My Mailbag: On The Music and History of Undercover

Dave Swaney has been coming to Undercover concerts since the early 1980s, he tells me. We were able to spend a little time together at our performance at the House of Blues in 2022 and over pizza he told me he had a lot of questions about the workings, music and history of Undercover over the years. He sent them to me not long after, and dammit Dave, I’m sorry it took me so long, but here you go!  

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To Ojo, Gym, Gary, Sim: Here are the rest of my questions I didn’t get to ask at the rehearsal. You can answer anything you want. 

Did Glorified ever have a vocal melody? 

I don’t know if we had done an instrumental before this song. I’m pretty sure I always intended to keep it an instrumental. But this was me being kind of cutesy, writing lyrics for an instrumental song and printing them on the sleeve. In hindsight it was a mistake from a practical point of view because the record label and distributor (and the band) immediately got a lot of complaints from people who thought their records were defective because the song didn’t have vocals but it did have lyrics. Many times I had to tell folks that it was intended that way. And anyway (and I can’t fault people for not knowing this), that’s not how vinyl/CDs/cassettes work. The song that appears is the mixed and mastered version of the song. There’s no way for a defect like that, where one CD has the vocals but another one doesn’t.  

Who is Alan from One of These Days? 

It’s actually Alice, a reference from The Honeymooners, and a take on a recurring line Jackie Gleason used to say in the show. We certainly didn’t at all intend the line in the same way Ralph Kramden did. It just happened to fit with the rest of the lyrics and I always loved that show.  It was just kind of a tip-of-the-hat tag on the outro.   

Did Joe play bass all along or pick it up for the later albums? 

I played bass from time to time in earlier bands Jim and I were in, so I had some experience although I wasn’t very good on the bass guitar. When synthesizers started showing up as bass instruments, of course as a keyboard player I was really interested in that – Gary Wright was the first artist I remember going exclusively to synth-bass. Well, there was Ray Manzarek first, but he used a Rhodes for the bass and on their records they used bass guitar in the studio, with The Wrecking Crew’s Larry Knetchel. 

The decision to switch to keyboard bass exclusively was made after Ric Alba left the group sometime between our first and second records. That was around 1982 or early ‘83, and by that time keyboards had become common in the low end (Devo, B-52’s, many others). Paring down permanently to four members also made managing the band easier and after all, there were fewer mouths to feed too. One more dynamic that informed the switch, was that being a keyboard player in a rock band, at least this kind of band wasn’t that interesting or challenging.  Doing keys and bass made life behind the rig a lot more fun, and while we didn’t intend it at the time, it did kind of set the band apart somewhat. All the keyboard and bass parts were always played live, never pre-recorded or sequenced.  

Did you ever have a band that you had “a crush” on, that you would like to be in if you weren’t already in Undercover? 

Well sure, every kid in a band has fantasies, I guess. I never really thought of myself as a technician on the instrument, a virtuoso. I was always star-struck by the giant keyboardists when I was growing up – Jon Lord, Rick Wakeman, those kinds of folks. I didn’t think I was good enough to achieve that level of proficiency, nor did I have enough money to put together those kinds of keyboard rigs. 

I was always pretty happy being in Undercover. I always liked writing songs and recording and producing, and the best way to do that was to be in my own band, I suppose. At first, I didn’t see myself mainly as just a keyboard player, so to do that in someone else’s band wasn’t my thing.  

But in recent years I’ve gotten to collaborate with a lot of other artists. I’ve done remixes of other folks’ tunes which also makes it more than just playing keys, and I have gotten to lay down some keyboard tracks for others just in that capacity.  But in the end, I didn’t ever wish to be in another band. If I had a fantasy like that, it would have been to have taken Undercover in different directions, to have been able to think bigger than Christian music. I have to say though, after seeing The Cure recently, especially on their new material, I absolutely could have seen myself coming up with and playing those Roger O’Donnell parts. They’re just perfect and right down my alley and if I were going to join another band, I wouldn’t have to think very long or hard about joining that one.  

What started the funk feel after Branded?

Funk?  Well, after Branded came 3-38-87, and after that Balance of Power and I don’t think any of that could be considered funk by any stretch of imagination. I think Devotion was much more groove-oriented, probably because I played bass guitar on all but one song and that informed the writing and recording. Second, we wanted a record that was not as dark as Branded and Balance of Power, perhaps livelier for lack of a better word, but I don’t think of any of those songs as funk. 

Is there a certain name you can give to the arrangements or progressions that make for the darker tone that came so much forward with Branded? Is it the chord changes? I’m not musically knowledgeable enough to describe how this is done. 

