Everything Falls Apart According to Plan

Theologians and pastors often attribute the creative process to our innate God-given capacities. To be made in the “image of God” is to share in God’s own creative character. Perhaps. And yet, artists and musicians constantly speak of how concepts, images, and melodies will present themselves out of nowhere. Songs are not so much fabricated, but discovered. Tom Petty once described the creative process as songs falling out of the sky. Music guru Brian Eno compared music making to gardening, the songwriter finding seeds and planting them without knowing exactly what the final result will look like. One’s role as creator does not rule out the possibility of being surprised. “You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience,” Eno says, “and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.” In that sense, there is a strong spiritual correlation between music and faith.

The Mbird community is full of such creators — writers, artists, and musicians — the most recent offering coming from our friend Tommy Mayfield who fronts the Birmingham-based band Crestwood Drives. Their debut album Everything Falls Apart According to Plan is full of references to Mbird favorites like Robert Capon, Gerhard Forde, Flannery O’Connor, and T. S. Eliot. And yet, the record is greater than the sum of its parts, standing on its own accord as a gorgeous offering of hope amidst suffering and life amidst death.

We had the privilege of speaking to Mayfield about how the album came into being and what theological aspects informed his creative process.

Mockingbird: Fran Lebowitz once said that “no one is more loved than musicians because they give people access to emotion and memory.” What is it about music you think gives people access to these things?

Tommy Mayfield: I think it has something to do with the way we are wired as human beings. Music has a way of enabling its hearers to access ideas and emotions in a way that resonates deeply. For me, the very best songs are those that can use a few words to tell me a compelling story. I’m a fan of Jason Isbell, and his song “Speed Trap Town” had this kind of impact on me. The first few lines of the song are:

It’s none of my business, but it breaks my heart, dropped a dozen cheap roses in my shopping cart. Made it out to the truck without breaking down, everybody knows you in a speed trap town

The first time I heard that verse, I could immediately see the entire scene with absolute clarity — a grieving man in a small-town grocery store buying flowers to take to the grave of his lost loved one and being stopped by a well-intentioned acquaintance whose words utterly undo him. I was told an entire story, and it was one that I not only heard with my ears but felt in my heart. That, to me, is the real power of music.

I’ve recently learned that this power is something that theologians have long appreciated. Martin Luther once said: “Experience testifies that, after the Word of God, music alone deserves to be celebrated as mistress and queen of the emotions of the human heart … For if you want to revive the sad, startle the jovial, encourage the despairing, humble the conceited, pacify the raving, mollify the hate-filled … what can you find that is more efficacious than music?”

My friend Simeon Zahl said something similar in a fantastic essay in the Mockingbird Magazine, in which he wrote of music as one of several “technologies of the heart” that possesses the ability to “speak the strange electric language of the heart.” Furthermore, he agrees with “what the greatest theologians have always known: in the context of actual ministry, the best theology and the truest Christian information are just ghosts and vapor until they are communicated in a language the heart can hear.”

MB: Throughout the album, there’s a real sense that you have lived through these lyrics. You don’t talk about the painful elements of life lightly (of death, heartbreak, and addiction) because you’ve actually experienced them. How have you personally been convinced that everything falling apart is actually a part of God’s plan?

TM: Largely through my own experience repeatedly affirming for me the truth that God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor 12:9). A related notion is found in the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous, which begins with an admission of powerlessness. In my view, the very first sin, and all subsequent sin, has to do with the problem of self — putting our hope and trust in ourselves as opposed to our Creator. The mercy of God is not enabling us to succeed at holding our self-driven efforts together, but instead in allowing them to fall apart so that we may be turned toward the hope of something outside of ourselves.

AA sometimes refers to an alcoholic’s bottom as the “gift of desperation.” But the desperation an alcoholic feels at rock bottom is not experienced as a gift in the moment, but only after he or she has experienced the truth of the promises offered through the program and looks back on how the process began. Put differently, rock bottom is not beautiful — until it is. The same is true of the law/gospel dynamic that I think Mockingbird does such a good job of conveying. Our efforts to justify ourselves by either the law of God or the laws of our own making (e.g., the laws of success, beauty, or accomplishment) lead to a death, and that death is a real and painful death, the death of our hope in ourselves. But the death is necessary and good, because only after that death is God able to resurrect us through the good news of the Gospel.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge that there are aspects of or experiences in our lives where we may not be able to see God’s purposes this side of eternity. But by grace I believe we can and do get glimpses of how it is precisely in and through the moments where everything falls apart despite our best attempts to hold them together that God works most powerfully in our lives.

MB: In the song “Better Days,” death is ever-present. You hold your breath past a cemetery yard, you drive past an abandoned Pontiac in a field of tall grass. One lyric makes it crystal clear: “In the kingdom of the Dollar Generals, in a land where death is very much alive.” How does your understanding of death inform your own life? It feels like you are grappling with both metaphorical and literal death in these songs. As we approach Ash Wednesday, a day that is set aside for acknowledging the realities of Sin and Death, how do these two senses of death — the literal and metaphorical — relate?

