y and Z. So the accuser does all those things. And Job still has faith. And then Job and his friends fight about it.
01:21:37
Speaker
And I think some of the cool things that come out is like Job's friends all present, quote unquote, biblically sound arguments for why Job is suffering, Levitical arguments, like you're suffering because you sit, like you wouldn't suffer like this if you weren't sinning. What's your sin, dude? Tell us what you've done. And he's like, I haven't done anything.
01:21:58
Speaker
and you have this constant argument. So even though you could look back on it now and go, that's kind of dated. We don't have this archaic view of God and gods in this divine argument and this concept of suffering and punishment for arbitrary reasons other than proving a point. You can say that book is really doing this thing where it goes,
01:22:21
Speaker
the time in which they lived, this is the operating assumption. And this is what we get in the early books of the Bible too, which is you wouldn't suffer if you weren't doing something wrong. And this book is doing something different. It's telling a different story, playing a different game, kind of pushing back against that cultural narrative as a story. It's likely just written as poetry.
01:22:47
Speaker
And the things that he says about that that like paint Scott is the aggressor in it is that like because God sets the terms for how the devil can torment him like
01:22:59
Speaker
God really is kind of in control. I think that's the pushback I would have though, is that like, we have God the aggressor when you're dealing with gods. And there is no like, there is no God God at that point. There's no understanding that there's, it'd be like argue, it'd be like the Greeks arguing which God, like you could say Zeus was the most powerful, but like there are equally
01:23:23
Speaker
powerful gods doing things that control different things. So I think that's the trouble with that, which whatever. I mean, if you want to paint God as the aggressor in that story, I'm not personally bothered by that. I have no like God, the positive that we understood to be God set the terms of how the devil could or the other party, whatever. Yeah. Can torment Job, you know?
01:23:50
Speaker
And by doing that kind of like, he had control over the setting throughout that whole thing. And it is kind of interesting too how like, yeah, certain people approach that, like his friends approach it in different ways where you have one person saying like, well, you must have sinned, right? And I mean, obviously trying to find a reason in that mess, but like- There's still people that think that way.
01:24:17
Speaker
Absolutely. It's this protectionist mindset that we're talking about, I think, is that I have to rationalize what I'm seeing happen to you in a way that protects my understanding of the order of things. Certainly.
01:24:34
Speaker
To me, it seems like you must have done something wrong to deserve this. Yeah, it's literally like a placation of cognitive distortions. That's all it is.
Pursuit of Truth and Morality
01:24:43
Speaker
If what's happening to you doesn't make sense, then I'm going to just have to jump off a bridge because I can't live with that level of uncertainty.
01:24:55
Speaker
which we've seen that story. Okay. So I think this is what's fun is like, we're having this conversation, right? And you can glean these different points. And it's like, it's kind of through that conversation. It's not like that it's circling it that you get closer to what you were talking about, Angel, and that your love of truth and your interest in, you know, we can never, we can never throw a dart right at the center of capital T truth, but just this idea of like,
01:25:22
Speaker
these types of conversations and especially at an academic level like they really like refine your sense of one ability to have a conversation but all we're trying to do is kind of get closer to that to that middle point knowing that we can never reach it but does it but striving for it nonetheless and that's disappointing for some people because they want to just sit and know that they've
01:25:45
Speaker
found the truth. But we do the same thing with morality, right? And evangelicals have the same exact conversation around sin. Well, we can never be perfect, but we're striving to be as close to it. They get the notion of striving towards something that matters. Yes, definitely. And they acknowledge that there's things you can do that throw you off that path, which is what they call sin. But there's obviously disagreements about
01:26:11
Speaker
what is sin and what isn't. I mean, I just kind of look at sin as, you know, when you aren't doing the thing that is best, even though you know that something else is the best, I guess it's not something you need to cleanse yourself of, but I think that it can help you stay on track with your own intuition and your own ethics and stuff like that.
01:26:38
Speaker
But the way that evangelicals and other sects and denominations look at sin, it's like this list of stuff that's horrible to do. Even if it doesn't have any kind of negative impact on you or other people, it's against the rules. So don't be gay, whatever, because that's a sin, even though
01:27:02
Speaker
Anyone who's gay, they meet their person or they come out or whatever. It's liberating. It's a spiritual experience. The one thing that never makes that list is making in 10 seconds what most people won't make in a lifetime. That never makes the list financially. No, it doesn't.
01:27:23
Speaker
Yeah, and then there's the, you know, camel through an eye of a needle verse. I don't know what they do about that. I mean, that whole versus there's a little I mean, I basically think it's saying like, if you're, you know, if you're if you're greedy, if you take advantage of people, if you're hoarding, like, you know, that's some serious karma. But like, how do they deal with that verse?
