After the Flood

"First was the fall / Bought by the death / Glory stands waiting / With baited breath / I'm always missing my mark."
—from "After the Flood"

The Clumsy Lovers are one of the best bands you've likely never heard of. Wildly popular in their home base of Vancouver and throughout the Pacific Northwest, the Clumsys might be on the verge of breaking at least a little bit bigger.

They had been putting put out a CD per year independently, but recently signed with Nettwerk (Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies) for their latest project, After the Flood. So it might not be long before they're one of the best bands you have heard of. (A potential '05 tour with labelmates BNL would be a big boost to that end.)

The Clumsy Lovers formed in the early 1990s when bass player and principal songwriter Chris Jonat and some friends started jamming in a Vancouver basement. They settled into a sound they accurately call "raging bluegrass Celtic rock," comparable to The Chieftains, The Pogues, or Christian music's Ceili Rain.

Their official bio talks about the band's slow rise as "a story of happy accidents," but those "accidents" are the result of talent, creative songwriting, hard work, and relentless touring—up to three hundred shows a year! They put on one of the most enjoyable live shows I've ever seen.

All the band members are Christians—at various stages of the faith journey—but they don't call themselves a "Christian band." Many of their tunes have spiritual themes—including some on After the Flood—and they've covered a number of songs Christians embrace, like U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name," Randy Stonehill's "Shut De Do," Woody Guthrie's "Jesus Christ," and traditional favorites like "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" and "Amazing Grace."

In an e-mail to Christian Music Today, Jonat describes his band's faith like this: "We cover the spectrum from the person who is Christian more in the sense of that's how they were raised and it's sort of their default belief system, to the person who fully intends to become a Catholic priest in the not-too-distant future, and points in between."

Jonat, the younger brother of singer/songwriter Carolyn Arends, describes his own faith as "a work in progress, and I'm sometimes frustrated with the pace of that work. But I believe we are fallen, I believe we need to turn to God . . . and I believe being fallen makes it real hard to turn to God. Most of the songs on After the Flood are, to varying degrees, about those things. That wasn't intentional, so maybe it was my faith manifesting itself."

After the Flood isn't awash in "Jesus lyrics," but includes the type of musings you'd expect from anyone "frustrated with the pace" of the journey. The rousing opener, "Better Me," captures that feeling, describing someone who knows he's fallen and yet on the road to redemption: "Well I'm angry as hell and I'm guilty as sin / Don't like where I am and hate where I've been / So I'm getting reborn, I'm doing me in / Tell my next of kin." And then: "I've got peace like a river flowing through me / I've got joy like a fountain bursting at my seams / I've got love like an ocean washing me clean."

There are other God glimpses, like on "Scarce" ("Thank you for making me fall / From the ground I can see they weren't lying to me / When they promised that love conquers all") and "Rest" ("Do you believe that love is God, or do you feel the reverse?"). And then there's the title track (excerpted above), which opens with these telling lines: "After the flood, when the world is of mud / And we send out the dove and it doesn't return / Do you think then all the king's men / Will start over again? Is that when we'll learn? / First was the Word which became flesh / That's only the beginning / I can't remember the rest / It seems I'm always forgetting." Sounds like a cycle we're all familiar with—we draw close to God, we fall, we confess, we repent, we draw close to God, and so on, over and over. It's a picture of our own "clumsy love" for God, in response to his perfect love for us.

And it all plays over that "raging bluegrass Celtic rock," featuring Jonat on bass, his wife Andrea Lewis's fantastic, frenzied fiddling, Trevor Rogers's proficient guitar-playing and lead vocals, and whiz kid Jason Homey, a Western Canada Banjo champ as a teen, plucking everything from the banjo to the mandolin to the guitar. It all adds up to an ear-pleasing, smile-inducing, foot-stomping sound that's even more fun at a live show.

For more on the Clumsy Lovers, check their official website, where you can listen to their entire new album, After the Flood.