Interview: 5 Score and Seven Years Ago - Relient K Washington DC

Relient K’s Matt Thiessen doesn’t insist the moon landing was filmed in a studio or launch into a diatribe about magic bullets or grassy knolls. His lyrical suggestion that an Abraham Lincoln impersonator died on April 15, 1865, was just something “dumb” he needed to fit an album title.

“It really was the last thing we wrote for the album,” Thiessen says of the opening track off “Five Score and Seven Years Ago,” which twists the Gettysburg Address to reflect five albums in seven years for the pop-punk band. “I didn’t care what the lyrics said.”

Such compositions without consequences aren’t the norm for the Grammy-nominated, gold-selling band from Ohio, best known for the Top-40 single “Be My Escape.” Discussing difficult conflicts in three-minute pop-song form, Relient K tries to fill albums with more than just 12 songs about a girl — although, on “Five Score,” there are some of those, too.

“It’s a good representation of where I was when we wrote the record,” says Thiessen, the band’s lead vocalist, guitarist, pianist and principal songwriter. “I was in the mood for some love songs.”

And in the mood, too, to pen “Deathbed,” a sonically, and spiritually, ambitious 11-minute epic about a cancer-riddled man reflecting on his life and, in the end, finding comfort in Christian faith.

“Not to be a hippie or anything, but life is all about that spiritual sort of aspect,” Thiessen says. “Nobody knows all the rules when it comes to that stuff, and it’s very gratifying to sing something from your soul onstage. We’re not prolific by any means, but it’s way more interesting.”

“Deathbed” is a sacred exception for a band whose universally interpretable lyrics — along with a punchy sound primed for Top-40 radio — have helped a crossover to secular audiences. Relient K is on Capitol Records, but keeps Christian presence and distribution through its initial label, Gotee Records.

Thiessen credits bands like P.O.D., Sixpence None the Richer and tour partner Switchfoot with showing that Christian artists didn’t have to be perceived as minor-league music makers.

“They’d write decent songs worthy of radio airplay that’d get stuck in a person’s head, and when someone would tell that person those bands were affiliated with Christian music, they didn’t care,” Thiessen says.

“When you say you’re a Christian band, people think you’re perfect, that you’re a kid who’s never been through anything. Our songs are chock full of me saying, ‘Listen, I’m a bigger screw-up than most of you out there, and I’m trying to learn from my mistakes.’ It’s not easy to go through life without conflict, and I think a lot of people can relate to that struggle.”