Switchfoot Has Never Let You Down

In 2004, Jon Foreman sat down with his brother Tim, their friend Chad Butler and their families to figure out what to do about Switchfoot.

“We weren’t making money,” Butler says now. “My wife had a job. She was paying the rent. We had a new baby. We were really struggling.”

Butler wasn’t alone. The whole band was in a tight spot. Jon had moved back in with his parents. “Life was moving forward,” Tim says. “What feels like a sustainable thing when you’re in high school looks different in your mid-20s.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The three albums the band released through Christian labels had been warmly received by critics, but good reviews don’t pay for health insurance and a loyal following of youth group kids isn’t exactly a sturdy foundation for a real career.

Still, thanks to a few lucky breaks and good songs, Switchfoot managed to get signed to an actual mainstream label: Columbia Records/SonyBMG. But from the jump, things went as poorly as they could have gone. The band flew to New York to play a few new tracks from their upcoming fourth album, The Beautiful Letdown, live for the label head. According to the band, that label head blew up in a profanity-laden tirade midway through the very first song, asking, in so many words, who on his team kept signing this crap.

“He hated it,” Jon says. “Hated it. Stormed out. We’re dropped.”

The band’s big dreams about recording and touring with a Sony-level budget evaporated, and they ended up on a subsidiary label the members lovingly describe as “junior varsity.” No marketing budget. No radio push for the singles. No money for a tour.

So the band called a meeting with friends and family members to put a simple question on the table. Do they tour the new album on their own, playing whatever dive bars would take them? Or was the writing on the wall?

“We really asked that question of our families,” Butler says. “‘Is this dumb? Is this worthwhile?”

The answer came back clear: Yes, the band should take the album on tour. But the sense was that this would be Switchfoot’s swan song, a way of saying goodbye to a fun seven-ish years as a real live band.

So they released the album and hit the road, playing a series of bars along the east coast in support of “Meant to Live,” The Beautiful Letdown’s first single. “We were at the point where we either needed to break up, or something big had to happen,” Jon says.

Suffice to say, something big happened.

***

I catch up with Switchfoot in Fargo, North Dakota, where they’re playing a spot at the county fair ahead of The Beautiful Letdown’s 20-year anniversary tour. The band stands out in this town, and none more so than Jon. His honey-blonde hair is hanging well past his shoulders, veering into Fabio territory. Ten bucks says he’s the only guy in Fargo wearing flip flops. He was surfing before he was playing rock and roll, and it shows. It’s not an accident that he’s kept up with both. Surfing, he says, isn’t so different from songwriting.

“They’re both about delving into waves that move you in different ways,” he says. “You’re immersing yourself in this substance that you don’t have control over, but you’re controlling your direction within the chaos.”

This is how he talks, somewhere between big-tent preacher and beach-bum philosopher. If you’re one of the tens of millions of people who’ve heard a Switchfoot song, that will come as no surprise. In the early days, Switchfoot cut their teeth on scratchy, punky surf rock, but their lofty thematic interests elevated the garage band production. The Beautiful Letdown significantly expanded the band’s sonic oeuvre, a real Hail Mary for the arenas the band would soon be filling. This newer, bigger sound didn’t entirely abandon the band’s roots — think Foo Fighters if Dave Grohl had grown up surfing instead of skating — but it proved a studier fit for Foreman’s lyrical ambition.

And that’s how the band built their reputation: monster riffs, high-energy live shows, and lyrical profundity in the vein of Kierkegaard, who Jon references no fewer than five times during our conversations. Switchfoot songs exist in the liminal space between faith and doubt, knowing and not knowing, settling and striving.

“When I’m writing at my best, there’s a problem, mystery, something that I cannot comprehend, and the song is a vehicle to get to the other side,” he says. “It could be my wife, children. The mystery of this transcendent God. The mystery of this nation we live in, the polarity, the divisiveness. You can call them contradictions. You can call them paradoxes. Those are the things that I’m generally drawn to. And the song becomes the vehicle to understand it and say things I might not say in a conversation.”

I was a teenager driving a $200 Chevette when I was first confronted with Jon’s unique ability to pitch listeners into existential crisis via big questions about meaning and purpose. “This is your life,” he declares on Beautiful Letdown. “Are you who you want to be? Is it everything you dreamed that it would be?” I had to pull over. “Don’t close your eyes. Don’t close your eyes.” I was already feeling like an awkward fit in my midwestern youth group. I connected with the Jesus stuff, but didn’t quite vibe with the broader picture of American Christianity and its culture wars and politics. Into that tension came Switchfoot, who seemed to say “Yeah, we don’t know where we fit in either.” This came as a huge relief.