I can do no better than to quote Leonard Cohen on songwriting. “It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.” The songs reflect my landscape, and that landscape involves my inner life, my musical interests and understandings at that time, and what’s possible with technology, but mostly the inner landscape. I could tell you for example that I prefer exploring the richness of minor-key tonalities and modes, or that I love pipe organs and strings. But that’s just all part of my musical language and wouldn’t say much about those songs and that record and how it all came to be.

Lyrics for me are the last part of writing and the hardest part. I have to listen to the mostly-completed tracks and find out what the song is telling me, which is strange because we’re talking about a song I wrote in the first place. It’s really about patching in to, mining, plumbing the depths of my self to find out where this piece came from. It can take a while, requires patience, and that long process is its own reward besides coming up with a song. It is a mystery, and I guess like the first part of that Cohen quote says, “If I knew where the good songs come from, I’d go there more often.”

What songs do you think of as the band really firing on all cylinders? 

I’m writing this not long after having played a show in Nashville, and having played two shows last summer, our first in 12 years. Putting together set lists for those performances involved some conversation among us. A good chunk of our repertoire is not musically or lyrically interesting or relevant to where we are now in our musical and spiritual lives, and we have a good number of songs to choose from. One consideration is wanting to give audiences what they would like to hear without causing too much dissonance to one or the other of us philosophically. I wrote a whole blog post about this. There are just some songs we are never going to play. The one exception is probably God Rules, and I’ve come to peace with that. I think the lyrics are heinous, but it was an anthem at the time, important to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. We can never get through a set without people asking for it which is disruptive, so we just play it, usually early on, partly to get it out of the way, but we do understand its relevance to our history and so we’re happy to give that to folks. We play it gladly and proudly from that angle, even though it’s not where any of us are musically or lyrically. 

Photo by Chad Fenner

The rest of the set list is songs that we still genuinely like, songs that are still alive, that still have teeth, that have stood the test of time, that are no less meaningful to us today than they were 40 years ago. We took some liberties with arrangements at times too. During rehearsals when we were trying out different tunes, I found myself saying to the guys out loud more than once, “This is such a good song!” It’s nice as a more mature musician to leave the ego at the door and appreciate the songs, and Jim’s songs, and the other guys’ performance without any sense of competition, to let their beauty in. It’s liberating. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to get more specific than that. “Firing on all cylinders” could mean different things, as songs appeal to us all at different levels for various reasons. I think the set list speaks for itself and I will leave it at that. 

Nashville set list, Sep. 30, 2023 in Jim’s handwriting. Thanks to Jeb St. George for the photo.

What do you like about using keyboards in this style? Most similar bands don’t. Does it help make for a more grand style? 

I’m not the keyboard virtuoso, as I wrote earlier. I see my role in Undercover in a few different ways. First, I like to create layers and textures, moods, and ambiences. Second, a big part of what I do is supporting Jim who is a one-of-a-kind guitarist. I like to provide a sonic foundation for him to launch off and do what he does. Third, the fact that I am playing bass and keyboards together means I get to make musical choices about things like chord voicings and inversions, voice-leading, those kinds of geeky music theory things on which the songs are built. That keeps things interesting for me. 

What songs got the most surprising fan reactions? 

I don’t really feel qualified to answer that one, to speak for fans. I can say this, that we have been lucky to have made some records that moved the needle, that perhaps altered the course at least of Christian music a little, and what was deemed acceptable in those communities – our first two probably, and definitely Branded, maybe a couple others. Writing Branded seemed natural to me, just a normal extension of where to go next, but when we started playing the songs, live first and then when the record came out, we did get a lot of mail, phone calls, reactions to it that surprised me, as we saw how it surprised others and the impact it had. We really had no idea that was coming. I am forever grateful for the whole experience. 

What songs gave the biggest payback compared to how easy they were to write? 

Well, the music for God Rules was written in one sitting, in one pass from what I remember, in the one minute that it takes to play it. I wrote it on a baby grand piano I had in my apartment after we had played at Gazzarri’s on Sunset Blvd. the same night Black Flag was playing at The Whiskey right down the street. That one-minute session had consequences! So just in terms of notoriety, that one probably is right up there. But “payback” could also mean a lot of things.  There are songs that are still meaningful to me that I don’t remember giving me much trouble from a writing perspective, so longevity or durability might be a better measure. On the other hand, there are very few songs that I think about in terms of how easy or how hard they were to write, how long they took to birth.

What songs were difficult enough that finishing them felt like an accomplishment? 

