Jeremy Enigk and Aaron Weiss

When one behemoth of Seattle-bred indie rock collides with an up-and-coming purveyor of Christian-bred indie rock, sparks will fly. Jeremy Enigk-former frontman for Sunny Day Real Estate and the Fire Theft who recently completed his second solo album World Waits-and Aaron Weiss-frontman for mewithoutYou-are prime examples of social responsibility, whether it be for their lyrical posterity, their mutual realization of love in the world or their mutual appreciation for alternative energy sources. Weiss is a major fan of Enigk, and Enigk of Weiss (enough so that Enigk contributed vocals to two tracks on mewithoutYou's newest album, Brother, Sister). What was supposed to be a mutual interview for Synthesis blossomed into a lengthy conversation about religion, God, politics and other things you probably shouldn't discuss at family dinners.

Jeremy Enigk: Tell me if this is true. A friend of mine told me that your band runs your bus off of an alternative fuel source?
Aaron Weiss: Yes. About a year and a half ago we got an extra fuel tank in our bus that filters and heats waste vegetable oil. So we can go out to the backs of restaurants, like Chinese buffets and steak houses, and there's usually a big dumpster filled with the grease that's used up from the kitchen fryer and they just dump it out there for someone to come and haul away. We have a hose we stick into that dumpster and pump it out into our tank, and we use it as fuel. So we very very seldom have to buy any diesel.

JE: Did you do it for costs or for environmental reasons?
AW: It's a little of both. The main thing for me was this talk about the war. There's really no way to know our country's motivations for that but it always seemed to be tied in with oil and it just seemed unconscionable to me. But it was a big financial investment up front. We had to spend, between all the costs and the labor, something like $6,000. So, at first, saving money wasn't the appeal, but we eventually have. Since then we've saved over $20,000 in fuel...

JE: Which is a huge perk [laughs]. I'd love to hook up with you and hopefully you would sort of guide me into doing that myself because I'm totally into that. It's like, why is it such an issue to even be fighting over something that could be solved with vegetable oil or hemp oil or...
AW: Or a bicycle.

JE: Or a bicycle, right. Okay, another question. This one is...bear with me on how I ask this. I'm reading it from a pad of paper. So, I understand that you believe in a God, right?
AW: Yes.

JE: Can you describe what kind of connection you have with this unseen force? Have you seen any specific miracles or any specific circumstances that made you aware of this ever-present force?
AW: I suppose the god I believe in comes from the Gospel and the teachings of Jesus, and particularly there's a verse in one of the letters written by John that made its way into the Bible that said if anyone loves, he knows God, because God is love, but if you don't love then you don't know God. My faith in God doesn't just come from the fact that I read the Bible or that I go to a church building on Sunday. I wasn't raised as a Christian.
My mom's Sunni Muslim and my dad's Jewish. They taught me to pray and to believe in one god but never Jesus or his teachings, the crucifixion, anything like that. The only experience that I've had or miracle that I've tasted firsthand was the fact that for most of my life I thought about not much else besides killing myself. Even after becoming a Christian and accepting the Christian religion, I didn't feel much of a change in that. Then just shy of three years ago, I had a sort of encounter where I felt like Paul in the Bible when he was knocked off his donkey and blinded, and then all of the sudden everything was different. The only thing that changed was this simple idea of love and this reality of love.

JE: Totally not scientific, but completely provable through, yeah, love itself. That's gorgeous. You mentioned your parents being Muslim and Jewish. What was that like? Did they pressure you?
AW: For a while, especially after I started going to a church building and started reading the Bible. There was this pressure from them that "no, you've gotta believe what we believe," and [they worried] that I'd try to convert them...and this went on for quite a while until this sort of profound experience that I just described where I realized that it's not my duty to convert anybody, it's my duty to love everybody. God will bring about the conversion of one's heart, if that's what needs to happen. All the arguing stopped, and all the fighting stopped and the disagreements. Rather than try to convert each other, we found a lot of common ground and I've since been able to go to my mom's mosque and worship the God that I believe in in that building.