That was and is Jon’s superpower as a songwriter, a practice he calls his “favorite thing.”

“[Songwriting] is a safe vehicle to explore unsafe terrain,” he says. “Even if you come back to the same spot without any definitive conclusions, you know more.”

Those are the journeys Switchfoot has been taking their fans on for over 20 years now, a notably lengthy tenure for any band. But part of what keeps the band feeling fresh now is that the questions they specialize in haven’t lost any of their potency. As long as there are people who feel the tension “between who you are and who you could be,” there will be people who see themselves in Switchfoot.

***

“There are some bands from my Christian upbringing that I’ll still listen to but it’s a more nostalgic, ‘Wow, this was crazy’ type of listen,” says Grace Baldridge. “Switchfoot is totally different.”

As a Christian recording artist who’s been vocal about her complicated feelings about growing up in youth group culture, Baldridge, as an openly queer women, doesn’t exactly fit the CCM mold. Still, she says Switchfoot was one of the few bands from her coming of age years that not only helped her feel comfortable within a difficult industry, but feel comfortable with her relationship with God. Or, at least, feel comfortable in its uncomfortability.

“They allowed space to be messy and faithful,” she says. “As someone reckoning with a lot of stuff as a kid and especially as a teenager, I held them like a teddy bear at night.”

Baldridge says that “the songs resonating to me at 15 and 16 and 17, are still just smacking me around in my car at 32” and she’s not alone. Tim Foreman says that he feels “super honored that our music is part of so many people’s journey of faith and doubt; two sides of the same coin.”

That duality meant the band has spent much of their existence as an odd fit — a “square peg in a round hole,” as Tim puts it. He’s a little shorter than his brother, hair dark instead of blonde, and a little more grounded in conversation, more likely to speak in concrete terms instead of drifting into metaphor.

“We’re a band that’s never fit in,” he says. “And I think that’s equally true for the mainstream success that we found ourselves in as it is true within the Christian world. We were largely misunderstood.”

So, about that mainstream success. It took about six months for The Beautiful Letdown to start making waves, thanks to the band’s dogged determination and the steady rise of “Meant to Live” — first up the alternative rock charts and then over on the Adult Top 40 and the Billboard Hot 100. It took a little over a year for the album to go platinum, and then a little under another year to go double platinum. The Beautiful Letdown would ultimately spend 118 weeks on the Billboard 200, one of the top-ten runs of the decade.

The band attributes at least part of that success to their commitment to playing what they called “neutral venues.”

“We had this epiphany,” Jon says. “You can’t play Philly three times a year. So if you can only play it once, let’s play … places everyone would feel welcome and accepted.” It’s not that they didn’t want to play churches, he says. It’s just that not everyone feels accepted at churches, and they wanted to play places where everyone felt accepted. Playing at a church comes with certain expectations for both the performers and the crowd. Playing these “neutral venues” would strip their music of a perceived agenda.

“We’d seen enough of the music as a means to an end,” Jon says. “Music in a church can sometimes just be advertisement, sometimes just cheese in a mousetrap. ‘We got ’em in.’ It felt disingenuous. Not that the gospel of Christ is something we’re any less passionate about, but I don’t think Christ would be comfortable with the disingenuous nature of all these things, and the false pretense of music.”

Butler says: “We wanted to speak a language that didn’t ostracize anyone or put up any barriers to talk about real-life topics. Honest music for thinking people.”

Switchfoot evolved into a full-fledged rock band, doing full-fledged rock band things. They did the late night TV rounds — Conan, Letterman, and Leno. They played MTV’s TRL. They started booking better gigs, opening for bigger acts like Gwen Stefani, Jimmy Eat World, and Maroon 5.

The secrets to their success are apparent enough: solid songs that they worked hard to deliver to a wide audience. But the secret to their longevity is a little harder to pin down.  There was a time when it was very likely that Switchfoot wasn’t going to outlive the Bush administration. Now, they’ve outlasted both Christian contemporaries like dcTalk and mainstream peers like the White Stripes. As Dr. Dre put it: Anybody can get it, the hard part is keeping it. How did Switchfoot keep it?

