The Gospel According to Sixpence None the Richer
How did a Christian pop band from Central Texas get to the top of the charts? Pray, tell.
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By 1996 the band had completed a second album, This Beautiful Mess, and Sixpence was a full-time job. Nash and Slocum relocated to Nashville, but two weeks after they got there, R.E.X. laid off most of its employees. The company went bankrupt soon afterward, only to be taken over by another label, Platinum. “This company was horrible,” Slocum says. “We knew that if we fulfilled the deal, they’d just run our career into the ground.” A legal struggle followed, during which time Slocum made his living as a cellist on other people’s recordings, including Natalie Imbruglia’s “Smoke.”
Meanwhile, Steve Taylor, a friend of the band’s and a fellow artist on the Christian-music scene, was planning to start his own label, Squint, with seed money from Gaylord Entertainment, the Tennessee conglomerate that used to own the Nashville Network. The band finally broke free of Platinum (the company still owns the rights to Sixpence’s first two records) and signed with Squint, learning hard lessons in the process. “The Christian-music industry is just like any other business,” Slocum says. “And it’s hard to get out once you’re in it. It ended up being really confining for us.” Says Nash: “When somebody hears you’re a Christian band, they think they already know what you sound like.”
While Nash and Slocum still value the fans who have been with them since they started out, the genre they’re associated with has changed. Since the early eighties, when everybody from cutie-pie songstress Amy Grant to light-metal band Stryper first gained attention, Christian pop music (songs with spiritual content and mainstream musical ideas that bear little or no aesthetic relationship to gospel or hymns) had become fairly commonplace, giving rise to a specialized network of fans, labels, radio stations, and touring venues. “We would play Christian colleges, or we’d come in to a church and play for a youth group,” Nash says. “It’d be like, ‘Okay, kids, here’s a band, and then we’re going to have some pizza.’ Those markets started to grow and grow, but some churches were still completely offended by it. I’ve had people berate me: ‘You say you are Christians, but you’re playing your guitars so loud you can’t hear the words!’”
Sixpence still managed to nab a 1998 Grammy nomination for best rock-gospel album. But these days, the group gets criticism from the Christian scene for other reasons, as the longtime faithful debate the appropriateness of its current career moves. After all, Dawson’s Creek features teen sex, adultery, and a sympathetic portrayal of gay people. “We have excellent fans who are very passionate about us, one way or the other,” Nash deadpans. The band also gets razzed for its decision to join the Lilith Fair. Biblically speaking, Lilith is not considered a positive role model—“She ditched Adam or something,” Slocum cracks—which, of course, is exactly why Sarah McLachlan gave the tour that name in the first place.
Nash has no patience for the complaints. “It’s embarrassing to me,” she says. “It gives Christianity such a bad connotation.” It’s the reason Slocum prefers to call himself a “follower of Christ’s teachings”: “Born-again” comes with so much baggage. He cites as one of his inspirations Sam Phillips, the wife of Fort Worth’s own T-Bone Burnett, who made a similar transition to secular artistry. Then there’s a certain Irish band that was never really stereotyped as religious, despite being faith-oriented from the start. “U2 was able to be relevant musically, politically, and spiritually all at the same time,” Slocum says admiringly.
SECULAR OR HOLY, IT’S OBVIOUS THAT controversy has a way of finding Sixpence. There’s even a story behind “There She Goes.” Originally an early-nineties hit for the Liverpool band the La’s, the chirpy, innocuous song is not about a lady love but rather a different kind of lady: heroin. It’s fairly easy to decode lyrics like “There she goes again, racing through my brain…pulsing through my vein,” but Sixpence has simply looked the other way. “We’re interpreting it as a love song,” Slocum offered when first confronted on the subject in the British weekly music paper Melody Maker.
Whatever its subject matter, “There She Goes” is very much a pop song, bathed in cheer and catchiness the same way “Kiss Me” has an aura of fairy dust and starlight. The problem is that if you know Sixpence None the Richer only from its hits, you don’t really know it. “It’s hard when what you’re famous for doesn’t really give the whole picture,” Slocum says. Yes, he loves the Beatles and the ornate pop of XTC, and he’s never denied obvious influences like the Smiths and the Sundays. But overall his songwriting tends to wander into darker, more poetic places. He can be a bit of a miserabilist—“This is my forty-fifth depressing tune,” the opening line of “Anything” announces. He references Dylan Thomas (the inspiration for “Kiss Me”) and Pablo Neruda (“Puedo Escribir”). And while he contemplates religion, he does it in a fairly primal manner, with the appropriate amount of angst, suffering, and burning questions.
The record’s musical accomplishments are also significant. Once again Slocum plays most of the instruments, and he also crafted the heavy-duty string arrangements, which have been mentioned by one critic in the same breath as the work of the great Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks. Nash’s voice, meanwhile, is a thing of guttural beauty ranging from plainspoken warmth to a fluttering level of abstraction that suggests Van Morrison or Kate Bush.
As it happens, Sixpence’s personal demeanor can be just as multifarious as its aesthetic. The sweet-as-can-be Nash, for instance, is often cutting, brash, and funny, whether recalling a shared bill with one of those boy bands—“I think there’s a ‘Jeremy’ in every one,” she jokes—or going on the Internet to anonymously strike back at her critics. And that Melody Maker interview found her discussing her married life in a forthright manner. “I have no idea,” she was quoted as saying, “how my husband can get pubic hair under the [toilet] rim.” (“I didn’t say the p-word!” she now protests. “It was embellished. I just said ‘hairs.’”)
Nash’s husband, Mark, is a 28-year-old musician and producer from Minnesota who took a turn as Sixpence’s drummer when Baker briefly left the band. It was nice for husband and wife to be together, but it soon became clear that neither the band nor the marriage would ultimately benefit from the arrangement. “It was obvious it would have been a lot of pressure, us both being on the road,” she says. “It brings on all kinds of conflict—not between us, but if there was ever conflict between him and the rest of the band, I’d kill them and go home with him.”
Needless to say, Nash has a vision of the future that doesn’t include pop stardom. Her own family, and possibly college, are still on the horizon. “All of us in Sixpence definitely see ourselves having a different kind of life in ten years,” she says. “We just want to keep making music together. I don’t know for how long. It depends on whether we get tired out or if nobody wants to hear us anymore. But we never really cared about that before, so I think we’ll be okay if there’s never another ‘Kiss Me.’”
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