(*Fin) chords by Anberlin

STEPHEN SAYS: “It’s my entire childhood put into one song. My battle with being raised in a church and the individuals that completely devastated my faith. It took a good set of eight years for me to come back and find God on my own.” “But later in life I realized I needed to stop looking at Christians to see Christ. I wrestled with God, and he won.” “In life, we’re all going to go through similar problems, even though you absolutely feel alone. There’s the moment when you have to fight depression, there’s a moment where, if you hit some type of fame in any capacity, whether it’s student class president or president of the United States, there has to be a moment when you confront pride. And there’s also a moment, like, what does my future hold, why am I here on Earth? A huge question is, who is God? And you have to wrestle with him and find out what you believe. And I think this song is a summation of my entire existence, of my wrestling process with God, starting with the house on Ridge Road. It was a house I lived in around St. Joe, Michigan, and I remember being six years old and walking to the end of the road, and just crying, because there was so much turmoil in the world, like seeing the news and seeing someone die, but then going to your Sunday school and saying everything is wonderful, and just feeling that kind of commotion in your soul. And so I remember, at six years old, just weeping and screaming – Devil, you stay over here, and God, you stay over here, and both of you leave me alone! – and I think that’s like, almost the foundation of the rest of my life.” [14] “(*Fin) is a series of four stories, that all tie together in the line ‘patron saint of lost causes.’ The first story is a personal memoir about my life as a child and the pull on my soul even then. I deliberated even at eight years old, that it would be better that God and the devil would just both leave me alone. The second story is about a couple from my early teen years’ church who cried for a miracle. It was a promised miracle, and it never came about. That leaves an impression. The third is about a mentor that used the guise of ‘missions work’ to leave his family in shambles and eventually decay. That plays with your salvation, when one experiences it. [The fourth story is about] Billy, a traveling ‘healer’ who crippled my life and growth right in front of me.” “We just wanted to create an ethereal, kind of ambient ending to the whole CD and definitely to the end of (*Fin), and so we let Aaron Mlasko, our drum tech, come up with different instruments, whether they were wood blocks or chimes of some sort, and then Joey just kind of overlapped them with guitars. I did about eight takes of [the end of] the song, and I wrote no lyrics. I just walked into the studio, listened to the song a couple times and then sang whatever came to my head. So I have absolutely no idea what I sang. I actually listened to it a couple times trying to pick out the lyrics and trying to hear what I said, but honestly, towards the middle, I kind of lose it and I have absolutely no idea what I said. But I think that just adds to it, I think it adds to the whole ambiance of the CD and the whole ambiance of (*Fin), just kind of like relinquishing my brain and my desires, so whatever came out just came out, and I think it turned out fantastic, amazing. In the future, I would love to get my hands on the other seven tracks and hear what those sound like as well, but I have no idea what I sang. It was an amazing process, and in my opinion it just turned out incredible and an experience I’ll never forget.” "This is one of the most personal songs, I felt like a weight was lifted off when I finished writing it next to the library in Richards Coffee shop in Winter Haven, Florida. The song tells of four overarching stories that effected my faith in Christ growing up. The first is of an unfulfilled ‘prophesy’ that was given to William and Mary in Winter Haven, Florida (they know, I know, & God knows). The second is an autobiographical tale that happened to me on Ridge Road in Stevensville, Michigan. I was 5 years old and I walked down our long driveway and had it out with God and the devil. I remember telling them both to leave me alone, I was confused and wanted neither of them. The third is of a ‘missionary’ who abandoned his wife and children to ‘help’ others, it only ended in hurting everyone around him, he did more damage than he could ever repair in this lifetime. Maybe he has changed, maybe he has stayed the same. The final story is of Billy Burke, a… healer? A… mystic? I am not sure, either way I saw OZ, I watched the curtain pulled back. I was left in a spiral of disbelief. Maybe he has changed, maybe he has stayed the same. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.