Last week we talked about the portrayal of the Christian woman in What To Do With Daylight, the first album by New Zealand artist Brooke Fraser. Today is really a sort of part two, looking at the arc of her next three albums, and how they slowly moved away from that image. For the international audience, who maybe aren’t familiar, Brooke Fraser was a New Zealand artist through the 2000s and early 2010s, releasing pretty well-regarded folk albums with Christian themes. Her four major albums are What To Do With Daylight (2003), Albertine (2006), Flags (2010), and Brutal Romantic (2014). After that, she started releasing Christian worship music under her married name, Brooke Ligertwood, and really (for most people) dropped off the radar. Her first three albums, all soft feminine folk pop, reached the top of New Zealand’s album charts. They didn’t stay at #1, but they hung around on the charts for a surprisingly long time – up to sixty-six weeks for What To Do With Daylight. The final album, Brutal Romantic – the wild card – was an electronic synth album about the perils of social media. It was not well-received, peaking at #6 on the New Zealand charts and dropping off after just a couple months. It was honestly a bit of a grenade – it got a lot of pushback, especially from her audience of soft hippy Christian women.

I want to say off the bat that there are plenty of reasons not to like an album. Sometimes the music is bad. Sometimes you don’t like it. Sometimes it lands at an awkward moment in history, coinciding with shifts in taste or pop culture that put it out of favour. Lorde’s 2013 album Pure Heroine detonated the modern pop landscape, laying the way for people like Billie Eilish. It undoubtedly influenced the direction of 2014’s Brutal Romantic, which at times feels like an undigested imitation. There are without question other social and cultural forces going on with this album – but I specifically want to look at how it was received by Christian women.

As we explored last week, Brooke Fraser, throughout the 2000s, served as a model of contemporary Christian womanhood. Her albums constructed this vision of what a Christian woman was like – how she should behave, how she responded to things. Growing up in Christian community through this time, it’s hard to overstate how present her music was. People at church would walk around singing these songs to themselves. You would hear lines or hummed notes scattered throughout morning tea after the service, through youth group nights or family dinners. The people who go around today calling themselves tradwives – if they grew up in New Zealand, they grew up singing Brooke Fraser. Part of the negative response to Brutal Romantic, especially in the communities I grew up in, was how that album departed from a very specific model of femininity. I want to trace that model through her other albums, and look at how it changed for Brutal Romantic.

We discussed last week how Fraser’s first album, What To Do With Daylight, very much models the crossover between the submissive believer and the submissive woman. There are a bunch of songs on that album about being a sinner and submitting to God, and then a bunch of other songs about how her dreamy boyfriend puts up with all her flaws and faults. It is a starting point for Fraser – artistically and emotionally, it’s clearly a first album. It’s a point of departure rather than a terminus. What’s interesting is how Christian women latched onto that point of departure and then slowly fell off as Fraser changed as an artist, most dramatically with Brutal Romantic.

After the success of What To Do With Daylight, Fraser’s second album, Albertine, is focused on theology and social justice, which – makes it sound a little drier than the actual product. It’s still folksy and heartfelt, it’s just also a little less wide-eyed. It’s clearly made from a more mature perspective. On What To Do With Daylight, you had songs like ‘Saving the World’, where the work of improving the world around you is presented in this quite jaunty, fun little way. Saving the world is thought of as a “fun afternoon activity” – the whole song has this irreverent, jokey tone, where Fraser almost mocks people for not having solved injustice:

“And while we’re waiting we could try saving the world
Or are we storing that up for a rainy day?”

It is, respectfully, a little airheaded. Why haven’t we fixed things already? Gosh, isn’t it silly that nobody’s thought to make things better, or that nobody takes the time to just sort it out? Fraser is “anticipating” being old enough to try her own hand at fixing things (“it could be fun to try”), but also doesn’t seem to have any real idea of what the issues are. Her best pitch is that people are distracted by their busy lives:

“Seventy thousand things to ponder today
The most significant are bottom of the list”

In Albertine, that jaunty attitude is replaced by a brutal, wrenching encounter with poverty and genocide. The album’s title song, ‘Albertine’, is drawn from Fraser’s trip to Rwanda with World Vision, where she met a girl orphaned by the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The fun lightheartedness of ‘Saving the World’ seems – one, totally inappropriate in the face of this lived experience – but it also disappears in favour of a heartfelt promise of social action. Fraser commits to tell people about what she’s learned (“I will tell the world”), and layers in Biblical language:

“Now that I have seen, I am responsible
Faith without deeds is dead”

She cannot do anything other than speak up about what she has experienced. The song is wrapped in the power ballad style of Christian worship music, with soaring emotional intensity. It’s designed to be evocative, to call a response out of the audience. Brooke Fraser went to Rwanda, learned about genocide, and now she feels called by God to get you involved in fundraising. That’s what I mean by social justice and theology – this album is more proactive, more socially engaged, less drifty and juvenile than Daylight.

