Be My Escape, Sadie Hawkins

When listening to music, I often times tend to find something I'll listen to over and over again because I like it so much. This happens especially when I rediscover old bands that I haven't listened to in a while. My recent music craze has been over the christian rock band Relient K. This band is one of my favorites because they convey quality, sometimes complicated messages through fairly simple and easy to understand lyrics without being cheesy. The other aspect of their music that I like is that it combines these life messages with just random songs about coping with ADD, females asking males to the Sadie Hawkins, or Women Pay All dances as they are more commonly called in modern times, or even just telling someone they love them. Combined with vocal harmonies, guitars, bass and drums, they combine to make a musical cornucopia of fantastic music.

For example, if you look at a song like "Be My Escape," it can most easily be interpreted as someone who thought that the only way out was suicide, but found God and, although wasn't sure where their life was headed, relied on their faith to create an escape through God. However, if you look at a song such as "Sadie Hawkins Dance," it's just about a dance and all that goes along with it from the planning to the asking, using random humor in the mix to add a sort of comical effect.

Perhaps one of my favorite songs of theirs is off their fifth album, Five Score and Seven Years Ago, entitled "Must've Done Something Right." Right off the bat, the song opens with single piano chords, a fast moving bass line and the lead singer's vocals, adding clean guitars into the mix after the first few lines. The entire song, as with many Relient K songs, has a bit of a double meaning. At the surface of the song, it seems like a typical love song, professing that this girl is out of his league, makes him a better person and wants to express his love in a way that's not so cliche. But the meaning doesn't stop there. It can also be used to describe a close relationship with God. If you really think about it, he really is so far out of our league it's not even funny and we probably don't deserve his love and affection. While I'm not very religious myself and tend to interpret this song more in the former rather than the latter, I still understand the hidden meaning in the song about God. I think this double meaning that is found in this and other songs is important as it gives a wider variety of people to relate the song to their own lives, something I look for in music all the time. They do a great job of it and I hope they continue to keep up the good work as their career progresses.