A Reverse Come-To-Jesus Moment: An Interview with Adam Voith

Recommended If You Like  is a novel that follows an Indiana grocery store worker named Anderson Humphrey as he explores the world of underground Christian rock in ’90s Indiana and starts touring with an actual band, Roadside Monument. Before long, he gets into the business of booking bands. The unassuming proto-podcaster is much like the author Adam Voith, who is also from Indiana and once toured with Roadside Monument before working as a booker for acts like Bon Iver, Father John Misty, and Vampire Weekend. Now, as the publisher of the small press Little Engines, he’s selling Recommended If You Like  for free on his website and touring the country again, this time to give readings in bars and coffee shops.

The book, named after stickers on Christian albums that identified the secular band they imitated, is an uncommon look into a subculture both maligned and misunderstood: alternative Christian rock. Voith reveals the culture around this genre of music in its brief heyday: not political or even particularly religious, but an odd, often regional phenomenon, a “sand trap” for isolated American kids, bands and listeners alike. It was a scene the internet would later dissolve by giving kids direct access to the secular world their parents had tried to wall off. But for a brief period, it was an arbitrarily constrained network for music funded by guaranteed checks from churches and youth groups.

While there aren’t many lasting bands or albums from this world, it was the first experience with an alternative DIY scene for many Midwesterners, including myself, and Voith exhumes this subculture in all its embarrassing glory. Quirkier and more insular than its secular counterpart, the music was often poorly written and even more poorly performed. But its legacy perseveres through both the artists that emerged and the many listeners for whom the genre was a trial by fire. Voith’s anger and resentment about having once been randomly thrust into this world has lifted, leavened by time and the wisdom of experience. He forgives, perhaps like Jesus himself, the sad, onerous Christian subculture, and the self that once lived it.

Chris Molnar: There’s a tension between the easy money of playing at churches and the difficult road of secular clubs. The former had monetary guarantees, and the latter wouldn’t even book you if you were on a Christian label. How much of that still exists today?

Adam Voith: There isn’t really the same alternative Christian market. It was bleeding into the mainstream in the late ’90s, into proper clubs. Pedro the Lion, Sufjan Stevens, P.O.D., Damien Jurado, some of these acts were playing at the same level and maybe better than the secular stuff. It disappeared fast, because these bands didn’t want to play at churches. Kids left the Christian scene along with them, and then you had the internet blowing the doors off of the protections that parents could put around what their kids were exposed to.

CM: Most of the characters in the book are real Christian alt-rock personalities. Most notably, I would say, Trey Many, onetime drummer for His Name is Alive and Pedro the Lion. He, like you, went on to become a booking agent.

AV: The Trey character is inserted into the book in some fictional ways. He wasn’t in the hotel room with MxPx, where they’re at the peak of their success, counting money and taking calls at Cornerstone Festival, but I put him in there. I met him and knew him a little bit back then, but it wasn’t until the year 2000, when we went on a huge tour together when he was in Pedro the Lion as the drummer, the tour manager, and the booking agent, that we became friends. I was their merch guy at that point, so I met him and got to know him as he did triple duty. 

He told me I should come work at Aero Booking and try to find some bands to sign. At the time I had written a few books and thought my career was going to be publishing and writing. I thought I’d be a booking agent part-time as a supplement to my real career. But my career became booking. I’m good at it. I have good ears, and I started finding bands that were doing well, so I stopped writing for a long time. Although Trey made me promise I’d still write this book one day—I was talking about it that long ago. I said I’d do it when I’m fifty, and that’s exactly what happened.

CM: Looking at both your careers from a distance, it seems like each of you started out booking Christian bands and built out from there. That’s part of what makes the book feel universal: the story of starting from a niche and iterating outward.

AV: There is a lot about booking in the book. I joke that the booking stuff is like the minutiae of whaling in Melville. Trey was booking Damien Jurado and Pedro the Lion, trying to figure out who to tour with his own band. But the thing that really made Trey break out was Death Cab for Cutie, who had no attachment to that world, though Trey had some residue of some Christian rockers on his roster. I was doing John Vanderslice, Songs: Ohia, Swearing at Motorists, The Six Parts Seven, not really anything Christian-related. The explosive part of my career came with Mumford & Sons, who come from that world in an indirect way. Marcus’s dad was instrumental in bringing Vineyard Churches to Europe, and their music draws a lot of people because it echoes that world—how praise and worship music works. It’s translated into their folk and rock music in a way you can’t separate. They weren’t a Christian band, though Marcus would probably call himself a Christian. But that was the closest I got to actually booking a Christian band, in the way that U2 was Christian, on that massive scale.

But I didn’t do much booking in the Christian world. I was pretty irritated with most of that music. When I think about how many records hold up for me in that world, I come up with ten, and after that it’s hard to come up with more.

CM: Did booking change during your time doing it?

AV: There was a major shift in the industry pre- and post-social media. When I first met the guys in Vampire Weekend, they asked me if they needed a booking agent. And I said, “Yes, and it needs to be me.” I had a roster, but it wasn’t a successful roster, and they were obviously about to blow up. I think they could sense I was sniffing around. Shortly after that, every new band I met not only knew they needed an agent, they knew every agent’s name, their roster, and what they did. That wasn’t just true of booking, it was everything. There was too much information, and it created a nervousness that I found extremely lame because they didn’t take risks.

CM: Do you feel like you worked through anything with the book? 

AV: I thought I was writing a very angry book, and there’s definitely irritation and anger in it, but nowhere near what I thought it was going to be. I think shame is what the book is really about. Shame and embarrassment over being involved with something you didn’t choose, and how that affects your ability to move forward in life when you’re interested in art, starting from that deficit. I remember when I heard about The Righteous Gemstones, I was excited, but then let down, because I thought they could have done a straight telling of this story that would have been just as weird.

