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The Stories Behind the Songs on This Single
Sat., Apr. 8. 2023 10:34am EDT
J. Jackson, lead singer and lyricist for ApologetiX here again.
Here are the stories behind the songs on our seventh single of 2023:
EVERY DAY ABOUT YOU
"Every Day About You" has a unique origin; it was originally intended for an entirely different song. On March 5, 2005, I started working on a parody of "I Hate Everything About You" by Three Days Grace. I was going to call our version "I Pray About Every Day About You" but never finished it, although we eventually covered another tune by that group.
Fifteen and half years later to the day, on September 5, 2020, I was thinking about spoofing "Everything About You" by Ugly Kid Joe when I realized it had the identical titular lyric line in the chorus: "I hate everything about you." Even though none of the other words were the same as Three Days Grace's and the music was very different, "I pray every day about you" still worked.
It's based on a revolutionary command Jesus gave in Matthew 5:44: "But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you ..."
As the late great ApologetiX drummer Keith Harrold used to say, "Talk about me how you please; I'll talk about you on my knees." He was full of pithy sayings like that. I first met him in the spring of '92, which just happens to be when Ugly Kid Joe's "Everything About You" was on the pop chart. It wound up peaking at #9 for four weeks in May.
Romans 12:14-21 contains a number of statements that also fit in with the mindset of "Every Day About You," beginning with "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse" and ending with "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
EVERYBODY CAN COME TO CHRIST
This basic premise of this parody is that, no matter how many human beings are alive on this planet at any given time, two basic truths apply: 1. "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23) and 2. "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Romans 10:13, Acts 2:21, Joel 2:32).
I wrote it (aside from the ad-lib vocals throughout) in March 2011 as a potential song for our Wise Up and Rock album, and I finally recorded my lead vocals on the last day of March 2023, a dozen years later. When I started writing "Everybody Can Come to Christ," we'd recently released our 29th CD; when I finished singing it, we were a month or so away from releasing our 69th.
That wasn't the only number that grew in the interim ... so did the world's population. Back in 2011, my opening line was "In seven billion lives," a number officially reached later that year. By the time we recorded this parody, I had to update that line to "Inside eight billion lives," a number expected to be reached later in 2023.
Speaking of '23, finding out the "bad news" of Romans 3:23 was actually encouraging to me. As I used to tell audiences at our concerts, "I always knew I was a sinner; I just didn't know all the rest of you were, too." It made it easier for me to accept the "good news" of Romans 3:24, just one verse later: "and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus."
It's comforting when you realize there's a level playing field, you know?
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