mewithoutYou Deserve Their Flowers As One Of The 21st Century’s Greatest Rock Bands, And The Underrated Pale Horses Is A Big Reason Why

People said they were Christians, but they were also freaks. They toured in a 42-foot 1976 MC8 Charter bus that ran on vegetable oil. They crashed on people’s floors and ate out of dumpsters. They performed regularly at Cornerstone (the Coachella of Christian rock), released music on Tooth & Nail Records (the Geffen Records of Christian rock), and their CDs were carried in evangelical Christian bookstores. But when I first saw mewithoutYou in the summer of 2008, the band was traveling with people that looked to me like hippies, men in long dresses and women with dreadlocks playing bagpipes and accordions, dancing around the stage like a circus, chanting praise to Allah. When I spoke with lead singer Aaron Weiss after the show, his massively oversized t-shirt with a daisy on it soaked with sweat, he told me that our bodies are like these T-shirts, just costumes that we put on, and if our spirits changed bodies, it would just be like if he and I traded T-shirts. I nodded, bewildered. This was a Christian band that made no sense to me as a teenager raised on Sunday sermons and Wednesday night youth group services. This was something else entirely.