01:27:48
Speaker
You know, I could tell you they came up. Go ahead. They came up with something. I think it's kind of like, you know, who were Noah's kids begging when they got off the Ark? Something's best not to dwell on. Exactly. No one really cares. I don't I don't need the story of Noah's Ark for like anything in my life. Like it's just.
01:28:13
Speaker
Who gives a fuck about that story? I'm sure there's lessons in it. I'm sure there's like some teachings in it and I'm sure like an academic or even a pastor could like share with us what it is, but like I just do not care about it. Sometimes everybody else is wrong and you're right. And then you get to watch them choke to death on divine punishment. Yeah, that sounds great. Just make sure there's two of every animal.
01:28:42
Speaker
While they bang on the side of your boat going, please, please, you get to just you get to just listen in that. And that, you know, the screams and the soft beat of the rain on the roof of your boat until it slowly all turns to gurgles. And then it's quiet. It's very nice. Yeah. You hear their fingernails out of the cracks of the wood on the side of the boat. Yeah. I.
01:29:07
Speaker
I watched some kind of animated series when I was a little kid and I have this memory of when the flood was like building up and there's just people like, ah, like help us. And but it was like such a positive meant like we were supposed to feel really good about what's happening. Like, look how God is getting rid of all the
01:29:28
Speaker
bad people and protecting, you know, those good people or, you know, I like to say they now or it, I don't think God minds. So, yeah, it's really it's really awful to think about that. And like, I don't know, I don't know much about that story. I need to like study, learn more about like what the hell that author was like thinking what it's supposed to mean. So I don't know.
01:29:58
Speaker
It is funny to the fact that like in some of those, especially those Old Testament stories, like there's like the way that they're taught, it's there's almost no effort put into like explaining why the people all die a horrible death. You know what? If we make it a flannel graph, no one will ask questions. It's like if this was a Disney Channel original movie, they're the types that would like elbow you when they walk past in the in the school hallway.
01:30:31
Speaker
If it was a teenage camp movie, they're the ones that steal your underwear when you go skinny dipping in the middle of the night. Oh, God, that is so evil. That's a sin right there. If there's one thing we can all agree upon, that is they're all O'Doyles. Oh, God. Wait, what movie was that from? Was it Billy Madison?
01:30:55
Speaker
Oh, I figured it's much older than that. Isn't there a much older one? Thinking of some teen comedy from like the 80s or something. About stealing clothes when you're in the water? No, like that name. Oh, Doyle. Doyle rules. I think of arrested. Was that arrested development? No, that's how I'm thinking of. That's Steve Holt. Doyle.
01:31:20
Speaker
I don't know. Okay. Oh, it was Billy Madison. Oh, it is. It's it's the internet says, but there's got I'm thinking of an older movie. I'll have to look up. Never mind. When you started kind of like coming full circle after doing an exploration of other religions and finding your way back into Christianity, was that like
01:31:44
Speaker
Was there any contention with your family around your previous explorations? Did family play a part in any conversations that you had at all?
Spiritual Journeys and Beliefs
01:32:00
Speaker
Not really, because like I said, my parents are just like the most lazy Christians possible.
01:32:07
Speaker
My dad's got more spiritual over the years in a bit more of a kooky way. Classic cat. His cat passed away and it was his best friend. I think that that really propelled him into a more spiritual life, which is really cool, but it's not like in the Christian way. Hopefully, in the next 10 years, he just turns on like
01:32:34
Speaker
Full-on new-age kind of shit when he grows hair back out and get some dreads or something No, um, my parents have always felt uncomfortable with like really sacrilegious like sentiments, but You know, I don't even think I necessarily told him this and I don't think it matters but if I told them like I you know, I've really changed spiritually like I have a problem with all of these
01:33:00
Speaker
doctrines and teachings. This is kind of how I am now. They would probably just be like, sounds good. Yeah. That's what you don't have any idea how many of our listeners are begging for that response from their parents. And it's like, God, it's one thing if your parents think you're living in sin and it's another thing when like you're you're they just like don't want anything to do with you anymore because
01:33:26
Speaker
you're queer now or something. Or you don't believe in God anymore or whatever it is. I'm really lucky in that sense. I mean, my parents and I have some serious contentions for sure. But religion was never one of them, thankfully.
01:33:44
Speaker
despite that super half-assed Christianity that I grew up with, really everything was done on my own, my own exploration, because I wasn't exploring when my mom was taking me to church. I was just like, this is fucking boring. So it took me getting older and being like, hey, wait a minute, I'm interested in like what all this is and what's happening and what, like, what does this all mean? What are we doing here? And then, you know, kind of went from there.
01:34:14
Speaker
Are there any moments that stick out to you like infamous or otherwise from like a sermon or a big altar call at Bible camp or anything like that? This is why psychic connections are real because I was thinking about that exact thing before you said that. Like that's literally what it came to my mind. I was like, oh, I want to share about that. And then you asked me about it.
