“40x”

Track No. 6 — 3:30

“40x” is just one story in the life of Alex, a young person in the Beloved Arise community. This is a story about lavish love and the thriving that can come from community.

In December 2020, Alex reached a point of crisis in his mental well-being and sense of self-worth because of deeply painful exclusion from his church and doubts about his belovedness by God. He nearly lost his life to suicide. While in the hospital, the Beloved Arise community rallied to send him letters of affirmation – forty letters in all, just as Blake sings, imploring him to hold on.

Sometimes it takes a lavish reminder of belovedness like that to dispel the onslaught of unaffirming messages we can receive from our faith institutions, our families of origin, or the world around us. Alex left his unaffirming church and now attends a church that values his whole being. His mother Ashley says, “When we lost all of our support system, Beloved Arise was our support system. The beauty of the queer community has enriched our faith and given us a more beautiful view of God.”

In creating a song that reflected Alex’s voice, Blake sang into a vocoder – a device that multiplies a person’s voice into chords. He used this to “create the feeling of a gender-ful voice.” Like Alex, all queer and trans youth contain multitudes, as the queer poet Walt Whitman famously said.

“There’s a thread through this song about passing time,” says Blake. “In the queer world we hear the phrase ‘it gets better,’ which can get kind of kitschy, but there is a grain of truth. With the people around us, with communities in place, time can be something that carries us into a better place than where we’ve been.”

Song credits:

Written by: Alex Churchman & Blake Mundell / Vocals: Blake Mundell / Background Vocals: Julianna Zachariou / Produced & Mixed by: Quinn Redmond / Mastered by: David Wilton at Coalesce Audio