Switchfoot back on the road
Songs spun in “Native Tongue” are of love in angry times
When the San Diego alternative rock band Switchfoot marked 20 years of touring together by announcing it would take an “extended break” from the road in 2018, the hiatus was spurred by a desire to take a collective deep breath and afford the band more time with family.
As the year unfolded, though, the sabbatical proved far more timely and eventful than the Grammy-winning band had in mind.
They didn’t know the wife of frontman Jon Foreman was pregnant with the couple’s second child, a son who would be born in June, and they didn’t know
keyboard player Jerome Fontamillas had cancer. Fontamillas had one of his kidneys removed in December, and has since been declared cancer-free. He is touring with the band as it promotes its new album, “Native Tongue,” including a show at The Fillmore Auditorium on March 30.
“There were a bunch of reasons we were thankful we were on hiatus,” Foreman said in a phone interview. “It has been an amazing journey the past year and a half. Every night this tour, to look over and see Jerome playing on stage with us brings a heightened sense of awareness of what we have to be thankful for.”
The break also proved to be an unexpectedly fertile time in the studio for writing and recording an album intended to be a light in dark and angry times. “Native Tongue,” the band’s 11th album, is a call to pursue joy and resist the voices of hatred and fear, including those in our own heads. “Love,” Foreman sings, “is your native tongue.” Foreman acknowledges some of the inspiration may have come from holding his infant son in the middle of the night.
“I do feel like our culture seemingly only has a few dialects to speak in,” Foreman said. “Hatred and fear are very reactionary dialects. We respond almost in a fight-or-flight mechanism toward the people we disagree with. It’s not an actual rational conversation on either end. And yet, when I see some of my heroes, they will respond with love even in a difficult situation. The hope for this album is that it would be a catalyst to remind people that what we have in common is far greater than our differences, and that each and every one of us was loved into being.”
Switchfoot is sometimes described as a Christian band, and there are clues to their beliefs throughout the album, but Foreman has always resisted being confined by that label. He doesn’t want to alienate or isolate through doctrine or theology. He wants a wider audience to absorb the band’s message of love, hope and joy. There’s even an invitation on this album to find rest “if you’ve been hurt by the church of black and white.”
Switchfoot, which will open for Bon Jovi this summer at five shows in Europe, wants to be about inclusion.
“I never subdivide humans into categories of Christian or Muslim or atheist or agnostic,” Foreman said in a 2011 Denver Post interview. “I feel like, even early on, playing all sorts of places — whether it was coffee shops or bars or colleges or churches — there’s hurting people everywhere that are trying to look for meaning and purpose and beauty, finding it in relationships or a sports team or a song or in religion.”
That remains the audience Switchfoot is trying to reach, to comfort, to inspire.
“I love science, and I don’t subscribe to the false dialectic that you have to choose science or God,” Foreman said.
He sings, “every movie makes love seem easy,” and love is “the hardest art to learn.” Foreman also asks some hard questions of himself. He has a “Prodigal Soul,” and confesses he needs “forgiveness instead of applause.” But there are songs here called “Joy Invincible” and “Wonderful Feeling,” too. The latter tune has a lightness of heart with riffs reminiscent of John Lennon and George Harrison after the Beatles split.
“Joy is such an interesting concept, because joy is only to be found in the moment,” Foreman said. “It is a conscious, cognitive choice to choose that which is beautiful, that which is true, that which is good in the moment. For this album, we wanted to bring that to the surface in every song, in a lot of different musical forms. How do we speak joy, in kind of a ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ approach, as far as what we were doing with the music?”
Switchfoot gave Denver a moment of spontaneous joy last summer when it played at Elitch Gardens, one of few shows in its season of hiatus. When a girl held up a sign asking if she could join Foreman in singing “I Won’t Let You Go,” he invited her on stage. As she made her way forward, Foreman acknowledged it was a risky move, but they sang together beautifully. The girl, who looked to be about 17, nailed her part.
“She did, yeah,” Foreman said. “I try to lean into the moment, and the moment is fraught with beauty and pain and amazing decisions and horrible choices. I think music, live music especially, is a chance to embrace the right notes and the wrong notes, to recognize that something beautiful can come from even a bad decision.
“In every way during the night, we’re trying to embrace a communal expression of music and figure out how we make this feel like it’s not five guys up on stage but rather just a bunch of people in a room singing the same song. That’s the goal.”