01:34:40
Speaker
So how's that for cosmic energy feed? Yeah, exactly. So there was a lot of emotional spiritual experiences. But there was always like a doubt in the back of my mind that like,
01:34:59
Speaker
God was really part of it. But I think that there were some pretty profound like sermon moments and altar call moments. Because I think that, you know, how emotional people get and they have these transformations and stuff and they like, you know, walk out of church that night, never do heroin again, or something like that.
01:35:24
Speaker
I think that those spiritual experiences can be very legitimate. A lot of people are just forcing it and faking it. Even people in the Pentecostal Church, they're just mimicking other people. But then there are other people who are freaking out and dancing around and screaming who are actually just feeling an insane amount of love for
01:35:47
Speaker
everyone and themselves and and it's beautiful and transformative and so you you just got a lot of both and even in more like calm churches like mine was like there was still stuff like that and so I think really you just have the people who are having general transformative experiences and then people who aren't and the ones who do have them unfortunately when it happens at a church they end up associating their experience
01:36:17
Speaker
with the stuff that the church is teaching. So they think that the big salvation or transformation experience they had is intrinsically tied to the current or the interpretation of scripture that their church has. And that makes me really sad because it's almost like you're throwing away your experience or limiting it or just becoming dogmatic about it. And you defend the legitimacy of your
01:36:46
Speaker
Evangelical Christianity based on the fact that you had a genuine experience and you you knew it was God You knew in your heart. It was God. So if that's true, then I guess being gay is bad so That's what's something that's really rough, but I definitely had a few big experiences some of them I was just like sitting quiet in the in the pew and a couple of them were like going up to the altar or whatever but like
01:37:16
Speaker
There was experiences of I felt like I was flushing out trauma, experiences where I felt a lot of love, like I was being taken care of, being watched after, and I didn't have to be afraid, and stuff like that. Despite the pastor on the altar preaching some messed up stuff about gay people, it doesn't mean that I didn't have a genuine transformative experience.
01:37:46
Speaker
I love the connection that you made between people's genuine spiritual experiences being used then to confirm the beliefs of the environments in which they had those spiritual experiences.
01:38:04
Speaker
That is an incredibly accurate way to look at it and it's a really generous way to look at it too, because we're not playing a genuine experience that someone's having. Yeah, exactly. A lot of people, they see videos of Pentecostal church services and they get really freaked out by it, which is understandable and you probably should be in a lot of cases.
01:38:28
Speaker
But they sort of like throw all of these people like in a crazy box. And I just don't know if we should do that because, you know, even though they're all part of the same denomination and the same church, it doesn't mean there isn't like a huge diversity in people. And like when I was going to church, I had friends who were very spiritual and they go to church and they participate, but we'd talk about like scripture or certain doctrine and they kind of just be like,
01:38:57
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I don't really like that. I just kind of like do this. It works for me. And I was just like, ooh, you can't do that. You can't just like pick parts of Christianity and say you don't like them and throw them out. But now I realize because it's every culture, every era, you know, has a different relationship to Scripture and interprets it differently and applies it differently. Now I look at
01:39:24
Speaker
you know, what those people were telling me as like a really great thing. And it's not like the things they were throwing out are like, don't murder. You know, I don't feel like praying in that way. That doesn't feel great to me. And I don't know that verse doesn't sit right with me. So I'm not gonna, you know, like endorse it or something. I think that's awesome.
01:39:45
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know how we got there, but that's okay. I really appreciated this conversation in hearing the way that you've landed, where you've landed in the exploration this took to get you here. But I want to take a shift into some of your music with the time we have left because I
Musical Influences and Authenticity
01:40:05
Speaker
I'm curious as to, I mean, we talked a little bit about your interests in high school and new metal and finding your way into some other even heavier music, as you mentioned, Lou and Chris as well, as we now know as Norma Jean, things like that. I want to just talk a little bit about your trajectory into the music industry.
01:40:30
Speaker
Yeah, well, I was into like the first couple of corn albums and stuff around the new metal days, but you know, that's not
01:40:39
Speaker
It's not a big part of my identity at all. I really love the first two Korn records and the first Limp Bizkit records and the more weird and harsh and noisy new metal at the time, like Cold Chamber and the bands that were ripping off early Korn, but that was just kind of like a phase. I mean, I've been really nerdy and into music since as long as I can remember back, even three years old, I have these really blurry memories of rocking out to
01:41:09
Speaker
Russian Led Zeppelin in my living room with my parents or something, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, whatever. So obviously I was raised on the music that they like, like every kid is. And then when did I start venturing off into my own interests? I think it might be when my uncle got me like a dream theater CD in like the early 90s. And it kind of launched me into like Prague and then he got me into all these like Prague bands.
