Out of the Shadows

Some fragmented thoughts on loneliness, Spencer LaJoye's stunning new album, freshly fallen snow, the beginning of Lent, and a prayer for gratitude

Feb 16, 2024

Friday, February 16
Grand Rapids, Mich.

A couple of years ago, I had a breakthrough in a spiritual-direction session. Since childhood, I’ve often felt lonely. Sometimes I’ve regarded that loneliness with anger: Why wouldn’t loneliness leave me alone? Couldn’t it just go away?

As I talked with my spiritual director, this thought arrived: What if I stopped trying to fight the loneliness? What if I welcomed it as a companion? Could I learn something from my loneliness? Might it even become a friend—a sometimes annoying, occasionally unwelcome, yet nonetheless beloved friend?

I held that thought close, sharing it only with a couple of my dearest human friends. Not long afterward, I saw an Instagram post by the singer-songwriter Spencer LaJoye, who performed their deeply moving “Plowshare Prayer” at Evolving Faith 2022. Spencer was trying to raise funds for their next album, and they were trying out a “sponsor a song” experiment: In return for a contribution, you’d get to glimpse rough drafts and hear early takes of one track. I was in.

Soon, Spencer emailed me. The draft lyrics included these lines:

I summon her with lilies
Put some Kleenex in the pew
Close my eyes and hum Amazing Grace

I see her in the doorway
And it feels just like the truth
Come closer, come on, cover me in gray

Was it happenstance? Was it providence? The “her” in the song is loneliness. And the song I sponsored, Spencer informed me, was entitled, “The Art of Feeling Lonely.”

Today, Spencer released their wonderful new album, Shadow Puppets. “The Art of Feeling Lonely” is the third track.

A funny thing: Though I received the song as candid and earnest—on brand, if you’ve ever met me—Spencer meant it as self-deprecating and tongue-in-cheek. “I was poking fun at myself,” they told me when we spoke last month. Most of Shadow Puppets was written in autumn and winter—times of year “when I could revel in my own sadness and seek out my own loneliness. And I was like, ‘Spence, you’re being ridiculous. Don’t do that.’ I think it’s so funny, because I am literally throwing a funeral for my happiness, and loneliness shows up at the door, and they’re like, ‘Are you sure?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, you and me, babe.’”

Spencer thought it was delightful that I’d heard “The Art of Feeling Lonely” so differently. They’d written the song as a mirror. Turn a mirror toward a different person, and it creates a different reflection. Every songwriter must reckon with the reality that each listener will bring their own experience and their distinct ear. “I have to let people love what they love for whatever reason they love it. With these song-babies, with these children—it feels like I’ve been raising them and they’re going off to college and they have to represent themselves. They’re going to make their own impressions. I have to trust them. I can’t stop them from dating a theater major,” Spencer told me. “They are living things.”

The gorgeous entirety of Shadow Puppets bears such generosity and good humor. Like Spencer, who is a wise-beyond-their-years 30, it is quirky and gentle, unusually thoughtful and unfailingly hospitable. The whole album feels like a twelve-part pep talk for the slightly melancholy—twelve exquisite sighs of solidarity, twelve takes on the plight and possibilities of being human.

On the song “Serial,” Spencer asks, “How does it feel to be alive?” In another voice, that weighty question might come tinged with threat. But in Spencer’s, which can be both achingly sweet and beautifully sad, the question is cast into the air to flutter, like a newly unfurled butterfly trying to make sense of its own wings.

Throughout the album, Spencer’s ethereal voice and shimmering instrumentations can give the impression of effortlessness. Listen closely to the lyrics, though, and you’ll begin to sense just how hard-won their wisdom is. That resplendent grace? It was forged through arduous life experience.

The last shall be first: The album’s first (and title) track was the last to be written. Often, when Spencer writes, they’re immersed in others’ songs—lately, the indie-pop band MUNA as well as folk-pop artists including Noah Kahan and Lizzy McAlpine. One night, Spencer was in the kitchen, listening to indie-rock supergroup boygenius, another favorite. “The lights were off,” they said, “and there were random shadows on the walls and on the floor.”

Those morphing shapes inspired “Shadow Puppets,” a clever and winsome meditation on fear and perspective. It could be offered equally to a kid who is scared of the dark and to an adult anxiously wrestling with their identity. “A shadow so big, a shadow so wide/ It’s a darkness I could fit my whole self inside/ She says, ‘Just pull away, away from the flame/ Now it’s a shape you can make with your hand/ Just an owl coming to land/ Just a monster you can understand.’”

Three times, Spencer returns to this refrain, slightly tweaking the words on each visit. Gradually, they issue an ever more expansive invitation, reminding us of our agency and urging us toward another, braver look at whatever bedevils us. “When you’re making a shadow with your hand and you’re close to the light source, it casts such a daunting shadow,” they said. “But when you move further away, they become clearer. Now they make sense. Now they make a shape.”

Spencer’s gift for turning a common occurrence into uncommonly thoughtful reflection manifests again on “How Are You?”, which was inspired by childhood family dinners. “There are six kids in my family. My mom would ask us, ‘How are you? How was school?’” they recalled. “She wouldn’t really hear the answers and we wouldn’t really give adequate answers. We’d say, ‘Fine!’ ‘Good!’ And I just think about how we’re all doing that through our entire lives.”