The more I studied music formally, the harder it got for me to finish songs. But I noticed things slowing down for me leading up to Balance of Power, so maybe that was just me, and studying music made it worse. I don’t know. I’ve gotten pickier the older I get and the advent of MIDI and software provides too many options. My composition mentor used to tell me I was taking too long to write. My songs on Balance of Power were hard to get to where I wanted them, but I don’t remember Devotion taking very long to write. I am grateful to the band for putting their signatures on them and making them what they are. The hands-down winner of that question though is Line of Thinking from the I Rose Falling experiment. We did that record in my home studio, so we had unlimited time and didn’t have a record contract driving the schedule. I had the skeletal part of that one for years without it having been finished, and it wasn’t until we got into the studio that I was able to bring it home. Listening to the arrangements now, it’s easy for me to see why it took so long relative to where it started, just a sketch on an acoustic piano. I think it was worth it too. Jim has said in the past that it’s his favorite Undercover song, and that’s something. 

What do you still regularly do musically? 

My life is immersed in music!  I am so lucky that way too. I am on the full-time faculty in the school of music at James Madison University. I teach songwriting, history of rock and several music business courses to aspiring younglings. I’ve done remixes and studio work with other artists, and write as much as I can, whether I do anything with it or not. My Soundcloud page has a lot of those experiments and my blog too. I’m particularly proud of “Be Still My Child,” a song that appeared on a compilation record by Dan Barker. I’m always writing something, or tinkering around, noodling on some thing or another that may or may not end up on anything. 

The band is considering recording an EP, maybe 5 songs and I’ve been writing for that too. And we’re playing live a bit too! Almost everything I do revolves around a musical universe, and I feel very fortunate that way.   

Did the more punk stuff ever seem limiting musically or lyrically? 

Not the punk stuff per se. I already talked about God Rules and how I feel about that. We had some fun with Wait a Minute in the studio too although again, those lyrics are despicable, but musically there’s some cool stuff that’s counter-intuitive to punk. On Branded there’s Tears in Your Eyes. That one was influenced musically by GBH who I was listening to and found a little more interesting than the run-of-the-mill punk stuff. Again, my lyrics in that one are regrettable and antithetical to the overall theme of Branded (a couple of the others are too, especially If I Had A Dream). It seems looking back that I used the more punk-influenced numbers as an excuse to be extremist in the lyrics. Too bad because otherwise, some of those had potential musically. 

Connecting the dots between those extremist lyrics and what was limiting to us is that mindset, my involvement in extremist fundamentalist religion, which evangelicalism mostly is. Like many other artists, it’d be great if we could blame and rail on CCM, on Christian music, complaining about how we’re not really part of all that, but the hard truth is that we were, and we did it of our own accord. What limited us was those religious beliefs and the decisions we made because of it. It was a double whammy too, because the CCM infrastructure and powers that be were never going to (and still don’t) embrace where and who we were musically and culturally. We were never going to get any institutional respect or validation from Nashville. And we’re not Americana after all. These choices had consequences. 

I’m writing this just after the death of Shane MacGowan, listening to his songs and watching videos. His songwriting and impact were rooted in literature, folk song, the heritage of the Irish, larger world issues. What if we had taken a larger view of life and the world in our music and transcended, resisted or ignored the religious infrastructures altogether, not allow it to be the tail that wags the dog? What might things have looked like for us if we just continued to play clubs and bars and if we make it, we make it, and if not, we just keep playing clubs and bars and writing and recording? I think about this often, whenever I read or think about artists who have had that larger worldview and a business vision that can contain it. CCM cannot. I believe we were every bit as good a band as any that had commercial chart success. It was our religious extremism that drove business decisions and held us back, listening and taking advice and support from cult-leaders and wanting their approval. I have nobody but myself to hold responsible for those choices.

We would not have had to abandon our beliefs and faiths to do this. Plenty of mainstream artists are devoted and faithful and I admire those who have yet forged a mainstream path for themselves free of any religious trappings or associations. We would just have had to have been able to think bigger, think past it, see it for what it is.

Well, am I ungrateful? What about all the good that we have been part of, the people who tell us their lives have been changed because of our music? Would we have been able to make records if we had avoided the christian music infrastructure? My career today is a result of what we’ve done and accomplished, after all. I’ve made a living and raised my family on the band and on support from Maranatha Music when we were just getting started, on my work at Brainstorm Artists enabling other artists to make their music. All that experience on the road and in the studio along with my formal education has led me here, to educating and mentoring others. For these things I am truly grateful. And yet the question haunts me; what if we had been able to do all of that and more if we had made different decisions. But “shoulda’, coulda’, woulda’,” and here we are. They say the best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago, and the second-best time is now. There’s nothing I can do about the past other than to accept, appreciate and be truly grateful for the good that came from it, the friendships, brotherhood, and the music, and yet to take what I have learned and make different decisions now. I want nothing to do with CCM or any religious infrastructure and I have to balance that against good stewardship for the assets in my charge and for sharing and preserving the accuracy of this history. Otherwise, I am grateful to be involved in music every minute of my life at a secular university and to no longer be beholden to any kind of lyrical or ideological purity for a paycheck or a fanbase; to be completely and transparently true to who I am and what I believe.