 by Steve McPherson
 It’s 2 p.m. in Seattle on a Thursday, and Jeremy Enigk is stuck in traffic. He’s running errands in preparation for heading out on his first solo tour on Sunday. “Right now,” he explains, sounding untroubled despite the long to-do list he’s about to lay out, “we’re practicing, we’re trying to get a tour van and everything’s sort of coming down to today and so once we get out, it’s just free and clear.”
Free and clear is a position Enigk’s taken a long time to reach. If Washington, D.C.’s Rites of Spring were the first dictionary definition emo band—combining the fury and edge of punk music with cathartic and personal lyrics—then Enigk’s Sunny Day Real Estate provided the textbook example with 1994’s Diary (Sub Pop). It was the album that launched a thousand emo bands (not his fault, really). Enigk’s personal demons were laid out for everyone to see; alienation, weakness, longing and loss dominated the album, and Sunny Day broke up during the making of their second album—which would be released in a semi-finished, yet still brilliant, state by Sub Pop under the name LP2—in the midst of Enigk’s much-publicized conversion to Christianity.
Any ideas that his newfound religion would turn Enigk into a devoted, automatonic
Christian soldier were dispelled with the release of his first solo album, 1996’s
Return of the Frog Queen. A mossy album of lo-fi beauty, ROTFQ
finds Enigk grounded, but still searching, and its orchestra-meets-four-track
aesthetic prefigures such late nineties/early oughts acts as Neutral Milk Hotel,
Iron & Wine and Devendra Banhart. Sunny Day reformed in 1997, releasing
the underrated fire and brimstone-spewing How It Feels to be Something On
and the more expansive and prog-ish The Rising Tide before disbanding
for a second time. Enigk and fellow founding members William Goldsmith (drums)
and Nate Mendel (bass) have gone on to form The Fire Theft, but Enigk’s
mostly been busy preparing to release his first solo album in ten years, World
Waits, scheduled to arrive in stores October 17, even as he brings a set
composed of equal parts ROTFQ and World Waits to the Varsity Theater
this Thursday.
And that pretty much brings you up to speed. World Waits finds Enigk
exploring sonic territory somewhere between the organic orchestral approach
of ROTFQ and the more bombastic rock sound of The Fire Theft’s
self-titled debut. Lyrically, he’s still searching, still running through
hollow fields, still carrying buildings, still caught out in the rain. I’ll
give him rain, since he lives in Seattle, but asking him about his songwriting
process gives some insight into the repeated words, themes and phrases that
surface throughout his body of work.
“I usually sit down with either an acoustic guitar or the piano,”
he explains, “and I’ll come up with a melody—or the actual
basic song, and then I’ll start weaving in a melody here and there and
then it’ll be a song. And then, in the end, I’ll write the lyrics
like at the last moment, right before I record it. So I pretty much sing gibberish
as a melody until the very last moment when I have to write lyrics.”
Anyone familiar with Sunny Day’s second album might have noticed that
that last moment maybe didn’t come for that project. Enigk’s free
associative and often half-mumbled lyrics leave a lot of room for interpretation,
but even on World Waits—where he’s the most comprehensible
he’s ever been—the lyrical aspect of the music remains impulsive.
 “My
head only has so many words in it,” he laughs, “and ‘rain’
is one of ‘em and ‘God’ is another one. Those are recurring
themes, but it’s not intentional, it’s just who I am.”
Enigk’s struggles and experiences with faith have been at the core of
his music for the majority of his career now, but, by his own admission, he’s
grown up a lot since the winter of 1994 when he posted an open letter on Sunny
Day’s website explaining his conversion and in which he stated, in no
uncertain terms, “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Since that time, he’s
forged an at times troubled but mature relationship with his faith, and one
of the most compelling things about his work is the very personal connection
he seems to have with the divine. It’s a complicated, questioning rapport
that’s more Old Testament than New, but the desperate quality that gave
How It Feels to Be Something On such a dark beauty has been replaced
by a desire for connection more grounded in hope.
“Even though I’m always searching and reaching and longing and hoping,”
Enigk says, “I do feel more positive, and I think that has to do with
life changes and experience and growing up a little bit and throwing off that
baggage that one carries. I have anxiety, but I’m not nearly as anxious
as I used to be and I’m starting to learn how to deal with some of these
things and, honestly, I’ve been a lot happier because of it, and that
probably does reflect on the songs, although I do say there is a lot of darkness
in there because there’s still a lot wrong with the world. It breaks my
heart, and I want to convey that but find some way out, hopefully in the lyrics.”
World Waits is an unabashedly big-sounding record, and for those of us
more accustomed to the grit of indie rock acts like Wolf Parade, that can be
a little off-putting, but the more I’ve listened to it, the more the underlying
strength of the melodies and the arrangements has made its glossy sheen a non-starter.
The album finds its best moments in the gentle build of “Been Here Before,”
which peaks with a driving church organ before exploding into a soaring chorus;
the layers of vocal harmonies that enfold the lyrics of “Cannons”
like a fleece blanket; and the plangent heart-on-sleeve hook of the title track.
“‘World Waits’ is a love song to the world,” says Enigk.
“It’s still written in that sort of format—of a love song
with a human being or whatever—but it’s really meant to be written
to the entire world as a whole,” he continues, as the portentiousness
begins to get away from him a little, “and to the hungry, and the poor
and the insane who start war …” He pauses, full of good intentions,
but not unaware of the purpleness of his prose. “I didn’t mean to
rhyme but it was kind of cool,” he laughs. ||
Jeremy Enigk performs Thu., Aug. 3 at the Varsity Theater with Stars
of Track and Field. 8 p.m. $15. 18+. 1308 4th St. SE., Mpls. 612-604-0222.
For more information on Jeremy Enigk, check out his MySpace
page at myspace.com/jeremyenigk, and for an over-the-top critical analysis
of Sunny Day Real Estate’s best album (IMHO), How It Feels to Be Something
On, visit pulsetcmusic.blogspot.com.
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