Baldridge’s theory is Foreman’s unique knack for writing songs that are so universal precisely because they’re so personal. “A lot of Christian artists, when they got that memo that ‘we’re trying to go wide,’ they went too wide,” she says. “When you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.”

She says Switchfoot songs have these “broad strokes” — “You’re created with purpose. There’s more to life. There’s something beyond this realm,” and other existential topics common to a lot of Christian rock. “But then you have these very specific references that are clearly from the mind of Jon Foreman,” she says. “That’s what sets them apart.”

When asked about this impulse, Foreman says his time in college honed how he writes about spirituality. His first roommate was an atheist, and their religious conversations kept getting tripped up by the youth group jargon Foreman had been raised on.

“It’s not the language people know and speak,” Foreman says. “If you’re going to say something about the transcendent, you have to put it in a language that people aren’t weirded out by. So from the beginning, I was always writing music for my roommate.”

***

The Fargo fair is a pretty good size compared to the fairs I grew up on. There are the usual low-level roller coasters, spinning cups, and ferris wheels, along with rows and rows of cheap white shacks offering fried oreos, fried Twinkies, fried donuts, fried anything, you name it. A Journey cover band is wailing about streetlight people while some guys at a military recruitment booth challenge me to a pushup contest. The biggest stand is exclusively stocked with Trump 2024 gear — flags, T-shirts, buttons, and posters. Switchfoot’s faces flash on several huge billboards that dot the park.

I head over to the amphitheater where the band is set to play in about an hour. It’s an open seating situation, and maybe a hundred people are already crowded up near the front, while more are setting up a little further back or back in the stands that form a semicircle around the stage. I strike up a conversation with the bartender, who grumbles that she’s only sold two beers so far.

It’s a beautiful evening, and the swelling crowd is positively giddy. It’s largely elder millennial — mostly white, lots of couples, at least a few of whom have brought very young kids, their tiny heads squeezed into oversized noise-canceling headphones. Though many of these fans are inching toward middle age, they still shriek like teenagers when the lights finally go down and the band cuts loose. “They said we weren’t going to play Fargo on this tour,” Foreman shouts, drawing a chorus of aghast boos. “We said, That’s not okay!” Almost anyone would figure he was a born frontman. Anyone except Jon himself.

“I used to hate playing live,” he’d told me earlier that day, before the show. “Some people, the reason they play music is to get in front of people. That is the opposite for me.” He says his early days on stage were spent standing stock-still in front of the microphone. His brother and Butler used to offer “helpful” advice like “try moving around while you play.”

Back then, Foreman dreamed of meeting what he calls “a better version of myself” that could be the real rock star; a total natural who would be “a better singer and a better frontman and a better guitar player.” This guy would be the Christian de Neuvillette to Foreman’s Cyrano de Bergerac, singing and playing Switchfoot songs while Jon focused on his real love: songwriting.

“That guy never showed up,” Foreman says. “I had to become that guy.”

He calls doing so a “trial by fire” of touring, spending years learning how.

“I just learned how to enjoy the song. You put the song on as armor.”

It clearly worked for him, as the crowd goes gaga when Foreman steps off the stage and into the audience, magnanimous with high fives and selfies while singing “On Fire.” Later, almost every hand is up and swaying when the band unleashes the power of “This Is Your Life,” his voice a mix of Bono’s bleeding sincerity and California grit.

“This is your life,” he screams from the stage. “Are you who you want to be?”

I remember what Baldridge said about getting slapped around by Foreman’s lyrics, and I totally get it. The sun is setting in Fargo, North Dakota, where I am, somehow, watching a band I’ve loved for over half my life drag me along with the rest of the crowd toward an existential crisis.  I’m just as overwhelmed as I was when I was 17, hearing this song for the first time. I’m thinking of all the little things that had to happen to bring us all to this moment, together. I’m crying?

“This is your life. Is it everything you dreamed that it would be?”

***

“It is a miracle that songs happen,” Foreman says. “No one knows where they come from. They come out of thin air.”

We’re in the hotel lobby, and he’s reflecting on his time recording The Beautiful Letdown, and how the band’s then-uncertain future empowered a bolder approach to the songwriting. The music was bigger and the production was bolder. The addition of keyboardist Jerome Fontamillas primed the songs for the arenas they’d soon be filling. Jon remembers it as a chaotic season, but a positive one. “Volatility can be a beautiful thing,” he says. “If everything’s destroyed, there are no doors to open.”