CM: I feel like you do a good job of this in the book, especially discussing bands like Lifesavers Underground and Scaterd Few—the reader gets a glimpse through your eyes. They’re big names within this scene, but there’s something so small and sad about them, smaller and sadder than a band outside the Christian circuit, because there’s no mechanism to resurrect these bands. There’s no historical consciousness: kids are fed the current iteration and then escape. You can’t have a Numero Group reissue campaign for Scaterd Few. 

AV: I asked my friend, who’s a partial owner of that label group, to get them to reissue this record, and they said no. But I actually think there might come a time where some of this stuff gets a hipster re-evaluation.

CM: You mentioned that there are maybe ten albums that hold up. Would you want to share them?

AV: It’s Scaterd Few’s Sin Disease, The Throes’ All the Flowers Growing in Your Mother’s Eyes, which—you might like this—I eventually married their bass player. We met in 1999, got married, and had a kid. Now we’re divorced. But if there were a part two of the book, it would be that I actually married this woman whose band I booked in order to meet her. Adam Again’s Dig, The Crucified’s The Pillars of Humanity, Joe Christmas’s North to the Future, both Roadside albums, Pedro the Lion’s Whole EP, and The Choir’s Circle Slide. The only reason the rest of the Pedro stuff isn’t on there is the rule that it has to be on a Christian label, and that’s the only record they did on one. Michael Knott’s Rocket and a Bomb. There are a couple of Breakfast with Amy songs that I think are as good as Jane’s Addiction. There’s another Choir record called Wide-Eyed Wonder that’s pretty damn good. LSU is an interesting one because writing this book I kept going back to it and thinking this shit was not good. 

CM: How have people who know the Christian rock subculture reacted to the book?

AV: There’s some level of “I’m sorry you were dealt that hand.” People know it as a genre, but they know it in broad strokes. When you get into the minutiae, the anecdotes, you start to understand how trapped the musicians were. A lot of listeners don’t understand that kids in bands don’t necessarily choose that as a career path. The market, whether it be Tooth & Nail or youth groups or these coffee houses, were finding kids really young and having them sign contracts. I think a lot of kids in bands probably were so psyched and then, a year or two later, they had their reverse come-to-Jesus moment, wondering if they believed in Christianity. But it was already too late. I think people are fascinated by the stickiness of it, the sand trap of it.

CM: You do a good job of describing that devious structure where you have a guaranteed show and maybe more money if you’re playing a church. I could see that balancing out for a lot of bands.

AV: Routes were irrelevant. It was about routing to where the next youth group check would be. It didn’t matter how far it was or whether it made sense directionally. These days, a lot of these bands who are still around or reuniting might be playing in a non-religious market, but there are still some Christian people mixed in with tons of regular hardcore and punk stuff. We’re hitting the nostalgia cycle.

CM: It’s interesting to think about that cycle, because the original ’70s Jesus People era was more directly hippie and cult-adjacent, whereas this era—at least through your window into it—seems almost divorced from spirituality. What’s your relationship to spirituality, and what did religion mean to those bands?

AV: It had very little to do with the world I was in. It was a market. It was a business. It wasn’t something we talked about as a belief system. It was something we talked about as a bummer, like a Scarlet Letter we were trying to erase. I know there were bands out there trying to spread the good word, but I don’t think that’s what most of them were up to. I think they wished they weren’t associated with it at all.

Around the same time I found underground Christian music, I also found underground real music. At first I couldn’t tell whether I was interested in religion or if I was looking for something artistic. It took years, but I eventually had nothing to do with religion. I hated religion. And that lasted until very recently. I’m still not religious, but some of the anger has fallen off. I’m at this point now where I’ve been reading more classic literature, and I realize you can’t escape Christianity in it. Douglas Coupland’s Life After God. Frankenstein. Ulysses. Light in August and The Sound and the Fury. I don’t know if I’d call my interests spiritual, but maybe I have a literary interest in religion, because I do love these books. Now I’m thinking, maybe I can have a spiritual life without being tied up in dogma. I suppose I’d call myself suddenly spiritually curious for the first time in decades.

CM: One thing I was curious about was the tapes—the narrator is called the Christian Humper and distributes podcast-like tapes to his community. Is there truth to that element of the book?

AV: There were no tapes. But my nickname was the Christian Humper in a very specific circle. It’s just sort of stuck in my head, and now I kind of love it. I was a sexually active teenager who was also a Christian, and they just couldn’t handle it; they thought it was so funny. But the podcast form came to me as a solution. I knew the stories I wanted to tell, but I couldn’t fit them into a container. One day I thought, what if there had been a podcast back then where someone could just rant? 

CM: You’re publishing the book through your own imprint—tell me about your publishing journey.

AV: I had a book I’d written in college that I wanted to publish. So I taught myself how to print books, found people to help, and treated it like a record label. I asked myself what bands do when they don’t have distribution. They go on tour. So I started going on tours, bringing the books with me. The internet was new, but there was suddenly a way to sell products online. It felt like a punk rock record label, but for books. The company was called TNI Books, and Little Engines was a literary magazine I was doing at the time. I put out four issues of that, plus a couple of books from other people, including some weird music crossover books. Zach Hill—the drummer for Hella, and later Death Grips—did a crazy solo record that came with a book of his illustrations. We did ten books or book-like things before I shut it down. 

CM: It’s an extensive book tour you have going. There are so many dates. Maybe the most I’ve seen for any author.

AV: I’m secretly trying to capture the same feeling the character in the book gets the first time he gets in the van, just being on tour.

CM: It really feels full circle in terms of finally doing what you originally wanted to do.

AV: I mean, I’ll see how I feel in three weeks after doing it every night.