Like jumbo shrimp or civil war, "Christian rock band" can seem like an oxymoron. After all, rock and roll has always been the devil's music, and Jesus surely wouldn't approve of the sex-and-drugs lifestyle.
So why is the Christian band Flyleaf playing on this year's Family Values Tour with Korn, Deftones, Stone Sour and Bury Your Dead? Did some booking agent make a terrible mistake?
Actually, it's a match made in heaven, according to Flyleaf singer Lacey Mosley. "Everyone's real cool with us," she says. "The thing that separates us mostly, maybe, is just that we're sober."
Don't expect any Bible-thumping from Flyleaf. The band's single, "I'm So Sick," is a good example of its aggressive sound, full of stormy guitars and half-screamed vocals. The album, produced by Howard Benson (Papa Roach, My Chemical Romance, P.O.D.), features plenty of dark-hued lyrics: "All my efforts to clean me/Leave me putrid and filthy," Mosley sings on "Perfect."
Speaking by phone from a tour bus parked in San Antonio (the band is based in Belton, about a two-hour drive north of there), the 24-year-old Mosley describes a rough childhood. She bounced from town to town with five siblings and a single mother, herself a struggling musician. At 10 Mosley was dabbling in drugs, she says, and by 12 she was slipping into addiction.
"I had a death wish," she admits. "And little by little, the opportunity for harder drugs came as I got older. It didn't matter to me; I would do anything just to get high."
Initially, Mosley worshiped at the temple of hard rock: Type O Negative, Stone Temple Pilots and Pantera. "When I heard that dark sound, I remember thinking it was a whole new world of art," she says. "They described the negative part of me, the hunger for something different, the frustration with the monotony of life and abuse and whatever."
As for God, she wanted no part of Him. "I hated Christianity," she says flatly. "Everything I had seen of Christianity was just used to judge people and to be holier-than-thou."
Mosley's religious conversion came on a day when she planned to kill herself but found her plans thwarted. She won't go into details but says, "I had to see a miracle for myself. And that's what I think it is for everybody. I can tell you my story, but unless you experience something for yourself, you're not going to believe it."
Apparently, Mosley and her band mates (drummer James Culpepper, bassist Pat Seals and guitarists Sameer Bhattacharya and Jared Hartmann) aren't the only straight arrows on the tour. Mosley won't name names, but says she's pleased to have found a few other kindred spirits.
"They really respect us for our positions," she says. "If we make other choices that go against what God put us here for, I totally believe it would be all over."
