Switchfoot -- Learning to Breathe

9/10

Since I didn't listen to much Christian rock music in high school, I came into Switchfoot relatively late in their indie career...but I guess earlier in their overall career than most people. I won Switchfoot's third album, Learning to Breathe, from an awesome college radio show a year before I started co-hosting said awesome radio show. I feel like I discovered a lot of bands that spring of 2001 (the second semester of my Freshman year), but for some reason, I wasn't overly psyched to check out Learning to Breathe. I was really into punk rock that semester, and Learning to Breathe is only punk in the way it celebrates positive vibes over negative ones.
My brother and I actually both won an album--his was The Juliana Theory's Emotion Is Dead, so that was quite a musical weekend for The Nicsperiment brothers. We ended up trading the two CD's back-and-forth for months. They're both excellent albums, but I already reviewed Emotion Is Dead. Learning to Breathe is quite different, and boy did I need it. During that semester, I was starting to feel that it was time for me to stretch my wings and fly out of my parents' house. This was both an exiting and terrifying prospect, but I also found myself often sad that spring. I'd spent nearly my entire life sleeping in the same bedroom, surrounded by cane fields, and crawfish ponds, and the thought of moving to the big city and leaving all that behind gave me a strange sense of nostalgia in the saddest, most literal sense. I was already homesick before I left--things were just moving too fast. All of a sudden I was an adult, and seemingly leaving all these things behind. And then Jon Foreman sang Learning to Breathe to me.
Learning to Breathe is like a 40-minute, head-clearing, comforting musical exhalation. The opening track "Dare You to Move" is a slow-building explosion of noise and positive feeling that is so good, it was not only re-released on the band's major label debut, The Beautiful Letdown, three years later, but was a radio single for that album. This positive energy leads directly into the title track, which has one of the most pleasantly beautiful cathartic endings I've heard.
The band have adopted a slightly more acoustic, slightly less distorted sound here, which would usually bother me, but on Learning to Breathe, it pays dividends. Frontman, Jon Foreman, is able to get more creative with his guitar playing and chord selections, and his interplay with his bass playing brother, Tim Foreman, feels telekinetic. Jon is able to get a bit jazzy at points, even throwing some Spanish guitar scales in at moments, and his brother is talented enough to not only keep up, but get creative himself, while Chad Butler holds down the drums.
Meanwhile, the songwriting is phenomenal, with track after track embedding itself in listeners' memories, not because they're cloying, but because they're that good. The one outlier is "Poparazzi," a frustratingly insipid takedown of pop culture that becomes what it hates. In contrast, the other ten songs feature brilliant dynamics, an excellent flow, and fittingly, loads of space to breathe.
This is Switchfoot at the height of their powers. In 2001, Learning to Breathe was good enough to get me off my punk rock high horse. Experiencing its gentle power nearly 20 years after I originally moved out of my parents' house, as I sit in my office working from home every day, unable to go out or interact with anyone, Learning to Breathe still feels like a healing boon, a breath of fresh air.

Also, the playlist I made for that spring is rad. The one's I made for that summer and fall were, as well, but here's Spring 2001, which I titled, "Oh, yeah? Yeah!" (The other two are "Oh, yeah? Yeah!!" and "Oh, Yeah? YEAH!!!" I had an attitude that year!)


2000 re:think Records
1. Dare You to Move 4:08
2. Learning to Breathe 4:35
3. You Already Take Me There 2:42
4. Love Is the Movement 5:10
5. Poparazzi 3:20
6. Innocence Again 3:28
7. Playing for Keeps 3:44
8. The Loser 3:43
9. The Economy of Mercy 3:56
10. Erosion 3:22
11. Living Is Simple 5:19