01:41:36
Speaker
But then I I discovered death metal at a really young age of late-night MTV and I was just like It just blew my mind. I couldn't believe it existed. I couldn't believe there was anything like that before So I got really into that and it's hard to be into that when you're like 10 and you don't have money and there's no like internet yet, and so I had to like
01:42:02
Speaker
you know, buy like Deicide Records and Morbid Angel Records or CDs from the CD store, like when I was out with my friends or another family member, I'd like sneak by it and bring it home and like hide it. Because it's like really like it, it crossed the line with my lazy, lazily Christian parents, because, you know, Deicide once upon the cross, it's just like bloody Jesus on the front of the cover. It's awful. Yeah, yeah.
01:42:29
Speaker
A lot of death metal went in that direction. Yeah, a friend of mine just abandoned. I've known my a couple of my friends have loved since we were in high school that I never once listened to a song of came up recently. And I've been doing this thing where if I've if I've.
01:42:49
Speaker
If a band comes up and I literally never can recall listening to a song of theirs or catching any of their musical ears, I've been going through their discographies. Oh, that's a good idea. Over time, but just for fun and not with every band, because that would be too many. But the ones I go, that's crazy that I've gone my entire life knowing my friends love these bands, but never listening to any music. So I did it with periphery not too long ago. But now I'm doing it with
01:43:18
Speaker
Hate eternal. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, good luck with that. Derek Roddy is such an amazing drummer. Yeah, they're one of my favorite guys. He's a robot. So their first album came out in 99. So I would have been 11 at that time. And I was just like,
01:43:34
Speaker
thinking about, because the recording is kind of trashy, not trashy, but you know, we just know what 90s recordings sound like versus. Yeah, especially death metal. There wasn't big production budget, so it has a recording quality that current death metal bands are actually trying to emulate, like the old school style death metal bands. They want their records to sound like those. It's kind of cool.
01:43:57
Speaker
But getting into that, I'm like, this is crazy. One, I can't believe, because I got a little bit more into Deathcore as a late teen and I still enjoy it. But like, you know, Deathcore gives you the reprieve of a breakdown or a chorus or something like that. Death Metal just goes hard for just the entire album. It just goes fucking hard. So you're just like, you're listening to Hate and Turtle. I'm like, this isn't something I would have gravitated towards, but
01:44:23
Speaker
even just now listen to it I'm like this fucking kills and it's fun to just do that deep dive it doesn't sometimes the entire song is just like blasts you know and the music's still intricate and everything it's not like super riffy like real technical guitar really riffy really technical yeah
01:44:43
Speaker
But that, yeah, Hate Eternal's drummer, I don't remember his name, just a row. It's like, it almost sounds like they've been programmed because he's just tearing it up so hard. Well, there's some studio magic. I mean, metal these days, unless you're trying to go for the old school thing, it's all doctored in the studio. I mean, I do this stuff every day. I record drums and guitar stuff and I'll line it up on the grid because I, you know, sucked at playing it. So that's just like a thing people have been doing since the 90s, since Pro Tools.
01:45:11
Speaker
seeing bands like these live, you realize like which ones can really do it. And I don't have any lack of respect or admiration for bands that like can't pull off their studio shit live because they're making art. And if you can't perform your art, who gives a shit because you made it and it sounds beautiful. But then there are the bands that like can do it live like Lorna Shore, that shit happens live.
01:45:36
Speaker
I've been arguing with some friends about it because they use triggers live and there's a huge debate about triggers. He's still playing it. That's what I'm saying. He's going so goddamn fast that you can't hit hard going that fast. So you have to use trigger. If you see their drummer live, he's just like tapping on stuff and very calm and everything. Even though his feet are going like they're like blurry because they're going so fast. But it's just very, you can't play that shit without being calm and using triggers. That's just how it is.
01:46:06
Speaker
and watching, like listening to Lorna, because I don't, they're a band where I'm like, I don't really pick up on like, you know, one song from the other too much. Like I don't listen to them like that, but I wanted to see them really bad. And hearing Lorna recorded and then seeing Will Ramos just perform live. God damn it. He's definitely one of the best metal vocalists in history. I just love that guy so much.
01:46:34
Speaker
Yeah, I like listen on interviews and like I just like watching him on the internet because he's such a nice man. Yeah, it's sick. But yeah, so anyway, that was a little tangential. But you you found your way into into death metal. And that was a little bridge too far for your parents.
