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Article published Nov 9, 2007 SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD: Glossary splits the difference between spirituality, religion on new album
By Steve Wildsmith of The Daily Times Staff
A great philosopher — Jimmy Buffett, perhaps — once said that there’s a fine line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the South, according to Glossary singer and songwriter Joey Kneiser.
Only in the South can folks make it home from a night of drinking and fighting and still find the fortitude to get up and go to church the next morning. Only in the South can country groups pay homage to the Lord and the bottle, both within the same song.
Only in the South can a band like Glossary make such a record as “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” its most recent album. Because it’s the South, and that dichotomy between spirituality and religion and the things that offer hope and salvation when the last drop of whiskey is drained and the still has run dry, that drives the record and the themes within.
“Religion has always been a subject matter with me, but it was a lot more on my mind on this record,” Kneiser told The Daily Times this week. “Religion and the idea of family — I’m kind of trying to understand both kinds of conventions, and the overall thing I wanted the record to have a sense of is that even though you live in the United States and there are all of these specific ideologies that you can fall into, you have the freedom to go and discover what you want and be what you want.
“What I wanted to come across is that you should take advantage of that to be who you are and not buy into anything. You shouldn’t buy into it, but you shouldn’t turn away from it, either. You should be open to it all — hardcore Christianity, Islam, whatever. You have the freedom to think and be who you want to be; you can design yourself, and you should take advantage of that.”
Glossary got its start in the college town of Murfreesboro, a collection of players that brought their respective experiences to the table. Kneiser rose to the forefront as the guiding light of the band, the songwriter whose existential musings on love, liquor and life in the South helped define the band’s sound.
Technically, it can be described as Southern rock — but that’s overly simplistic, a term designated to any sort of rock ‘n’ roll that’s painted by a songwriter’s brush and has more meat to it than what typically gets played on the radio. “The Better Angels of Our Nature” is the band’s fifth full-length album, following on the heels of “How We Handle Our Midnights,” released in 2003, and last year’s “For What I Don’t Become,” which wound up as a Daily Times Weekend pick for one of the best albums of 2006.
With “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” Kneiser said, the band has completed a trilogy that’s linked by a thread of spirituality woven back through “Don’t Become” and “Midnights.”
“We wrote the last three records consecutively, almost like one big body of work — ‘How We Handle Our Midnights’ is like Friday night, ‘For What I Don’t Become’ is like Saturday morning and ‘Better Angels’ is Sunday morning,” he said. “For ‘Better Angels,’ we wanted to make a record that was more positive than ‘For What I Don’t Become.’ That was kind of the gist — to take these little stories that were all kind of moral and uplifting and put them together.
“‘For What I Don’t Become’ was very much more introspective, and to write those songs, you basically have to sulk in your own misery. That’s not the most fun thing to be doing all the time. It’s really hard on you to write songs like that, because you’re constantly deconstructing yourself all the time. For this record, we still did that, but at the same time, I was trying to write about things that were much bigger than myself, things that were more universal than just me living down here in a little town in the South.”
With male-female vocal harmonies, some stellar guitar playing and an anthemic sense of purpose, Glossary succeeds in laying down a dominant theme on “Better Angels” — hope. It’s Americana in a vein that’s at once comfortingly familiar but also surprisingly unique — think Whiskeytown without Ryan Adams’ pretension, or Lucero without the melancholy. “The Better Angels of Our Nature” is stepping out of the darkened bar at 6 a.m. and getting hit in the face by the first rays of sunrise, only to smile in surprise because you don’t feel so damn bad after all and that maybe, just maybe, you’ll have a good day.
“I think ‘Better Angels’ does a pretty good job of trying to capture some of that stuff — the idea of having some kind of individuality,” Kneiser said. “We come from a sort of indie rock kind of background and a liberal-minded college culture, and to most of the kids we play with, religion and spirituality are almost like dirty words. Those things aren’t hip.”
The two have always been on Kneiser’s mind, at least since he was introduced to the church in his late teens. He wasn’t raised there, but he went through a phase, he said, where he attended regularly. Over time, he drifted away but never lost touch with his spiritual nature and the philosophical ruminations that such an existence seems to foster.
“I consider myself an extremely spiritual person, and I know there’s a lot of things outside of our realm of experience,” he said. “The human body is pretty primitive — we can only experience life through what we can see, touch, taste, smell and hear, but we all know that there’s a lot more going on around us. You can’t deny there’s not a spiritual world, and even if you don’t consider yourself a Christian, if you’re from the South, you think like one.
“That’s something that’s hard to get away from, and when you’re younger, you may try to run from that. But as you get older, you realize those values — Southern, religious, whatever you want to call it — are good things. Redemption, the belief in mercy — those are good things, and I’ve always been intrigued by the Southern duality of religion and the darker side of human nature. I’ve always been intrigued by what you can get away with.
“And really, when it comes down to it, there’s nothing we can do but adapt and change and realize we’re always moving forward because we’re in a constant state of becoming and moving,” he added. “Every day is a chance to change, to learn, to be a better person.”