“The whole time, we were thinking this is our last chance as a band. Let’s just throw everything at the wall. Let’s enjoy the process, because this is probably our last album.”

This devil-may-care attitude led to that album’s cerebral heft, but Foreman’s always had an interest in heavier lyrical content. He started writing songs as a teenager, struggling to fit in with a new crowd after a cross-country move from Virginia Beach to San Diego. He had a hard time making friends and developed a stutter. “But I felt like music was a place where I could speak clearly,” he says.

His parents encouraged his artistic impulses, but Jon says they stressed that songwriting wasn’t something anyone could do for money. “It still isn’t something I do for money,” he says, disdainful of the very concept. “Why do you write a song? Because it’s so enjoyable. I feel like I’m a better person when I do it. I know more about myself and the world at the other end.”

I ask what he wrote about in those early days and he whips out his phone to Google the band’s very first album, all the way back when they were a trio of teenagers calling themselves “ETC.” Reading the song titles jogs his memory.

“Songs about girls,” he chuckles, scrolling through some of his old music. “Songs about trying to pick apart the system of materialism that I’d been born into. And certainly songs about trying to unpack the Maker, asking what does it look like to be made and find purpose?”

Not exactly light work for a teenage surfer (even the songs about girls, Foreman says, represent “one of the bigger questions you could ever think of writing about”), and all those threads are still present in his songwriting. He credits the punk rock bands he listened to growing up for honing a lot of his early lyrical impulses. Bands like No Use For a Name, Propagandhi, and Operation Ivy resonated with his Christian upbringing because they “had this purpose to their lyrics,” he says. “It was for something. It was against something. You could find yourself in the plot.”

Now he describes his songwriting process as a collaboration between two sides of the brain he calls the Child and the Critic. He grabs his water bottle and holds it up in mock wonder. “The child is just ‘Oh, wow! This water bottle is amazing. We should write a song about this!’” he says.

The other side of the brain, the critic, pushes back. “That sounds absurd,” Foreman says, mimicking his inner critic. “Why would we write a song about that? We don’t have time for this. We have to focus.”

“If the critic is not in the room when the song is written, the songs get really sloppy and weird and they have no form, they have no frame,” he says. “They could be beautiful, but you don’t really know where you’re going to go with it. But if the child isn’t in the room, no songs will ever be written. But they both have to bear on the meaning of the song as it’s made.”

The question of meaning is one of Foreman’s chief obsessions, both in the broadest possible sense and in terms of the songs he writes. For him, a song’s meaning is a collaboration between the artist and the listener. He hates being asked what his songs mean. “How offensive!” he says, recoiling. “You were there! You tell me.”

“Meaning is made by the listener, the viewer,” he says. “I don’t think meaning is a spectator sport. You go to the theater, you’re making meaning on both sides of the stage. I’m very comfortable with people interpreting or misinterpreting my songs. … We’re co-collaborators, co-conspirators in meaning-making.”

Years ago, a friend of Foreman’s fell off a cliff in Mexico. He was found the following morning, barely clinging to life, and rushed across the U.S. border where a helicopter flew him to a hospital. The family was cautioned against hope. Doctors weren’t optimistic about his odds of waking up, let alone ever walking and talking again. His dad decided that “Dare You to Move” would be his son’s theme song until he could walk again.

“He’d play it for him on the guitar and —” Jon pauses to wipe his eyes. “I’m getting moved just thinking about it.”

Eventually, his friend made a full recovery. He and Jon remain close, but the way that the song’s meaning evolved to fit a very certain need at a very certain time has stuck. “For me to hold the meaning that I had for it when I was writing it tightly and say ‘No, it doesn’t mean that,’ is absurd,” Jon says. “I think that this is the meaning of the song, certainly for this context. I can’t think of a better story for it.”

***

Something every member of the band stresses as key to their success is breaking down walls, getting people outside of their boxes and helping fans find community in unexpected places.

“It feels harder now,” Jon confesses. “I think people are still longing for it. I think music does have that power. I just tend to see it as kind of this reptilian mind, attempting to find control and looking for safety.”

He has this theory about the modern age, and why the digital world is ramping up polarization. For eons, he says, community has largely been defined by proximity. But life in the digital age means many of us now define our community not by the people who live next door to us, but by the people we find online who believe the same things we do. Your next-door neighbor might be part of your physical community, but if they don’t vote like you or have the same religion as you, you’re less inclined to think of them as part of your real community which — for an increasing number of people — is made up of like-minded accounts you find on social media.