01:46:53
Speaker
Yeah, but then I also I discovered like Electronica in the early and mid 90s through late night MTV as well. They had the show called Amp. They would play FX Twin, like Auditor and Fluke and Underworld and even Moby like back when he was like making really good music that he wasn't
01:47:15
Speaker
singing in before he like started doing pop stuff and I was really into that and I got really into trance trance was like a thing for me for a long time so like my phases they they they come and go and overlap like I might have been in my death metal and trance phase at the time and
01:47:38
Speaker
And then, um, in the late nineties, I might've been 97 or so I discovered email. Cause I had some, I was playing music with older kids who were like in their twenties at the time. And I was like, you know, like 14, 13, 15 or something. And, um, they would, uh, take me to shows. Um, and sometimes we play them and there was just like a cool like DIY, like.
01:48:04
Speaker
emo screamo type scene at the time in town. So I would see bands like that. And I was just like, it just had the sound to it that I was so drawn to. And then I started like, finding like zines and stuff from like, you know, old punk scenes that would do like reviews of
01:48:23
Speaker
you know, seven inch splits from random ass bands from Kansas or something. And then I would look for those CDs at tower records. Um, and so I ended up finding mineral and American football and early death cab back then. And that was like, I got super obsessed with that. And I started showing it to all my friends and all my friends were getting into these bands and then they start buying like shirts and it was great.
01:48:51
Speaker
Sorry, I know my camera's going slow right now. I'm not sure why it was staggering, but it looks fine. No, it's fine. Yeah, so it's like- I love that. I love the eclectic pull from so many things. Yeah, so now you can start to see why fire tool sounds the way it does because, you know, grew up on death metal, trance and electronic music and emo and screamo and
01:49:15
Speaker
prog metal and everything. I mean, that's all, that's all in the music amongst other things. Um, but I've also listened to a lot of just like rock, indie rock. Um, you know, like I just, I don't have like genre preferences as much as I do, like artist preferences. So, you know, like, I like rap, I like. Drum and bass and you know, it's just whatever, whatever's good. And a lot of it shows up in my music. Yeah.
01:49:44
Speaker
Yeah, we were talking about it a little bit before, but I mean, you certainly hear it. And one of the things that stuck out to me is like the sort of like black metal vocals that'll show up sometime too.
01:49:59
Speaker
Do you do the vocals? Do you have someone that you work with that do the vocals? No, I do all the vocals. I do almost everything. There's people that get credited for like, I feature sax players a lot and then my friend played bass on a song and gets vocalist once in a while, but it's pretty much all me.
01:50:20
Speaker
For some reason, I'm really drawn to the black metal vocal sound. So I end up doing it over a lot of music that is not black metal sounding whatsoever. Yeah. But then I also, you know, sing a little and I'm trying to get more like yelly vocals in my music like
01:50:39
Speaker
kind of like old school hardcore type vocals. Um, cause I just, I liked that stuff too. And it would be cool to hear that in my music. I feel like it would almost fit even less than the black metal vocals. So we'll see. But, um, yeah, that kind of the appeal, it fits less, but making it work in a way that, cause it does work. I mean, the black metal vocals, when they came in, it was like a little like,
01:51:02
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, that's unexpected. Right. But if you allow it and you don't get gatekeeper about it, it fucking works. And it really stands out. And obviously it stands out in a way that allows you to amass a big audience of people who are connecting with it.
01:51:24
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it takes a certain kind of brain to be able to tolerate my music, but I meet more people every day that like it and it's great. I don't think, my goal is never
01:51:37
Speaker
to mash up genres. What I do is I just make music and I make what I want to hear. So when I'm, you know, when I'm making something that sounds like 80s, like smooth jazz, drum machine, 4-4, no key changes type of jazz, which is fake jazz, barely jazz. And then, you know, I'm working on it and I'm just like, it's time for vocals. And it's just like, that's just what I
01:52:07
Speaker
I go to, I'm probably going to do the shrieking. And it's not because I'm thinking, God, it would be so funny or fun or interesting or anything like that to put those kind of vocals over that music. I don't really think about that. I more just think like, what would sound good here?
01:52:22
Speaker
And I think what sounds good to me is like really ridiculous to a lot of people, but it's very natural to me. I'm not trying to prove anything or blow anyone's minds or confuse people. It's fun to watch people confuse though. Don't get me wrong. It's just not my, my goal. I'm just making what I like and it ends up sounding like that.
01:52:40
Speaker
And I think it's clear because everyone, I feel like everyone knows, and I don't mean this in a negative sense to any artists that are using these tricks or tools. It's like, but there are gimmicks, right? There's musical gimmicks that work and they pull people in and you can do them well or you can do them poorly. And I've been in an argument the past 24 hours with some friends about every time I die.
01:53:07
Speaker
and how I don't like that band very much. I have no disrespect towards them and I think they're great. I know so many people who love them, so I feel like I'm the one missing out on something that I would like to be able to enjoy with everybody else. But when I throw it on, I go, it's not doing it for me.
