Eager Seas - Mine As Well (2018) Album • Page 3

Well that's two old Tooth and Nail bands that have been ruined for me in the past few weeks. Children 18:3 is the other one.

 

hahahaha fuck this asshole

here's a better band currently known as Lakes you should listen to

 

Dare I ask what the latter have said/done…?!

 

Ahhh classic.

American Christian patriotism is such a different world to my experience in a different country. That people think this kind of thing is crazy.

 

the hostetters have been uber-conservative for a long time. small-town midwest to a T.

 

I couldn’t help myself and went even further back. After the insurrection he started posting conspiracies that it was “faked”. Went further back to the election….and he voted for Kanye.

A month later he tweeted this stupid thread:

This dude fell down a fucking hole.

 

If he’s been that vocal about his beliefs for that long, I have to imagine Tooth & Nail, and Anberlin, and Relient K, probably already know he’s like this.

 

Absolutely. Not…real sure how to feel about all that.

 

Yeah I feel like these bands need to explain themselves. Anberlin is particularly surprising.

 

I wouldn’t hold your breath for that, but agreed it’s definitely weird. This mentality is very common among devout Christian men so there’s a higher than average chance someone in either group buys into it.

 

fuck, i was stoked for this album but now fuck no

 

Pretty amazing how someone can tank themselves like that so quickly

 

It’s funny when people talk about brainwashing when the language they use show that it’s them who have been brainwashed.

Going to give Anberlin & Relient K the benefit of the doubt, because like the rest of us there’s no guarantee that someone (might not even have been him) reached out and asked them to take part with the record.

However, I am surprised that a record label wouldn’t do a background check. This one wasn’t even a hard job. Just scroll for two flipping minutes.

 

Yeah, you know, on that note, there was one other thing I noticed yesterday when I was busily scrolling through his feed. Some time after whatever this so-called “spiritual awakening”/conservative scrubbing took place in his personal life, his posts affected this overly positive tone (whilst, as you said, denoted this sinister undertone) which included posts like this one:

and this blissfully unaware little gem:

And so far, that’s the overly upbeat tone he seems to be swinging for with the new songs he’s released with the newly reformed Watashi Wa. It’s a strange 180 from the guy who once wrote some truly beautiful, slow, moody, atmospheric music out of the pain in his life post-divorce (essentially the entirety of Fire Ahead comes to mind). Even go as far back as his first solo venture as Eager Seas (before the label made him change the name back to Watashi Wa) when he was alone after his band’s breakup. He was struggling through the pain of it and wrote some wonderful songs like “Ten Years and Separating States”, “Broken Man”, “2:57”, and the mournful/reaffirming closer, which I always loved, “Something to Say”.

And so to see that above Twitter post and the ensuing posts thereafter…man, I don’t know. Something happened to this guy and it’s not the positive event he claims it to be.

 

as someone who still runs in church/Christian circles, that over the top positivity seems to be a common thread among this far-right, conspiracy-minded crowd. i think they think of it like “smilin’ cause the haters can’t touch me!” but it just comes across as delusional and reeks of condescension and passive aggression.

 

The "I voted for Bernie but then I saw the light" crowd is so fucking exhausting

 

I believe it’s willful ignorance disguised as positivity. As in, “the people that are angry about racism/sexism/etc and look at it objectively are just negative people. I choose to ignore/not care/not believe in those things so I’m always happy!”

 

So not to continuously beat a dead horse but, having gone through deconstruction over a number of years now, I have a curiosity about how people trap themselves in this type of mindset and I can’t help but want to understand the pitfalls that led to it. I discovered this Christian podcast Seth did last month that was…illuminating to say the least. About 34 minutes in he discusses his previous marriage during the Eager Seas/Lakes period, explaining that his then wife did not want him touring anymore and it caused a lot of friction. They had two daughters together and she wanted him home. Their differences eventually became irreconcilable. That’s what both The Agreement and Fire Ahead albums were about. He says that during that period of time he had a very different outlook on the world than he does now both personally and religiously…which suggests to me a much more liberal one.

Then around 41 minutes in they ask him how the last two years during the pandemic have been for him and that’s where it gets very obvious that the big shift happened. He says that things got very hard and he had a “spiritual awakening” during the pandemic and that “God woke me up”. He got remarried to someone else and decided that, in light of his “renewed” spirituality, he needed to start taking a stand for his faith and be a leader in his home to his daughters…and this is the way he chose to do it. He says his ex-wife does not agree with his religious beliefs (part of what led to their initial separation) or his views on the pandemic and that it caused a deep divide in his own family and the way their daughters are being raised separately amidst everything going on in the world.

Given the general state of things and what we’ve seen on his Twitter…I think we all know what that looks and feels like. The interviewers here suggest that Christian voices are being “silenced” and Seth nods along and says that that was something he began to feel as well. If you go back through his Twitter, it seems like you can’t go any further than early 2020 so it would appear he has curated this new persona exactly as he describes in the podcast. He then says pretty much what we all feared about those song titles in that a lot of this album will in fact be his thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about the pandemic.

It all just made me very sad.

https://www.facebook.com/the47podcast/videos/4289786957787371/

 

What happened to the thread from a few days ago about new Watashi Wa songs?

 

I share that same curiosity so thanks for this.

 

probly demonic forces.

 

Deleted, in response to his idiocy coming to light. I’m glad Jason is a rational person who wants no part of promoting in any way someone who holds such dangerous beliefs. Seth’s brand of Christianity is literally dangerous to the mental and physical well being of others. Say what you will about the faith, and obviously there have always been flaws, but I don’t recall bands like MxPx (when they were still believers) being so willfully ignorant. I suppose the jury is now out on Relient K. Jon Foreman of Switchfoot still seems like a genuinely good person.

 

Outside of them appearing on this, I have no real reason to think RK cosigns any of the trash views. (Really hope that’s the case, anyway)

 

In terms of Relient K, I follow Matt Hoopes and his wife Laura on Instagram and I’m pretty certain they’re actively opposed to this kind of thinking.