#28, “Lord Let it Rain on Me,” Spiritualized (2001)

150 Favorite Songs: #28, “Lord Let it Rain on Me,” Spiritualized (2001)

I’m not religious. I was raised Catholic, but it didn’t stick. By the time I was thirteen, the thought “what if none of this is real” got in my head, and it seemed much more compelling than any of the things I’d been taught about religion, and so I pursued that line of thinking instead, and never really looked back.

I’m not even spiritual, in the sense of people who say things like “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual” to suggest that while organized religion doesn’t work for them, they believe in something grand and ineffable, whether it’s God or The Universe or, I dunno, crystals and astrology. When I look inside myself, I just… don’t have any of that. I have a car battery where my soul should be, I guess. I do not lie awake wondering about the mysteries of the universe, about what happens when we die. I can make up stories about those things, when I miss my dad or my dog or a friend who died, but they are only ever stories to me. (I like to imagine that there’s an afterlife that looks like the final episode of Lost, which seemed like a sweet and meaningful version of the afterlife to me. I never cared that much about what the smoke monster was.) I don’t know what happens after, and I don’t really think about it much. I’m not an atheist in the sense that I have a strong conviction that there’s nothing beyond this world, and I’m not a committed agnostic in the sense that I believe strongly that these questions are fundamentally unanswerable. (Show me a burning bush and I might change my tune, you know?) I just don’t think about them. I don’t find them interesting, or at least I find them less interesting than I find the X-Men, so given a choice of what to daydream about, I usually think about the X-Men rather than matters of the spirit. I recognize that this may say something about me, even if I don’t fully understand why seemingly made-up stories that purport to contain unknowable truths should be taken more seriously than made-up stories about people who can punch through walls. Whatever it is, I just haven’t got it.

But then, sometimes, I can play “Lord Let It Rain on Me,” and almost pretend.

Spiritualized, despite the band’s name, isn’t particularly spiritual. It’s certainly not religious. Mostly it’s space-y, a little psychedelic, sometimes garage-y. It’s interested in religious imagery, but also it’s equally interested in the iconography of sixties pop. The album from which “Lord Let It Rain on Me” comes is called Amazing Grace, and its first track is called “This Little Life of Mine,” even if it sounds more like The Stooges than something you’d hear in church; the second song is called “She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit),” a reference to The Crystals’ 1962 hit “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss).” The album doesn’t include the song “Amazing Grace” itself, but they’d recorded it as a free jazz tune a few years earlier, mashed-up with “The Star Spangled Banner,” a curious choice for a band from England’s West Midlands. Spiritualized’s ethos, such as it is, seems to mostly be that religion and pop music and outer space (both as it actually is and as it’s imagined in science fiction) are interesting things to trip on, and trip on it, it does.

“Lord Let It Rain On Me” trips heavily on religion. I don’t know why this song, of all songs, reaches whatever little flecks of spirit exist underneath all the soot and Oreos and whatever else are contained within me, but it does. There’s a yearning to it that makes me think about what it was like when I was little and believed in god because it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be a made-up story, that took it on faith the way that I took, like, the existence of Canada on faith—I may have never actually seen it for myself, or met anyone who had, but if grown-ups said it was real, why would I doubt that it was? And religion always felt like yearning to me.

So let’s start with the song. It opens with a drum beat, the bass matching it in time. The guitar starts immediately, and then J. Spaceman’s voice, issuing a weary-sounding prayer to the big guy. It’s quiet and humble, not worship music in any way I was raised to think of it, but rather intimate and resigned. But then the guitar goes from gently strumming single notes to ringing out with big chords, and the chorus comes in, and suddenly we have a choir joining their voices with the lead vocal, and the prayer becomes an ask, and a very simple one: lord, let it rain on me. let it all come down.

There’s a brief second verse, another quiet registering of a complaint calling out Jesus Christ by name for what we’ve been through in the two thousand years since he made his first appearance, and that exists in tension with the chorus that comes back up quickly, and then the song gets prettier from there, the music reaching a swell, synths and strings and wind and an organ all peaking. Those crashing chords come back like the ringing of a bell, like they’re puncturing the serenity of the choir and that plaintive request to be cleansed in the rain. But ultimately the chorus wins out, and we get it over and over again, eight times in a row, faster and less serene each time, until the ask for cleansing rain sounds just as strained and frustrated as the verses do.

And maybe that’s what I really like about “Lord Let It Rain On Me,” and why it scratches whatever meager spiritual thirst I do have—because it is a lament and a plea and an indictment all at once, and to the extent that I think about god, I think, “Man, this is all pretty fucked up, huh?” And hearing all of that in the swell of a rock song and in a gospel choir and the simplest plea, not for wealth or health or eternal life but just for rain, feels more or less how I feel when I do think about god. If I did see that burning bush, and it was revealed to me that there was a grand design, some Architect or Author to address, I wouldn’t really know what to say except that we aren’t doing so well here, all things considered, and I wouldn’t really want to ask a favor bigger than the rain.

I don’t believe in all that stuff, and I don’t think about it much. But when I do, it sounds to me like “Lord Let It Rain On Me.” Having access to that even just for three minutes and forty-four seconds at a time is enough.