“I wonder if this is too much for the human brain,” Jon says, his huge smile faltering for the first time since we sat down. “We don’t know what to do with it. I feel like fundamentalism is at an all-time high for every tribe: ‘If you don’t believe what I believe on 99 out of 100 things, I don’t know if we can be friends.’”

He still believes that music can be a tool for sneaking around the barriers we erect for each other. He brings up Eminem, who, in 2017, drew a line in the sand, telling his fans they could listen to his music or they could support then-president Donald Trump, but they couldn’t do both. In short, Eminem said, it’s me or him.

“I see it from a different perspective,” Jon says. “If I’m Eminem and I disagree with a politician and a large part of the people who listen to my music put that person in power, I’d say ‘Listen to my music more.’ I’m not going to slam the door in your face and say we can’t be friends. I’m going to reach out to you, even just as a political entity, as the unit of change that you are in your nation.”

I ask him about this viral meme I came across, a picture of a cartoon spirit rising out of a person that was captioned the atheism leaving my body when I hear the opening chords to “Meant to Live.”

He chuckles, but then leans in with a serious expression. He tells what at first seems to be a troubling but unrelated story about his old youth pastor, who he says groomed and eventually married a girl in the youth group. He’s visibly pained by the memory.

“I’ve seen lots of weird things,” he says. “And we’ve all got those stories.” He leans back and pulls at his hair for a moment.

“I don’t pretend to know the depths of how people have been hurt by the church,” he finally says. “But I would call that Christendom, not Christianity. Christendom is the outer edifice, the shell, the building, the flawed humans that are attempting — or not even attempting — to follow Christ. The idea of the transcendent, unconditional love of my Maker remains compelling in the face of these flawed humans that have done horrible things in that very name.”

He’s glad that people who no longer identify with the church are still listening to his music, and he says he welcomes those conversations. “I find that running up against people we disagree with is necessary for change,” he says. “That’s something I wish the church had more of. Disagreements. Like, ‘Yeah, dude. I hate everything you’re saying! I disagree with all of it! I’ll see you next week.’ I love that. I think there’s gotta be more of that. But we have modeled that very poorly in the church.”

He says this has been the key to his own personal transformations and changes of mind: “the persistent love of someone who is caring enough to walk me through it day in and day out.”

“I don’t think it happens by yelling in all caps on Twitter,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a door slammed in the face.” Here, at last, the smile returns to his face.

“I think it’s just the continual embrace of love,” he says. “That, whether or not you believe in Christ, is what Christ embodies.”

***

Back in 2011, Switchfoot was playing a show in Phoenix when they got a call from another artist who happened to be playing her own show that same night. She’d been wanting to cover one of their songs live, and would they be interested in joining her on stage for it? The artist was Taylor Swift.

You can find footage of this performance online, Swifties erupting into cheers when Jon pops up on stage, any latent atheism leaving their bodies as soon as that opening rift lands. Swift herself is at her fangirliest, dancing along to “Meant to Live” (she waves her arms like a bird at the “failed attempts to fly” line). It’s just one of many such surreal moments in the band’s career. It also shows the ways Switchfoot broke from the CCM bubble, feeling more of a piece with bands like New Found Glory and Something Corporate. The band never really abandoned the CCM market ​​where they got their start, but it’s hard to imagine any of their Christian rock contemporaries sharing a mic with Taylor Swift.

Jon is demure about it. He says he’s honored by some of the acclaim his career has afforded him, but his kids keep him humble.

“They have a much more grounded understanding of the world, you know?” he says. When they hear his stories about hanging out with rock and roll legends or other such “celebrity accouterments,” Jon says their reaction tends to be: “Cool. Can I have some gummy worms? When’s lunch?”

But his kids like his music. His daughter plays Switchfoot in the car on the way to school, which forces him to confront the music he was making in his teens and 20s.

“It’s a snapshot of a person you’re not anymore,” he says. “So you listen to these things and you think, ‘Man, that’s so weird and different and cool, and I would never do it now. It’s just cringey.’”

Then he laughs a little and shrugs. “But the interesting thing is that guy, the 19-year-old, is looking at me and cringing a little bit too.

The whole band is feeling some type of way about the 20th anniversary of The Beautiful Letdown, reflecting on their legacies and reckoning with the distance between the young men who recorded that album and the guys who are playing those songs today. “Would the younger me who made this album be excited to meet the older me?” Tim asks. He takes a long pause. “I have different answers to that every time I ask it.”