On that track, Spencer stitches the dinnertime scene with another that many of us will know: the parent asking the adult kid to clear out the boxes of their childhood detritus. “When I go home, Mom is always like, ‘Can you sort through those boxes?’ And I’m like, ‘How are there still boxes?’ There are always more boxes!” they said. This album “is me trying to sort through boxes.”

Shadow Puppets is unquestionably rooted in Spencer’s experience as queer and nonbinary. “The Joker” discusses how “it hurts to be outed, so I out myself first,” while “Surgery” explores their relationship with their own body: “I’m coming back to my body/ I don’t love it yet but dammit I’m trying.” “I got top surgery almost a year ago,” they told me. “I was working really hard to love my body no matter what—and here I was, choosing to remove a part of it. What does that mean? It came from a very literal experience, but also I hope it applies across the board.”

Scattered throughout, too, are mementoes of religious faith—allusions to Hail Marys and Our Fathers, references to Jesus freaks, lines inspired by “Amazing Grace” and even the Sinner’s Prayer. Spencer grew up the child of a Catholic and a Presbyterian. Baptized and confirmed Catholic, they went to Mass multiple times a week while attending a Catholic elementary school. “I loved the high-church ritual and ceremony,” they said. “I kept folders with the different parts of the Mass, and I would just make booklets where I’d write out the liturgy.”

In high school, Spencer was that person who would hand out evangelistic tracts. After graduating from Calvin University, they helped to start a church. “I used to buy and sell conservative Christianity. I would tell my friends who came out to me that I could love them but not their lifestyle,” they recalled. “They laughed at me, because they knew I was gay too.” Spencer later attended the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, earning an M.Div. Today, they no longer identify as Christian.

What might be surprising, given this journey, is that Spencer tells this story with not even a bit of bitterness. Perhaps that’s a credit to their parents, both public-school teachers in rural Michigan who, as band and choir directors, have always made their classrooms a haven for queer kids. But it’s also a choice: “I don’t have capacity for animosity with my well-intentioned past. I can’t entertain resentment for it.”

Maybe, too, Spencer’s gracious spirit springs from their ability to see the divine all around them. “God is in everything,” they told me. “God is the energy in this conversation. God is everything that’s good. I used to have this prescribed image of God, and that limited me to seeing God in only so many places. Now that I’ve shed that prescription, that script, that lens, I get to look wherever I want and decide, Oh! That’s God! Snails on the sidewalk? God! And that’s cool.”

When I asked specifically about their current relationship with the Church, they said, “While I don’t consider myself a Christian, I feel really tender toward Christianity—and not an ‘ouch’ kind of tender, but sweet.” They can’t entirely explain why. Studying religion during undergrad and then going even deeper in divinity school “put me in a very empowered position when it came to anyone who might question my faith and my queerness cohabitating,” they said. “And then there was a fair amount of luck: When I decided to leave church, I wasn’t leaving because of harm. I was part of communities that were not causing me harm. In 2021, I was working in three different churches. I loved each of them to pieces, and I left on good terms. At one of them, someone told me, ‘Part of saying goodbye well is knowing that you’re always welcome back.’ And I do feel like I’m always welcome back.”

You can take the church kid out of church, but you can’t entirely take the church out of the church kid. Go to one of Spencer’s concerts, and you’ll unwittingly participate in a liturgical experience. “When I make set lists, I still organize them like a liturgy,” they explained. Different songs play the roles of different movements in a service—the sermon, the prayers of the people, the passing of the peace, even the eucharist: “I have a song called ‘Feast,’ so that’s kind of on the nose. If it’s not that, it will usually be a song about remembrance. I also have a part where the audience sings with me; the sing-along songs come after the eucharist.”

If there’s a track on Shadow Puppets that feels like outright testimony, it’s “Someday You’ll Wake Up Okay.” It moves from lilting reminiscence (“bedroom floor, 2008/ love the Lord your soul to save”) to tender empathy (“I’ll believe enough for you”), then builds to almost propulsive exhortation. “It’s possible. It’ll happen. You’re gonna wake up feeling better,” Spencer sings. “You won’t believe if it I tell you now/ Just entertain the possibility somehow/ You’ll never see it coming, never see it becoming...”

What a blessing—and what a benediction.

Spencer LaJoye’s Shadow Puppets is now available on all the major music platforms. You can also read more about them at spencerlajoye.com. You can find them on Instagram at @spencerlajoye.

I’m calling this photo “Fozzie on the Second Day of Lent.” Yesterday, it snowed several inches in the morning. The Fozz delights in fresh snowfall; maybe it’s gentler on his arthritic hips? But in the wake of the storm, the winds picked up, the clouds scurried across the sky, and the sun began to break through. The passing cars and the neighborhood dogs quickly got to work staining the snow. Honestly, it all felt right for the beginning of this season of penitence.

I’m feeling a bit behind. Some years, I’ve taken up a discipline during Lent. Others, I’ve set something down. This time around, I haven’t given it much thought yet. We’ve still got 38 days! Any ideas? If you observe, what are you choosing to add or subtract?

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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