Music without guardrails

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 2nd.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a conversation with Luke Bower about his first full-length release since his 2024 EP Man on Fire.

MAST: By the time that Luke Bower turns 24 in December, he’ll have completed a tour in support of his new album, Dopamine and Jesus. WORLD’s music critic, Arsenio Orteza, got Bower to open up about the making—and meaning—of his music.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Luke Bower grew up in Boerne, Texas. His family attended church, and he attended a Christian school, acquiring what he calls “head knowledge” about faith in Christ. It was this knowledge that would later allow him to work Biblical references seamlessly into a song such as “Necessary Fault,” which alludes to Paul’s “thorn in the flesh.”

MUSIC: [“Necessary Evil”]

But another reason that Bower can identify with such Pauline language is that he himself has experienced “thorns in the flesh.”

BOWER: Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always just randomly got extremely sad. I don’t know why. I remember going to my dad, and I’d say “I have bad feelings,” like “Help!” And it seemed to only get more intense, and that, like, dark spot seemed to get darker as I grew up.

Bower’s head knowledge, in other words, wasn’t much help during these periods. This crisis gave rise to his new album’s title and its title track.

MUSIC: [“Dopamine and Jesus”]

One night, during his first year of college, the crisis came to a head. He’d been on a pre-med track, but he realized that a career in medicine wasn’t for him.

BOWER: I talked to my parents, and I said, “I just want to do music.” And they gave me the hard No, like “That’s crazy.” I don’t blame them for that because they didn’t know that I did it. And I just remember there was this period of time after that where I was just at home, just kind of spiraling out, realizing I was never going to be able to do my dream, I guess. And that was the first time that I really got, like, actually suicidal. Long story short, I called out to God for, like, the first real time, in that moment, and, you know, I think he showed up for me there because I’m obviously still here.

It’s important to note that when Bower first signed to a Christian label, he was told that he had to make formulaic CCM at the outset if he wanted the finances and clout to do what he really wanted to later. He went along at first. Then he didn’t. There’s certainly nothing formulaic about either his debut, the EP Man on Fire, or Dopamine and Jesus.

BOWER: When we came in for this, I’m like “I want to leave a mark that’s different than other stuff. I want something that sounds like something that hasn’t been made yet. So we really dove into finding everything that was kind of weird, pursuing every weird idea just to see if it worked. So we just lived really creatively, tried to make all of the sounds, like, match the words.

What Bower has come up with could be called “Christian music without guardrails.” Consider the way that he ends the sides of Dopamine and Jesus’s vinyl edition. Side one’s closer is called “Spirit”:

MUSIC: [“Spirit”]

Side two’s closer is called “Truth”:

MUSIC: [“Truth”]

If you think they sound similar, you’re right—they’re the same song.

BOWER: There’s something in Christian music that I really don’t like. Everything’s really hype all the time, and it’s like “Young people, everyone come, like, dance at this concert and just be happy the whole time.” And it’s just not how life is. So I feel like a lot of people are going to that and being let down when it gets hard. So, basically, that’s a test, where “Spirit” is the hype one, and you don’t even really hear the words because it’s just faster and more like you just want to feel good. And “Truth” is the same words, but you can hear it because it’s pretty much only words.

After our conversation, I realized that while I’d asked Bower about his relationship with Jesus, I’d forgotten to ask about dopamine. So I asked via email, and this, in part, was his response: “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to control dopamine. I’ve gone to therapy, taken meds of various kinds…nothing really worked. These days I recognize it as something I can’t control. It’s the lack of control I have of it that earned [it] its spot in the title of the album. Both faith in Jesus and my mental state are things that I cannot control. […] Like the air in my lungs and the blood passing through my heart, these things are on the move. That movement is what we call life.”

MUSIC: [“What It’s Like Believing”]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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