Butler is the oldest and seems to have made the most peace with the whole thing, saying he’s grateful that he can stand by all the songs with a clear conscience. “That’s not always the case with bands that survive for 20 years, that they still believe the songs they wrote when they were 18 and 20 years old,” he says. “It’s a gift.”

Later that night, the sun slips below the horizon as the band launches into “Dare You to Move” — the song both Butler and the Foremans listed as a contender for the band’s “theme song.” “Maybe redemption has stories to tell,” Jon calls from the stage. “Maybe forgiveness is right where you fell.” The crowd is singing along, faces glowing in the carnival lights. People are putting their arms around each other. It makes me think of something Baldridge said during our conversation: “I’m so thankful that Switchfoot existed because what if they hadn’t? I would have been so lonely.”

Twenty years is a long time, and in that time, there’s been a real diaspora of the millennials and Gen Xers who make up the core of Switchfoot’s fan base from the youth groups where they first came across “This Is Your Life,” “Meant to Live” and “Dare You to Move.” Many are still Christian, going to church on Sunday and picking their own kids up from youth group. Some are, maybe, a different kind of Christian — deconstructing into wilder, more doctrinally adventurous waters. Some may not call themselves Christian anymore at all.

“The thing that I can appreciate about Switchfoot even now is that it never really felt like it belonged to one culture or one denomination or one type of people,” says Robert G. Callahan.

Callahan is an attorney in Texas. He started trying to listen to Christian music about the same time he started getting serious about his spiritual life, but none of it really clicked. His girlfriend — who is now his wife — suggested he try Switchfoot, which she called “music for thinking people.” He was hooked. “I just was blown away.”

In the years since then, Callahan, who is Black, grew deeply disillusioned with the racialized spiritual abuse he experienced in what he calls White Evangelicalism. He’s writing a book about his departure from it, and the Christian faith that he’s reconstructed from its rubble. But while his faith may have evolved, he never felt like Switchfoot left his side.

“I don’t worry about evangelicalism claiming them and having a monopoly on them because it’s like, no,” he says. “You guys don’t get to take that.”

Collin Bice has known Switchfoot for most of his life, and has been listening to The Beautiful Letdown since he was about 7 years old. He grew up in a conservative homeschool family, and Switchfoot was about as edgy as his parents would permit. He remembers bonding over the album with a boy named Sean, who sang “24” — the final track on Beautiful Letdown — at a karaoke event. That memory has stuck with Bice in the decades since, and was something of a spiritual soundtrack to his friendship with Sean, which endured even as their lives took different turns. Sean spent some time in rehab. Bice came out as gay to his family. Their support for each other never wavered all the way up to earlier this year, when Sean tragically died by suicide.

“My mind goes back to: I want to see miracles, see the world change, wrestle the angels for more than a name,” Bice says, quoting a line from “24.” “The bravery that takes. There’s just no one that I saw that in more than Sean.”

A week before Sean’s death, Bice texted to tell him that he was listening to The Beautiful Letdown.

“He just said, ‘Yeah, I still cry every time I hear that album,’” Bice says. “It was still that meaningful to both of us, who were in very different places.”

Whatever journeys we’ve all been on, Switchfoot has been there with us the entire time, driving home an overarching message: You are not alone, and there is more to life than you could possibly imagine. If there’s an age where that message isn’t as necessary to my soul as oxygen, I haven’t reached it yet.

About a year after that label exec stormed out of Switchfoot’s showcase and dropped them from the label, The Beautiful Letdown’s eye-popping sales compelled some serious reconsideration. The band was bumped back up to the big leagues at Sony, and that exec gathered the band together for a big photoshoot with their first platinum album. “‘We believed in you all along.’” Butler recalls him saying.

Jon laughs at the memory, and says he’s wondered if they should have taken a moment to get in a good told you so. “But my least favorite part of the music is the politics,” he says. “I’d rather just write another song.”

That same unpredictable journey that has kept Switchfoot’s fans around has propelled the band itself forward too. As the album title itself notes, not every letdown has to be a bad one, and they’re never the end of the story.

“Everything we’ve had that felt like a real disappointment as far as labels, being dropped, looking back now, I’m really grateful for that,” Jon says. “To be here, in this room, talking about a career that goes back 20 years, that is a gift. There’s gotta be twists and turns, but there’s no way I’m going to throw shade. I’m too grateful to be here.”