The language palette of Albertine is also much more cosmic than Daylight. Both albums tend towards fairly abstract imagery, being focused on relationships over any concrete sense of place. Common lyrics in Daylight are lines like “Your love makes me better,” in ‘Mystery’. They take place in the nowhere-space between two people, or between the individual and God – rather than, for example, in Tapanui. Albertine still has a fair degree of placelessness, but it draws more readily on this imagery of cosmic forces and powers. ‘Shadowfeet’ has stars and gravity, time and space. ‘Deciphering Me’ finds Fraser sitting under “flickering neons,” while ‘Seeds’ finds her at night, out in a field under the stars. Set against the context of the Rwandan genocide in ‘Albertine’, this increased focus on place feels like Fraser becoming more grounded. It feels like her coming to terms with the physical world, with its immutable history and brutish physical laws. There are still elements of the good Christian woman – ‘Hosea’s Wife’ is about the Biblical story of Hosea, whose wife is an unfaithful prostitute – you know, it’s a metaphor for the relationship between faithful God and faithless Israel, where the woman is the broken human and the man is perfect and the image of the divine. There’s still a thread of religious misogyny throughout this album – but it’s also immediately much more existential, much more socially driven and engaged, and I think on some level even furious, inasmuch as Christian women are permitted to express anger. It’s soft, feminine anger, but she’s not happy about how things are going.

The next album, Flags (2010), is even more grounded in the world around us. ‘Something in the Water’, the breakout single, has red wine and hammocks in summer. Songs are titled after literature and music festivals – ‘Jack Kerouac’ and ‘Coachella’ – and in some ways it feels like the sheltered Christian girl has finally discovered the world. If Daylight is innocent and loving, and Albertine is freshly shocked by world events, Flags is a work from a mature artist comfortable with life outside the commune. ‘Coachella’ is about the joy of the human encounter, with this fierce, vibrant love for complete strangers:

“I’m a warm bleeding heart
You’re a generous soul
And I love you though
I’d never met you before”

There’s a comfort with love here, in expressing it so freely towards a friend – or not even a friend, but an acquaintance or someone newly met. Love isn’t guarded or protected, jealously reserved for God and the boyfriend. It’s freely given, fearlessly, knowing exactly what it is and what it isn’t. The artist who wrote Daylight would have been fussing about not sending the wrong signals. The artist who wrote Flags is just excited.

At the same time, Flags retains those conservative religious attitudes that veer into misogyny. The song ‘Betty’ is in part about the futility of staying single:

“You’ve got a foolproof plan for a lonely life
You won’t be no one’s daughter and no drunk man’s wife
If a wife at all,
It’s a silly institution
Or so you keep insisting.”

Fraser mocks this woman’s desire not to get married: feminism and the attempt to break from patriarchal models are just a recipe for ending up miserable and alone. Betty has to keep insisting that marriage is a silly institution, Fraser suggests, because it’s not true. Betty has to keep up the lie, keep up this self-soothing reassurance that she’s doing the right thing. Fraser frames that decision as ultimately self-destructive isolation: “You’ve got a quick-snap lock on your cold cold heart.” Betty should chill out (or warm up) and get married. In concept, ‘Betty’ wants to be about the idea that – you know, we all get hurt by things, and you have to accept that as a normal, healthy part of life. If you try to withdraw from it all, you’re really only stealing from yourself. But the song wraps that emotional truth around the context of diverging from traditional gender roles. Someone somewhere maybe doesn’t want to get married, and suddenly we’ve got a whole song about how she’s lying to herself and cutting herself off from meaningful human connection. It’s misogyny, plain and simple. It can only conceive of a woman not wanting to get married by imagining that she’s engaged in psychic self-mutilation.

Flags is honestly my favourite album of Fraser’s commercial stuff. It’s by turns dark and mature and then summery and optimistic. It makes room for a broad range of human experience. It is still the work of a conservative Christian, but it has teeth. I think also these first three albums can be mapped onto a common trajectory of falling away from conservative Christianity. Daylight is this naïve, sheltered piece about behaving like the perfect Christian woman. Albertine has this deep, thoughtful engagement with global issues, and then – hey, suddenly Flags is when you realise that the Beat Poets exist. Brooke Fraser herself is obviously still a Christian today – she’s still releasing Christian worship albums under her married name. I’m not saying anything about her faith as an individual or her personal journey. It’s just interesting to me that the trajectory of these three albums can be mapped onto the journey out of conservative Christianity – out of the cultural ghetto of conservatism, into the wider world. In that framing, it’s very funny that the next album in Fraser’s career, her final major release, is a techno album about the perils of social media.

