Top Ten Songs by Switchfoot

“‘Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.’ That’s the place where our new record starts,” Switchfoot guitarist Jon Foreman recently stated in a Columbia/Sparrow article. This humble approach to their music is what has made Switchfoot into the popular mainstream band it is today. Their music’s honest reflection of themselves and society in general earned them the 2005 GMA Artist of the Year Award, but the down-to-earth Christian band takes it all in stride.

A quick rundown of the Top Ten songs for Switchfoot reveals the underlying current of supercharged lyrics asking the hard questions, set against a background of the alternative pop/rock sound that fits right in with today’s music:

1. Learning To Breathe
The title song to their 2000 album, this song reveals the singer’s message of inner hope for the new day and need for Christ. This song helped propel Switchfoot’s music from Southern California to Christian youth across America.

2. Poparazzi
Also on the 2000 “Learning To Breathe” album, “Poparazzi” deals with the idolization of pop culture and Hollywood entertainers, exploring with a truthful eye the love/hate paradox our society has towards the celebrity culture.

3. Dare You To Move
Found on the “Beautiful Letdown” album (2003), this song quickly became a popular choice for Christian radio stations and fans alike. “Welcome to resistance” sums up the song nicely, discussing the desperation of the human existence.

4. Meant To Live
Another song from the 2003 “Beautiful Letdown” album. “Meant To Live” discusses how the trappings of the material world tend to bring out the inner desire in all of us to find a deeper meaning within our lives.

5. This Is Your Life
My all-time favorite song from this group, also found on the “Beautiful Letdown” album following “Meant To Live.” It focuses on everyone’s need to do something with their lives today, since yesterday is no longer within our grasp.

6. Gone
My second personal favorite of Switchfoot’s songs, seconded only by “This Is Your Life”, it also featured on the 2003 “Beautiful Letdown” album. An up-front look at the brevity of life, it holds nothing back in getting its message across to the reader. It serves to punctuate the lyrics of “This Is Your Life” by driving home how short a time we have to make something of our lives.

7. We Are One Tonight
Found on the 2005 “Nothing Is Sound” album (which earned Switchfoot their “2005 GMA Artist of the Year” Award), this song features the somewhat softer sound the group is capable of – if “softer” is indeed the word for it. It grabs the listener with unifying lyrics, identifying with the chaotic ups-and-downs of life.

8. Lonely Nation
Another Top Ten song from the 2005 “Nothing Is Sound” album, this song analyzes the seeming irreconcilable difference between the computer-addicted information agers and their disconnection with each other.

9. Stars
The third entry from the “Nothing Is Sound” album, this song relays the message of the Christian hope for life beyond death. Switchfoot examines the seeming emptiness of this life (echoing Jon Foreman’s words about everything being “meaningless”) and the hope for a better life when this one is “gone” (see song number 6).

10. Happy Is A Yuppie Word
My last choice from the “Nothing Is Sound” album and my Top Ten list. The title was taken from an interview with Bob Dylan, in which Mr. Dylan determines that words like happiness and unhappiness are only abstract ideals created by yuppies. As Jon Foreman puts it, this song is “that existential urban/suburban moment of thinking, ‘Wow, all this happiness that I’ve been trying to achieve is really just the yuppie version.”