Me and You — Album Reflection

After almost four years, I released another album on May 17, 2024. If you enjoy the music I’ve released, I am genuinely sorry that it has taken me so long (though I am hoping to be able to release more before the end of the year).

This is the second-longest period of time I’ve gone since releasing music. I released L.I.L.F.Y.T.R. in 2012, “Teach Me Some Respect” in 2017, Welcome to da Faith in 2017, and “Call Me Crazy” in 2019. Then three projects followed in 2020: “Live by Faith,” “What It Means,” and 2020 Vision. And now, in 2024: Me and You.

This project started as a result of wanting to rework some of my earlier music. L.I.L.F.Y.T.R.‘s quality is very beginner status–though infinitely better than To Whom it May Concern (2010; unreleased), which was recorded on a video camera in my car and ripped from there. “Stick Together” originated on To Whom it May Concern, and I often reference the chorus, so I needed to reproduce it and release it for real. “Me and You” was written on a rainy day shortly after receiving a depressing update about my childhood best friend.

For someone who proclaims, “Live in Love, find your true reward,” working on this project convicted me. I’d been a pretty lousy friend (at least toward him) after getting serious about Christianity in 2010. As such, there are five things I’d like to point out as it relates to this album.

Theological growth

First, if you check out the album, you’ll notice that there are two versions of “Find Yourself.” I first wrote this song for my childhood best friend in February of 2009 shortly after turning seventeen (“Original Lyrics”). After recommitting myself to Jesus in 2010 and falling under the influence of Calvinistic teaching, I decided it was unbiblical to imply that Jesus died for any specific person (due to the “limited atonement” perspective that “Jesus only died for the elect”). Since I couldn’t know who was elect, I decided I couldn’t know if Jesus died for someone. So I changed the lyrics from “He sent him to die on a cross / for you, it’s true” to “He sent him to die on a cross / was slew, it’s true.” As I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with the theological/biblical validity of this sort of theology (not to mention the lack of love it promotes), I decided I wanted to release the original lyrics.

Which version do you prefer?

Love does

In “Me and You,” I wrote the following line, repeated in each hook:

I’m sorry for preaching when I should have just prayed

My prayer life has always been a struggle. It was especially a struggle back in 2010 when I first wrote “Find Yourself,” which contained the line: “unless you change all I can do is pray.” I’ll come back to this idea below, but the point stands that even though I told my friend all I could do was pray for him, I continued to send letter after letter preaching at him to change.

Prayer gives control to God; preaching too often takes matters into our own hands, relying on our own rhetoric to change people. But too often, it succeeds only in pushing people away. I should have trusted God more; I should have prayed for my friend more. I should have loved him in deed rather than just word.

And as I think about this, it goes for so much more than just my relationship with my friend. I should have prayed instead of preaching. How much better would the Church as a whole be if we prayed ten times more than we preached?

Assurance of salvation

Another line that might cause people pause is my declaration about baptism:

It was your baptism at church that inspired me too
The water made you God’s child and declared us bros

Growing up in heavily Baptist circles, baptism was always merely a picture of death and resurrection with Christ, “the public profession of an inward change.”¹ However, as I’ve discussed at several places on this blog, there is a lot more to baptism than this simplistic understanding:

• What is Baptism?
• The Sacraments, Unity, and Jesus’ Will

As such, my point with this line, was to let my friend know that Baptism declared him God’s child, and much like the Prodigal Son in Luke 15, all he needs to do is return to his Father and he will be embraced with open arms. He doesn’t need to clean himself up first; he just needs to turn his gaze back home. As Flame² explains:

Explicit lyrics?

If you search for this album, you might have noticed it labelled as explicit. If you’re a Spotify listener, you might have seen the “E” for explicit on the song “Me and You.” If you’ve followed my music for years, you might remember a time when multiple songs were incorrectly labelled this way.

However, this time, the label is accurate. But only for the song “Me and You.” There are no explicit lyrics on the rest of the album. And “Me and You” only contains one explicit word.

If this costs me listens, I’ll get over it,³ but I wanted to take a moment to explain why I made this decision on this song. First, and most importantly, my use of the word “sh#t” is supposed to echo Paul’s words in Philippians 3:8 — “Because of Him I have suffered the loss of all things and consider them filth [dung, garbage, excrement],⁴ so that I may gain Christ.”

What do I consider filth?

• My self-righteous insinuating that I was better than my friend for not cursing, even though he knew that I used to
• The theology that teaches people to cut off all their relationships with non-Christians

Neither of these filthy ideas are Christian. Self-righteousness is what nailed Jesus to the cross (Mark 3:1-6), and isolating oneself from non-Christian relationships is exactly the opposite of Jesus’ example (Mark 2:13-17). In this context, the use of “sh#t” could actually constitute “giving grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29). It could break people of damning self-righteousness, and it could encourage relationships with those who need Jesus the most.

Try your hand at lyricism

Finally, the instrumentals are a fun addition and throwback to the days when my friend and I would find instrumentals and experiment with rap together. I included these for my friend to add a verse, or for you to try your hand at writing some tracks yourself.

Tag me @lilfytr if you post anything with these instrumentals on social media.

Conclusion

It was great getting back into music production for this album. Laying down instrumentals, writing lyrics, recording, and mixing and mastering are hobbies that bring much peace and joy to my soul.

The idea of friendship has been hijacked by Facebook, and Christians need to take it back. We need to be friends in more than title. We need to love one another like Jesus loved us (1 John 3:16). He did this even when we weren’t lovable, even when we did things that went against popular piety — and he still loves us — even when we demonstrate that we still aren’t perfect.

But my question for you today: Who do you need to reach out to who you haven’t talked to in years? Where is that friend who you let fall through the cracks when life became increasingly busy and frantic?

Listen to my album and be inspired to reach out to an old friend today! Click here or here to find it on your preferred streaming service!

In this with you!

Thanks for reading.

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Notes

1. “You’re simply not going to find not one Church Father that made the confession / That what baptism really is / An outward sign of an inward expression / It’s not in the Bible and scripture don’t teach it / American pulpits / Most people preach it” (Flame, “The Patristics,” Word and Water [Saint Louis, MO: Extra Nos Music, 2022], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B66G6PFTnVk). ↩︎
2. Flame, “Small Catechism 3,” Word and Water (Saint Louis, MO: Extra Nos Music, 2022) ↩︎
3. Out of 61 songs released to date, I’ve only used one swear word in one place in one song. ↩︎
4. BDAG cites several ancient sources in which the word σκύβαλον refers to human excrement, and even cites one author who translates it as “crap” in order “to convey the crudity of the Greek” (William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 932). ↩︎