TM: Physical death is coming for all of us, but we often seem determined to deny its reality. I wrote this song after repeatedly driving a stretch of country roads in northern Alabama. I was struck by how prevalent signs of death are in these kinds of rural settings, and the verses of the songs were my attempt to articulate some of the signs I encountered. The chorus of the song simply says, “Here’s to better days.” While it may seem, at first blush, like the chorus is simply an empty hope that, despite the death in the verses, there will somehow be better days ahead, that’s not really what I was trying to get at. Rather, I was trying to convey that the death in the verses has purpose inasmuch as it is only after the death of our hope in ourselves that we find the better days intended for us in the gospel.

MB: The song “Cut You Down” is deeply profound. On the one hand, it paints a dismal portrait of human despair, this idea that, left to our own devices, we will hang ourselves out of our own hopelessness. And yet, there’s this image of God pursuing us and cutting us down from the noose of our own making. In an age where suicide and deaths of despair have been steadily on the rise, how could this song provide hope for the hopeless?

TM: I won’t presume that this song (or the album as whole) can do anything on its own, and I did not write it with any intended response(s) in mind. I agree with Flannery O’Connor, who said: “When the book [or other work of art] leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others. But I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.” I feel like all of my songs were gifts that I was called to put out into the world, but any impact they have (or don’t have) is out of my hands and frankly none of my business. That being said, I wrote the song with the intention that sonically (and even lyrically on first pass) it would sound like a song of vengeance or judgment, when in fact it is a song about a profound love that pursues us relentlessly.

I think one of the great deceptions of our own human hearts is a belief in the complete independence of self. Our culture exacerbates this lofty anthropology, teaching us that we can be the people we want to be and have the life we want to have if only we exercise enough effort and control over ourselves and others. This notion of the fully autonomous, self-made man or woman is deeply ingrained in us despite abundant evidence to the contrary. There is a version of this belief embodied in many churches, a belief that the greatest power in the universe is not God but the human will. It is the notion, contrary to Scripture, that we are effectively the authors and/or perfecters of our faith, that we somehow begin the good work of salvation and carry it on to completion (Heb 12:1–2; Phil 1:6). These kinds of beliefs do seem to have disastrous consequences in some cases. The reasons behind deaths of despair are admittedly manifold and complex, but I tend to think there is a category of people whose descent into despair is driven by the honest realization that what they’ve been taught, explicitly or implicitly, by our culture and even by some of our churches — that the answer and the power lies within themselves — is simply not true in their own experience. A song like “Cut You Down” is, perhaps, a counterpoint to much of what our culture conveys because it speaks a word, not about our abilities, our power, or our pursuit of God, but about a God who pursues us relentlessly and efficaciously. Lazarus wasn’t raised from the dead by trying really hard or by some innate qualities he possessed. It was a power outside of himself that enabled him to respond to the command “Lazarus — come out” (Jn 11).

MB: The album defies categorization in the sense that there’s no neat line between sacred and secular. And yet, while nobody would classify Everything Falls Apart According to Plan as “Christian Music,” it is clearly informed by themes that are familiar to Mockingbird — the relationship between law and gospel, the Theology of the Cross, the idea of total depravity, and the unwavering nature of God’s grace. How is the way you relate to music similar to the way your faith is incorporated in your everyday life?

TM: I would say two things. First, the scriptures talk about the Holy Spirit using images like wind and fire — which are things that cannot be put into a box. I don’t believe it’s possible to neatly divide life into the sacred and the secular, nor do I believe we can delineate precisely through what means the Spirit chooses to work.

Second, just as I view my songs as gifts that were given to me, I likewise view my faith as a gift that was and continues to be given to me. My stance toward both my music and my faith is largely passive and receptive — most of life is, in one form or another, waiting for the Spirit to move and to work. I will admit I sometimes struggle with the apparent tension between the reality of the Spirit’s movement in and through me and the necessity of my own basic actions. I don’t have a perfect answer, but one image that has been helpful to me is that of a tandem bicycle. My posture is properly the rider on the back of the tandem bicycle. I do something — I pedal, but the Spirit is the one who steers. I’ve noticed that when I find myself disturbed, it is almost always because I’ve found myself trying to steer.

MB: Listening to “Troubled Waters” (the lyrics of which were taken directly from Thorton Wilder’s brilliant short play The Angel That Troubled the Waters) I was reminded of what T. S. Eliot said about artistic license: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” How did Wilder’s play inspire you to write a song in the first place?

TM: After first reading the play, the song just kind of came out. I was just so struck by the beauty and profundity of Wilder’s work and the ways in which it conveyed some of the deep truth I was encountering in other contexts, including in the wisdom of Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilder’s key insight seems to me to be that what fits people for service to God and to others is not their strengths or their successes, but rather their wounds and their weaknesses. I saw this clearly in AA — all the angels and squeaky-clean pastors in the world cannot persuade an alcoholic like another alcoholic human being broken on the wheel of living who has found a hope outside of himself. I wanted to write a song that could perhaps honor and introduce more people to Wilder’s beautiful play.

Be sure to listen to Crestwood Drives’ Everything Falls Apart According to Plan on Apple and Spotify.