01:53:28
Speaker
Uh, but they, they intentionally go in some very distinct directions that are a very clear choices to make people go, Oh, well, wasn't expecting that. Like, so I don't think gimmick is a bad thing. I think it gets a bad connotation, but I don't mean it in that sense. And there, maybe there's a better vocabulary word I could be using to describe these concepts, but I don't feel like, like, uh,
01:53:51
Speaker
a gimmick sometimes has like a bait and switch feel. We're like, yo, you're taking me here. And then you threw this on it, like a fake down or something like that. But like, I, I think, to your point in the way you're describing your music, I, it resonates because I don't, I didn't, it just feels like something authentic. It doesn't feel like you're being like,
01:54:14
Speaker
Even though it's unexpected, it's not like a gotcha moment. And you can see that throughout your music too, where it's just like, there are elements of it that stay. And you go, yeah, this is the artist I'm working with who's putting their art out to the world. I think that's what's the, I like the way you described it, that you're not trying to
01:54:40
Speaker
You're not trying to just like surprise anyone, even though sometimes they'll be surprised. And you're not trying to just like mash up genres, because it doesn't, doesn't feel like you just like, let's just do like, use an 808 to do a hokey EDM song and scream black metal vocals over. It's not like that at all. It's very intricate and well thought out. Yeah, thank you. I think that's
01:55:04
Speaker
I'm surprised that as many people as I've seen or heard people talk about a red that they can tell it's genuine and they don't think of it as like contrived or like I'm trying to be annoying or trying ironic or anything like that. Like I expected
01:55:26
Speaker
so many reviews like I don't know what's going on it's just like random shit random noises and just sounds really dumb and corny sometimes and then it does you know I just I thought that's what people were gonna say but then even people that like don't really like it are still like
01:55:59
Speaker
But they're like humble enough to be able to look at it from different angles and appreciate some stuff about it. So I think that is like a way bigger compliment than like, oh my God, I love your music. So not trying to like mock any of my fans. You're right. Right. Please keep telling me. I mean, I just did. I literally just did mock them. So it's yeah. Sorry, guys. I think it's I don't know. There's.
01:56:07
Speaker
I really appreciate this and that is expected but it's really great.
01:56:26
Speaker
Whether you're, it's almost like any art form at this point, because I mean, literally any art form is accessible now with the tools that we have available to us that there's just so many people putting things out and stuff. And it gets to a point where like, even if you have a good beat on what people want to hear and you can
01:56:54
Speaker
you know, you can put that together. I don't know. I mean, whether you're a musician or a comedian or an author or whatever, like eventually, if it doesn't ring true for you and it's not like an actual expression of like what you have in there, then it's it's going to
01:57:17
Speaker
fall short i think i think that's the case a lot of times i do think that people can get really skilled at manufacturing like music that people are going to respond to um and so i admire that talent and hopefully the people that are doing that don't necessarily want to express themselves in a more like on authentic way maybe they're they're authentic
01:57:45
Speaker
act is making music that gets people dancing. Even if the song isn't, you know, that great, like, I don't know that you probably know of YouTube or Cody Ko, right?
01:57:59
Speaker
Maybe you don't. I don't know. I live on YouTube. He's pretty huge. He does commentary. He's a comedian and stuff. He forces himself to learn these new skills sometimes. He taught himself to DJ and produce music.
01:58:17
Speaker
His songs are just so stupid, but they're fun, and they're funny, and they slap, and they have energy. I mean, DJs often make music just to get people going. They'll throw in their original-ness or whatever sometimes. I'm not talking about all DJs. It's just this certain type of DJ, I guess, who exists to get the people going.
01:58:42
Speaker
And I am that's like a skill in itself. I wouldn't be able to do that because every time I get people going in a song, I fuck it up. Like when I play shows like the certain part will come and people like look into like holy shit and start throwing down and like two and a half seconds later, I'm doing some like meditation piece or something.
01:59:02
Speaker
And so I really see people kind of just get jerked around by the music. Um, it's, it's pretty funny, but it's so funny. You just have to appreciate the fact that like people like making music can have several different aims. Yeah. And looking at it in one flat way, like I definitely feel like, uh, I had that stage.
01:59:29
Speaker
It as a annoying little scene boy where I was like, oh, yeah, like there's no riffs in here. Like guitar parts are so bland and basic and like I feel like I've heard that breakdown before. Like like there was going to be some like super unique expression of like Azulay dying.
