“Maybe every death is a beginning, castles falling back into the sand.”
It’s a shame that Bongo Chico won’t get any widespread attention—the music industry is just so fickle and image-driven and there’s simply not much cultural appetite for the debut solo album from the forty-something bassist of an alt rock band that peaked in popularity twenty years ago. A shame, because Tim Foreman’s benignly pleasant retrovibe music is just as catchy and peppy and slickly produced as any other moderately durable pop act going today.
Wearing his Beatles, Beach Boys, and Zombies influences on his sleeve (influences that brother Jon Foreman has always cited but which were never this apparent on Switchfoot’s albums or his folk-inflected side projects), along with a few flourishes pilfered from mainstay indie acts like the Shins, Vampire Weekend, and Cage the Elephant, Foreman delivers a dozen well-constructed songs that span the conventional stylistic range of such records: power pop (‘When You Walked Away’), garage rock (‘1995’), dance rock (‘Eh La La’), folk pop (‘Bottle’), ethereal piano ballad (‘What Happens Now’). I’ve listened to a lot of music and have hundreds of melodies and riffs ingrained in my DNA, so take it with a grain of salt, but there were quite a few instances where the influence from a specific track was so crystal clear that it was hard not to queue up the original on my mental turntable. I’ll refrain from listing them here because comparison is the thief of joy.
No big surprise, there’s a distinct Switchfoot flavor as well. What is surprising is that, if online album credits are to be believed,1 besides Tim, no one from Switchfoot plays on the record. (Who am I to say that I hear Jon singing on the chorus of ‘Eh La La’?) I have an ancient memory of some Switchfoot interview or podcast or vlog or livestream where—paraphrasing because I can’t find the source—Jon suggests that even though he is the primary songwriter for the band, Tim provides a crucial stabilizing force that gives their songs coherent identity and mathematical proportion.2 And I think that comment is proven true on Bongo Chico. All of these songs are carefully written to rise and fall and build tension and flow smoothly—or not, because sometimes an abrupt transition is the correct artistic decision.
It’s eminently pleasurable to listen to and helps clarify the critical role Tim’s played in Switchfoot all these years. Where it falls short is where the best Switchfoot tunes excel—the words. Tim sounds like his big brother. Not quite as good, of course—or he would have had a lead Switchfoot vocal prior to the one relegated to the 2014 b-sides collection The Edge of the Earth—but his backing vocals are a secret weapon on many of Switchfoot’s all-timers. But based on Bongo Chico and its trite lyrics of heartbreak and sentimentality and nostalgia and hippie dreaming, it’s clear that Jon’s the superior wordsmith, not only in terms of constructing linguistically interesting lines but in writing songs that dig beneath the pop-songs-need-words surface and examine the human condition and reward further inquiry with spiritual edification.
I doubt that Tim Foreman cares that much if people find him an inferior songwriter and singer to his brother. I mean, it’s kind of obvious, right? After thirty years a Lennon-McCartney dynamic would have been more apparent by now. And if there was shame in not matching up to one of the 21st century’s best singer-songwriters, then there’s a lot of musicians that should be ashamed.3 I suppose it’s possible that Tim helped write a dozen Switchfoot albums in absolute agony because he believed with all his heart that he could be just as successful as a solo musician and he expects Bongo Chico to shock the world and prove all the critics wrong and garner praise for him finally stepping out the shadows to spread his wings and fly all by himself—possible, but not probable. A more likely scenario is that he’s been writing songs like this for decades and the ideas were just incorporated into Switchfoot’s music and us fans never knew.4
At this point, Switchfoot has settled into a sort of baseline level of popularity where they’ll always be able to do a profitable national tour and the same groups of dedicated fans will come see them over and over. I like to think that Tim counts it as a blessing that he and his brother have been able to make a career of it. That he’s content to have this huge personal undertaking be a footnote on Switchfoot’s Wikipedia page because just imagine all the different paths life could have taken and he’s gotten to play bass and surf for a living for thirty years.
Switchfoot was once a major fad daring us to move and telling us we were meant to live for so much more and asking if we were who we wanted to be, now they’re a minor institution riffing on variations of those same themes. A band still trying to make the big time needs to treat every performance like the chance of a lifetime, but for Switchfoot, there’s absolutely no harm in letting Tim take center stage for a song or two. That’s where these songs will find a home, I think. Even some third-rate Switchfoot songs like ‘Take My Fire’, ‘Native Tongue’, and ‘Bull in a China Shop’ are absolutely delightful in concert. I can see songs like ‘1995’, ‘Eh La La’, and ‘Wrongside Right’ being excellent additions to the setlist. Switchfoot has already played ‘Eh La La’ on a livestream, so I would bet on it seeing the stage at some point.
Favorite Tracks: 1995; Eh La La; Rain Brain; Comeback.
1. Sadly, I cannot afford nor do I have the space to buy all my media physically anymore.
2. The closest thing I could find is an interview for the University of San Diego where Foreman says that if he wasn’t a musician, he would be “somewhere between a high school math teacher and a carpenter.”
3. I still entertain the idea that I could be a decent songwriter, but 99% of the time if I write a great song, I just need to listen to a throwaway track by Jon Foreman or Sufjan Stevens or Bill Callahan to whittle me down to size.
4. Speaking of behind the scenes, who among us ancients can forget when they parted ways with Sony and spent months trying to record a new album with a live webcam in the studio, incentivizing the entire band to goof off for the fans instead of make music? Good times.