When Harold and Doug approached me about releasing and recording old songs from the band, I was torn about the idea. “Strip” illustrates the main reason for that.

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On the one hand, I like the song’s music a lot. It rocks, and we were a better band than I remember. Sure, there are some obvious influences — for example, you may hear Stevie Nicks’s “Edge of Seventeen” in the guitar part (though I was aiming more for Pat Benatar’s “Get Nervous”) — but it has its own flavor. I can’t think of many other songs that sound like it.

And, though I’m not a huge fan of my voice, our mixer, Marc DeSisto, made it sound pretty damn good — certainly much better than it did on the tape. Magic!

On the other hand, the message embarrasses me a bit.

Part of this is because, ironically enough, I’ve morphed into the target of the song, and, as such, it seems mostly silly to me now. But I’m also a bit annoyed by how overwritten and overdramatic it is: “Slit my throat and watch me die in your vanity”? Oh, please.

Where did all that Sturm und Drang come from?

I would love to say that the song was my reaction to the New Atheists, as their aggressive anti-religious stance would have explained the song’s combative tone. But since “Strip” predates their work by at least a decade, that can’t have been it.

My suspicion is that I was awash in the Church’s rhetoric against “secular humanism,” especially in the anti-evolution world (which took me a surprisingly long time to get out of). Secular humanism was presented as a virulent influence, especially in schools, chipping away at the (alleged) Christian foundations of our society and leading our nation inexorably toward a godless, animal, and thus meaningless existence.

All this means that “Strip” feels to me like an anthem of white evangelical proto-grievance, which has since been perfected as so many white evangelicals fight to shore up dominance in an increasingly not-evangelical-Christian country. (Exhibit A: Project 2025.)

If The Reign had been a more blatantly Christian band, I might have declined when Harold and Doug recruited me to help memorialize our old songs. We were making a transition, though, trying to move from a “Christian band” to a “band that happens to have Christians in it” (like U2, we might have said… lol!).

And that means that we have a few songs that I’m still pretty proud of — including, even, some songs that are at least ambiguously, if not explicitly, Christian.

The Liner Notes

Here are the lyrics, if you’re interested.

Written by The Reign.

• Greg Kemble: Lead vocals, guitars
• Curtis Holtzen: Bass
• Doug Lada: Drums
• Travis Sheets: Keys
• Dave Hackbarth: Recording engineer (RIP, Dave)
• Marc DeSisto: Mixing engineer

Top photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

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Better Late than Neverland is available on vinyl, CD, and digital download through The Reign Store. It’s also available for purchase digitally through Amazon and iTunes (through Apple Music).

The album and individual songs are available to stream on YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and other streaming services. (You can find them on YouTube, too, but if you’re not a Premium subscriber, it will serve you ads….)

lyrics and Liner Notes

(I’ll update this list as I complete blog posts…)

Side One	Side Two
Strip: Lyrics  — Liner Notes Long Shadow: Lyrics — Liner Notes	Wall St. Wisdom: Lyrics — Liner Notes