01:59:50
Speaker
riff or something, you know, song. It's like, you know, sometimes songs that get formulaic and it's more about like how it makes you feel and how, you know, it's the soundtrack to a certain part of your day or what you're doing or, you know, it gets you hyped up before you go do something. Like sometimes that's more valuable than like legitimate, like
02:00:14
Speaker
deep artistic expression. Sure. But it's not what you want all the time. Some people make music specifically to be in the background. You know, ever since like, you know, Brian, you know, it was like ambient albums, I believe that's kind of where it started to become something where
02:00:29
Speaker
like more people would like listen like attentively to like ambient music but I mean the word ambient I'm pretty sure it just comes from the idea of like uh I don't know how to define it but now that it's now it's a genre not just a word in the dictionary and so um
02:00:47
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of things that are passive listening are supposed to be passive listening I listen to like in a serious way like I listen to a lot of 80s like stock music that like TV shows would use movies films or whatever just like generic like they're just called like jazz song 1 jazz song 2 there's like 60 of them on this like 6 LP set that you know, like, you know, broadcasting companies and stuff would use and film companies and stuff so
02:01:17
Speaker
Um, go ahead. This is just like, just like commercial jingles.
02:01:26
Speaker
Well, not so much like commercial jingles, but just like, just think of like some 80s teen like beach movie, like summer break type movie. And, you know, the romantic scenes would have like a silky smooth, smooth jazz kind of thing with some guitar solos and like a sax part. And then, you know, when everybody's having fun at the beach, it'll be something more upbeat, but it's still just very generic and
02:01:52
Speaker
2D sounding and like plastic and like goofy. Like stuff you find on random channels in a Grand Theft Auto soundtrack while driving. Um, sure. I never played that, but I, yeah, sure. Um, that was the thought that I was like, oh, right. Just random. It works. It's smooth. Yeah. It's like family matters mid episode. Carl's coming in from work and it's a saxophone piece. It's like,
02:02:19
Speaker
And then it fades out, but no, I want to hear the whole song. I listen to the whole song, you know? Yeah, I really love that sound. It's very nostalgic for me, just like Full House Core, you know, Urkel Core, like whatever it is.
02:02:36
Speaker
That's the genre that doesn't need to happen because we know if if Urkel core thing it would just be a bunch of people and Matching suspender outfits doing like crab core shit. Yeah, no no Urkel core. I'm more of a stuff on all right I shouldn't have said that cuz now like your listeners gonna hear it and be like wait a minute. Yeah, someone got an idea That evil seed
02:02:57
Speaker
Like right before the breakdown they cut that did I do that yes That's replacement for the ride symbol. Oh I feel like I should know cuz that's that's just too silly, but I know I kind of want to do that if you do it I'll support it. I'm not gonna joke it on it, but I won't I won't denigrate it I'll think about it
02:03:23
Speaker
Oh, alarm's going off on my phone. One second. Okay. Yeah, I was going to say that I really love that sound. It's very nostalgic for me. I grew up listening to, you know, I would always listen to the background music and be like, mom, dad, like, can we buy a CD of this? And they're like, that's not how this works. That's just music that's in a file drawer that the company like plays. Like, I don't know.
02:03:53
Speaker
And I like the the music that was on the weather channel in the early 90s I was always like where can I get this like can I kind of have this like they only play like one minute of it and then the broadcast is over I'm going crazy and now we can listen to all of those songs because they're all online and you can identify them all with like Shazam or whatever and
02:04:13
Speaker
So that's one big genre subject that we didn't touch on. We don't have to touch on it, but I'm just like smooth jazz is like huge for me and that also shows up in the music quite a bit. I used to listen to that in high school. I would listen to it. There was a smooth jazz station B98.7. I probably know like almost every song that you were listening to then at this point because I've become such a nerd for it. It is like weather channel music.
02:04:47
Speaker
That's what I thought the genre was when I was a kid. I didn't realize that there was any jazz or new age music. I didn't know what to call it. It just had the weather channel sound to it. So when I discovered these artists much later in life, like there's this resonance, like this alarm goes off and it's like I like time travel to like being a little kid home on a snow day from school. And that's why I have such a connection to it because it's like it was always there when I was a kid.
02:05:06
Speaker
No, it is. Yeah, absolutely.
02:05:15
Speaker
It's like playing a guitar under a weighted blanket. Yeah, absolutely. That's the town. That's a good one. We're only playing a keyboard. Probably more keyboards in those songs than guitars at the time because it was like late 80s, early 90s stuff, which I love. Love when bands have like three keyboard players and no guitarists. You know they're going to be such a sick band if that's the lineup. How do you feel about keytars?
02:05:45
Speaker
I love them. Have you heard Blind Equation? No. Well, they're a band that just got signed to Prosthetic Records. And they're, they kind of dabble and like, cyber grind, like, maybe a little deathcore, but maybe it's more like metalcore. But they have a drummer, a vocalist, and a keytar player.