[Later in the conversation, Aaron began asking the bulk of the questions.]

Aaron Weiss: Did you have a religious upbringing, yourself?
Jeremy Enigk: My father is Catholic and my mother is Christian, and there was a conflict there as well, believe it or not. Even though they both believed in the same sort of sect, more or less. They both believed in Jesus, ultimately. I was raised mainly Christian. I went to church with my mom to a Christian church that was very dogmatic. I was raised to believe that this specific church with the name "The Church of Christ" was the only church you could go to if you wanted to go to heaven. Anywhere else, you would go to hell. It was just dogmatic. It's nothing against my family. They were wonderful. It's just what it was like 30 years ago. For me, it was extremely important to discover it for myself, and not only take what other people tell me to believe, but take what other people believe and measure it in my own heart and see how it sits and how it goes through the filter of my own heart.

AW: Do you feel responsible to communicate something of God or your faith in the lyrics? Why do you-I read an article recently where you described yourself as a shy person-get up onstage to sing these songs and are then flooded by people who want to talk to you, have their picture with you, get your autograph? How does this make you feel as someone who is so introverted?
JE: I get up onstage because it's what I feel I'm supposed to do. Many times I've wanted to quit music and get married and have children and not tour and just live on a farm with many different animals, but that's not my calling, because so many people have told me that they are inspired by what I do, I have to do it. And you know what else? I love it. I enjoy the meditation of music. I love sitting down and playing. I don't particularly like to play shows and play the game and go on tour and advertise and sell myself, but it's something positive, and there's nothing wrong with putting something positive out in the world if it changes someone's perspectives, or makes them not commit suicide, or makes them believe that there's something more than the 9-to-5, or the money, or war. It's a positive force, music, but it can be a negative force as well. I choose the light side of the Force, Luke [laughs]. At the time of Diary, I was just feeling it and how I felt at the time, frankly, it was all about a woman. I was in love and my heart was broken, and it took me seven years to get over it.

AW: I'm in the same boat, brother [laughs].
JE: Things worked out, but now the older I get, the more I'm aware of the world around me. When before, the younger I was, it was all sort of centered within this brain. Then I started to look out and just notice, you know, there's war and stuff and everything that's going on with our president-actually, he's not my president. I don't even believe in lines. And the more that I started to be aware of that, the more I started to feel a responsibility to start saying more important things as opposed to being so internalized.

AW: Do you worry that being tied in with God or even using the word "Christ" will make you associated with this very different political party and this whole view of what that has come to mean for Americans? Do you find yourself shying away from the language of Christianity as a result of that?
JE: I have. I have completely shied away from the dogmatic idea of religion. But I want to get to this point where I embrace it for myself and understand it individually rather than as a whole. Nobody can tell me what I understand. I have to understand and experience for myself to take it to heart. That's what religion is to me-a lot of times blindly believing because somebody told you. But I was always somebody who had to experience and understand it for myself, because that was more important.

AW: How does the role of community, or common worship or faith amongst others, where, if you do reach a point as an individual as coming to believe in God, is there a point in which you feel compelled to find unity with others in that, whether it be a traditional Sunday church meeting or just a group of people you can talk to with an open heart?
JE: Well, you and I are having that community right now. We're having that conversation, and that is my community. I have that community with atheists. But I don't go to church anymore. What I'd like to do is start-I don't know how it's going to pan out-but I'd like to start going to a Buddhist temple one day and the next go to a Catholic church, the next go to a mosque, and experience, as you were saying with your parents and stuff-I don't want to be Unitarian, but I want to respect God in life. It just so happens that Jesus is the one who showed me the light. That's how I relate to it, and that's where I want to be, but I also think there are absurd religions, obviously, so I don't subscribe to everything. It's all about, as an individual, filtering out the unnecessary. Judging by the fruits, basically.

For the full audio version of this conversation, please visit www.synthesisradio.net.

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