Spencer LaJoye grew up as one of eight in a family of musicians in rural Southwest Michigan. At the age of 5, Spencer picked up a violin and pursued classical music until college, when they swapped their bow for a pen. Spencer wrote their first EP as a closeted queer kid in a historically conservative Christian college while pursuing a degree in theology. Spencer’s songwriting and theologizing became tools of self-empowerment amid a culture of shame. Now, an outspoken nonbinary bisexual, Spencer’s goal is to foster a life-affirming community through music and to “bring people to church” at their shows.
LaJoye thought they were writing “Plowshare Prayer” for an upcoming prayer service at a local church where they worked. “But I felt like such a fraud because I hadn’t actually ‘prayed’ in years,” LaJoye recalls. “There I was, working in three churches at once, knowing in my gut that my time was coming to walk away from church work altogether. My body kept giving me signals I was ignoring because I so loved these communities.” They chose honesty and started writing with a simple premise: What would a prayer sound like if it was used as a balm rather than a weapon? A plowshare instead of a sword? “I quickly learned the song wasn’t just for one church,” LaJoye explains, “It was the grandest and rawest outcry from my own soul at a pivotal moment. And it was heard by kindred crying souls all over the world.” After recording a one-take video of the song on a laptop in their kitchen, Spencer shared it to Facebook, expecting their friends and family to respond. It has since been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, been shared among communities around the world, and connected LaJoye to countless individuals and their personal stories. “This song has changed my life, and so have the people it’s led me to.”
Explain the title of your album/single.
There’s a well-known Bible verse in the book of Isaiah that talks about nations beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. It’s this gorgeous image – this dream – of a future in which things that were once used for harm are made into tools used for growth and flourishing. Prayer can be, I think, a powerful spiritual practice. But I’ve also seen and experienced it being used as a weapon. It can be used to short-circuit grief, devalue our bodies, or re-closet us. Basically, prayer can be a means of trying to fix things about other people that make us uncomfortable. So I went into writing this song with a simple curiosity: What would a prayer sound like if it were used as a plowshare instead of a sword? The result is a “plowshare prayer.” Like a plowshare does with the earth, the song is meant to break us open (rather than break us down) and help us grow.
Do you start off with the music or lyrics first? Why?
It’s more of a dance than a linear process. Lyrics will often come to me while I’m walking (I think it has something to do with both brain hemispheres integrating when we walk). With “Plowshare Prayer,” I was out walking my dog when my favorite lines of the song came to me: I pray that if you go all day being brave, that you can go home, go to bed feeling safe. At that point, I always go to the guitar or piano and develop a progression and a groove. If I have some lyrics I want to work with, I can massage them into a melody that belongs with that accompaniment. After that, it’s just a matter of writing more lyrics and more melody (that’s the part that can feel less like pure inspiration and more like craft). “Plowshare” was unique because I had lyrics and an accompaniment, but I never really wrote a melody. I ad libbed it when I sat down to record my first voice memo of the song, and that’s more or less the melody that stuck.
Tell us about your favorite show you’ve ever played.
When I was a senior in college, I released my first full-length album. The day of the release, my best friend spent hours converting our church’s indoor construction site (a lobby under renovation) into a music venue complete with a stage, lights, sound, seating, and a merch table in the back. My community showed up like I was actually somebody. I played the whole album start to finish on this stage and in this room that was only there for one night – would only ever be ours. People sang along, my banter was locked in, and at the end of the night, my older sister even came up to me and said, “When did you get funny?” The whole thing was magic and more connected than I’d ever felt. I’ve had great shows – bigger shows, sparklier shows, unforgettable shows – but that one felt like the real start of something.
How do you feel your coming out journey plays into your music?
I don’t have a lot of experience “in the closet,” per se, because as soon as I’ve come to terms with something about myself – as soon as I’ve known – I’ve been ready to tell people. I tend not to keep myself to myself (which is honestly a privilege). So my coming out journey is marked less by moments I leave a closet (or tell someone) and more by moments I notice the closet I’m in to begin with. And you can trace my songs back to when I never knew there was a closet at all. My earliest songs in high school were Christian worship songs. They become more autobiographical in early college as I become a more differentiated person. They get moodier in late college as I become less and less comfortable in my own skin and context…which is when I finally saw my closet and came out as bisexual. The songs get angry in grad school when I start breaking down the theologies that ever made me feel wrong or invisible. Most recently, my songs have had a freedom about them as I’ve noticed another closet (the gender binary!), taken on a new name, and shed some old belief systems. All of that is to say, my music is a pretty good diary of my evolving understanding of self. You can hear the closets enclosing around me or crumbling apart.
Is there a professional “bucket list” item you would love to check off?
I want to be on the stage at Red Rocks and hear that amphitheater full of people sing back at me. I daydream about that. In summer 2018, I saw Brandi Carlile on that stage for her By the Way, I Forgive You tour, and at the very end she had us all sing “Amazing Grace” together. Except we sang one verse in the plural: Through many dangers, toils, and snares, we have already come. ‘Tis grace has brought us safe thus far, and grace will lead us home.” You have to imagine that amphitheater full of queeros and hippies with our arms around each other, after the last few years we’d had (we didn’t know what was coming), singing those words in solidarity. It was powerful from the back of the audience. I wonder what it was like from the stage.