20 Signs of Life From 2003

Steven Delopoulos’ familiarity with the stage extends well beyond his years fronting the now-defunct CCM alt-rock group, Burlap to Cashmere. “I was a theatre major in college at Marymount Manhattan,” he explains. “It was an acting college out in New York. But, yeah, my first love was musical theatre.” This little revelation comes as no surprise. Delopoulos has just finished pointing out that his new solo effort, Me Died Blue, was originally conceived as a stage play.

“The album was originally supposed to be a 1970s, '60s-based play, full of different characters—I was digging out all those old records. And I wanted to put it on stage, but I didn’t. It just turned into a record, which is fine.”

Me Died Blue, a boisterous and deeply moving blend of acoustic folk-pop and Delopoulos’ beloved traditional Greek music, analyzes the human journey in all its complexity and ambiguity, through the eyes of the hurting. From the impoverished lady upstairs who “squints her eyes at bills galore” to “the billionaires hung on the streets for the stars,” all of the characters in this drama are swallowed up in death’s ominous shadow.

All too aware of life’s brevity, their journey becomes a quest for some kind of light, which they hope to find—preferably before they reach the end of the tunnel. According to Delopoulos, the record’s theme of redemption is bundled up in the closing track, “People Come And Go,” a hymn-like ballad of quiet suffering and hopeful resignation.

“It’s a song about the shadowy area of life, not here, not there, not in light or darkness, but behind the light, stepping outside and looking at the whole light-and-darkness process, only to crucify the third eye and start over.”

However, much like in Charlie Kaufmann’s bizarre, wonderful script for the Spike Jonze-directed Adaptation, Delopoulos has written himself (as the artist) into his own drama. On the opener, “Another Day,” he sings, “But I’m the worst than most of you / I write these words to fill some shoes / Pay some tolls, cheat some dues / Watch my words from far away.” Later in the record, over a jaunty track called “Rocky Boat,” we hear him intone, “I was on that rocky boat / Trying to sing and catch my note / But my face turned blue and green / Oh, the ocean, big and mean / But God is here and God is there.”

In the final analysis, art becomes, for Delopoulos, a vehicle for fleeing the darkness and capturing some taste of the divine—that warm, elusive, beckoning glow.