02:06:06
Speaker
And it, you know, and they do breakdowns and shit, but no guitar. It's just like, beep, beep, beep, beep. I hope they don't hear this because that was shitty. They're like, no, that's exactly what we're talking about. I thought you liked us, but yeah. Blind equation. Is that what you said? I hear your, I hear blind equation and I raise you show bread. Okay. Oh, I've, I've been.
02:06:33
Speaker
Yeah, all the way back to their first album. I saw them when they were touring on their first album. I played shows with them several times in old bands. We shared the stage. Oh, no way. Dang. I even played an acoustic show with Josh from that band. He was touring like promoting a book that he wrote.
02:06:52
Speaker
Recently is it though not recently because he went he's a pretty like Fundy conservative dude now. He just wrote a book. Oh, hey what I think it's John I think it's Josh and he wrote a book about like the dangers of like not really the dangers but the Basically just an anti-progressive even
02:07:12
Speaker
It's like Death to Deconstruction is the name of the book or something like that. Oh, God. That's so strange. He sounds real cool. Okay, I'm thinking of Josh dies. I don't know if that's his real last name, but that's what he went by. And it looks like he's a pastor right now, but I could have sworn. Yep, Josh dies. Death to Deconstruction, reclaiming faithfulness as an act of rebellion, which is the worst title.
02:07:34
Speaker
Oh no, I thought that he was kind of getting out of that stuff and writing a book about it. I never read it, but I thought that's kind of what the book was about, but I guess not. He doubled down because it's like a magazine. A magazine was a channel. I loved them. I loved the first album and I loved that one too and it was a
02:07:55
Speaker
I don't know if it holds up anymore. I'll have to try. They don't hold up for me. The first and last time I saw them was at Purple Door in Pennsylvania, and that's when they were still wearing all the matching clothes. Yeah, the red pants. I've been to a couple Purple Doors. Oh, nice. Those are a good time. Purple Door is a life-changing experience for me as a teenager. Absolutely. Is there any Christian albums from back in the day that you still throw on occasionally?
02:08:25
Speaker
I mean, I listen to Bless the Martyr Kiss the Child all the time still. I know every note, every word, everything from that album. I have it memorized. I could just play drums through it right now. So that one's big for me. I haven't listened to a lot of old Seyo recently, but really like that stuff. I really like X-Toll and I still listen to them. Yeah, X-Toll fucking rules. My buddy went to First Fest last year. Peter Espoval, we had him on the podcast.
02:08:55
Speaker
I also listened to some pretty worshipy stuff like Delirious at the time because they came out with that Mesomorphous album that sounded kind of like, sometimes they sounded like Radiohead. I actually really think that's a really cool kind of unique album. But I think it's one of those things where it's like option paralysis because there are so many albums from then that I really like and now I can't think of any.
02:09:24
Speaker
option paralysis. My youth era in church was very music centered. My pastor loved music. He had long hair. He liked heavy music and everything. So cool Christian bands were always around and there were churches in the area that would host bands when they'd come. In figure four, he is legendary because they were quasi-Christian at first too.
02:09:52
Speaker
They would always do big shows and they would get secular bands that were wholesome to play as well. But yeah, lots and lots of music in the Christian world for me, which is something I'm really thankful about because regardless of some of the crappy lyrics, I mean, there's great music there. Absolutely.
02:10:17
Speaker
Man, it's been great talk, the angel. Thanks for coming on. It's a lot of fun. So where's the, you mentioned your website earlier. What, where's your, what's your website again?
02:10:28
Speaker
Um, it is angel mark Lloyd calm. Um, but it's just like basically like a bio and like links to all the stuff I do. Um, my mixing and mastering business is called angel hair audio. So there's a.com for that. Um, firetools.com actually exists too. I know it's weird. I'm naming all these.coms like nobody gives the websites anymore, but
02:10:53
Speaker
Everyone goes to Instagram. I like leading people to websites because then they can choose whatever mode of contacting me or following me they want. So websites of the original link tree.
02:11:06
Speaker
They really are and I, I love them and I miss them. And, um, yeah, I used to make websites when I was in middle school in the, in the nineties. I was a HTML five expert, which is very, very, very ancient at this point. You must've had a really sick Myspace then. Oh my God. Yeah. I had the crazy CSS overlays and.
02:11:31
Speaker
Yeah. When they started letting you put a song on your profile, that was the best. What better way to force your identity out there? I mean, yeah. And so show people how cool you are. Yeah. You're like you're all like old poppy friends, you know, who just who you might have lost connection with. But you still had that connection on myspace goes to your page and they get blasted with metal and they go, I didn't realize
02:11:57
Speaker
He was this kind of a person. You're like, yeah, I'm pretty cool. That's why you're not in my top eight. Yeah. I converted a lot of people to metal fans, emo fans, electronic music fans when I was that young. Pioneer. It was necessary. People like you were pathfinders for people like me. Well, you're welcome. All right, everybody. Well, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.