Brutal Romantic (2014) marks the end of Brooke Fraser’s career as Brooke Fraser. It is the end of that journey from conservative church girl to someone engaged with the modern world. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a good album, but it’s interesting. Certain concerns and stylistic choices clearly carry over from her earlier work: ‘Psychosocial’ is a hate song about unhealthy social media relationships, or parasocial relationships, as they would come to be called. It’s about having a deranged, fake relationship with celebrities online. I’ve always read the term ‘psychosocial’ as derived from psychosomatic, meaning in some sense delusional or all in their head. People think they have a relationship with Brooke Fraser, but they don’t. They are psychosocial – almost pseudosocial, social but psychotic. The howling chorus of ‘Psychosocial’, just that word repeated over and over, feels like it borrows some of its repetition from songs like ‘Crows and Locusts’ on Flags – there are traces of that sort of repetition in the song’s outro (and again throughout ‘Je Suis Pret’). It’s a practice drawn from worship music, from the meditative repetition of key lyrics or ideas. Also, Fraser has always built her songs around these very specific multisyllabic words. They’re often central words or concepts – they serve as a point of revelation or as the height of an idea. Sometimes they serve as the title of the song, as in ‘Arithmetic’, ‘Indelible’, ‘Deciphering Me’, and even ‘Albertine’. ‘Psychosocial’ is another instance of that principle.

As noted, the sound of the album is completely different – the light acoustic guitars are dropped in favour of synthesisers and layered, howling vocals. The language palette is also different – where Albertine was about stars and gravity, Brutal Romantic is about holograms. ‘Start a War’ has weapons and crowns, ‘Bloodrush’ mentions a post-mortem, ‘Magical Machine’ in quick succession talks about MRIs, ATMs, MP3s, IEDs, submarines, megaphones, wires, welding, and digital dreams. ‘Kings and Queens’ almost seems to borrow from the Matrix:

“We’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve got the energy
It took a little while to find reality
We’ve come a long way you know, living inside a dream
Waking to find that we are kings and queens”

It’s fair to say the album as a whole is probably a little undigested. It’s discovered Facebook and the internet, the twenty-first century, but it’s still figuring out what to do with it. In places it’s bragging, with an eye on the stadium, on crowds, on fame. It’s not just bragging, of course – the dynamic of the individual and the group is thematically tied to concerns around the internet. What does it mean to have hordes of people commenting on celebrity accounts on Facebook or Instagram? How do you deal with that new combination of closeness and distance, where unknown people across the world can send comments to the phone in your pocket? The sense of newness and overwhelm is most successful in ‘New Year’s Eve’, the album’s closing track:

“It’s been a loud year and I really need the quiet
It’s New Year’s Eve babe, and I’d really like to be alone.”

The silver and glitz of celebration clash against the human need for silence, for quiet reflection. What do you do about social media? Brooke Fraser doesn’t know, but she’d like a time out.

On the whole, Brutal Romantic is not really a Christian album, in the overt manner of all the earlier work. God barely gets a look-in – if He gets anything, it’s oblique. The album is also not concerned with the nature of the Christian woman. The first three albums are about a shifting sense of identity, about emotional development and growth. Brutal Romantic sets all that aside and asks – shit, what do we do with the internet? It ignores the question of identity except insofar as it intersects with being online. The internet is first, and the carefully crafted vision of womanhood is left somewhere else. We obviously can’t know the exact breakdown of why people didn’t like this album, but since the start of her career, Brooke Fraser’s albums were a roadmap to Christian womanhood. Brutal Romantic largely abandoned that function, and people were mad about it. I remember people feeling betrayed – their favourite Christian woman had given them an album that they didn’t feel they could model themselves on. They wanted songs about soft, feminine compliance. They wanted Daylight, and they didn’t like this new direction.

Looking back, the shift feels inevitable. It feels like the natural unfolding of that broader trajectory – like the natural final step. We move from innocence to experience, to engagement with the actual world out there, to the issues of the modern day. The conservatives don’t want to talk about things like that. They huddle together and look inwards. Brooke Fraser’s four albums move in the opposite direction – towards an increasing groundedness, towards actual lived history. When she started writing about Jack Kerouac and Coachella – it was only a matter of time. As noted, Brooke Fraser continues her musical career today under her married name, Brooke Ligertwood. She had kids, sang for Hillsong, left Hillsong – I don’t really know what she’s doing now. She’s still releasing church music – so much for my metaphor. Maybe it’s best put like this. If I wrote music, Brutal Romantic is something I would have written when I stopped going to conservative churches, and I feel like the Christians at those churches would have stopped talking to me over it as well.