Criminally overlooked and tragically short-lived, Texas trio Lift to Experience were simply too pure and beautiful to be long for this world. Their double-disc concept album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, was their first and final record before the band split to pursue their separate careers. LTE’s potent mixture of prog rock, post-punk, and shoegaze was enough to garner them some favorable press, but their album’s bizarre narrative arc, which placed Texas at the center of a biblical apocalypse and recast the three band members as prophets of the coming Kingdom of God, must have proven a little too much for audiences (stateside, at least — they apparently developed quite a following in Europe), and the group quickly faded into semi-obscurity.
It was a good six or seven years after album was released before I discovered it, having been gifted with a burned copy by fellow TMTer Paul Bower during one of his visits to Chicago. I fell immediately under its spell, drawn in by the extraordinary power of the music, but also out of a peculiar sense of kinship with the band’s frontman, Josh “Buck” Pearson. Pearson grew up as part of the Word of Faith Movement of the Pentecostal Church, which advances a radical version of the Prosperity Gospel. When Pearson was four, his father stopped working to support his family, believing that all their material needs could be met through faith in God alone and that little things like “jobs” and “salaries” were redundant, if not outright blasphemous. Pearson’s mother wisely filed for a divorce, but Pearson continued to be an active member of the Pentecostal church throughout his youth.
I’ve spoken briefly about my own history with some of Christianity’s more peculiar outgrowths. While my experiences were nowhere near as extreme as Pearson’s, I couldn’t help but perceive a pained spirituality in his writing that felt achingly familiar. Music is a pretty common medium for young people to work through their religious ambivalence. Many approach the subject with a healthy dose of irony, poking fun at its contradictions and excesses, and in this regard, Lift to Experience was no different. The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads was full of absurd juxtapositions of supernatural grandeur with earthly squalor and mundanity. What made it so remarkable, however, was that its irony did not create distance between the artists and their subject. Pearson’s voice was not that of the Enlightened 21st-century Rationalist scoffing at the backwards ways of the masses of ignorant theists. He felt too intensely the beauty of his object and identified too closely with his protagonists, and when it became necessary to dig beneath their veneer of ecstatic fervor to uncover some uncomfortable truth, it was evident that he was also digging into himself.
Keeping this in mind, it’s probably no surprise that “To Guard and to Guide You” was one of the tracks I found most personally moving. Like the rest of the songs on the album, its lyrics draw extensively from other sources, Christmas hymns (“Angels We Have Heard on High”) and country songs (“Under the X in Texas”), but most significantly from a common Christian prayer, the Angel of God:
Angel of God my guardian dear,
To whom God’s Love commits me here,
Ever this day, be at my side
To light, to guard, to rule and to guide me.
With its brevity and its sing-song, nursery-rhyme quality, the Angel of God is a children’s prayer, and if it was not the first prayer that was learned by heart, it was certainly among them. The prayer forms the song’s refrain, with Pearson only flipping the wording of the last line to make it “To light, to rule/ To guard and to guide.”
I remember being taught, from a very early age, about my guardian angel. I was told that he (or she, but we tended to refer to him with masculine pronouns in my house) was chosen by God to watch over me from the moment of my conception, to look out for my physical and spiritual well-being. I was taught to invoke him often to ask for help and guidance, and as a result, my angel never felt like an abstract concept or a fairy tale, but rather a genuine presence in my life, such that, to this day, I recite that prayer every time I take a trip or get behind the wheel of a car. Such that, were I to lose all belief in God and to renounce my Catholic faith in its entirety, I would feel my guardian angel’s loss as the passing of a lifelong friend.
Hearing those childish words crop up in the middle of an indie prog-rock song tugs at those deep and buried corners of my consciousness and calls forth only the best associations that I have with Christianity. I don’t know what Josh Pearson’s relationship with God is like. I don’t know how sincerely he identifies as a Christian these days or what being a Christian means to him personally. But whatever bad shit he experienced as a result of his parents’ religious belief, I’m sure that he has a memory, not much different from my own, of sitting on his mother’s knee while she rehearsed the words to that simple, ancient prayer, pressing each syllable into the tender folds of his heart where they could grow to form a shelter for the difficult years ahead.