Queer AND Christian? Semler’s Debut Album Offers Safe Space

Dispatch from a Sold-Out Show in Chicago

Semler headlines sold-out show at Chicago’s Sleeping Village.

I write to you this morning in the afterglow of a Thursday evening spent in a room full of fellow queer, spiritually-minded misfits working out their faith with rock chords and communal singing to an album that wasn’t even out yet. Leading the service, er, concert was Grace Baldridge, who performs as Semler.

As of Friday, February 21, they’ve finally released their debut album, Revival in My Mind, which chronicles Grace’s journey from the intimate, home-recorded confessions of the 2021 EP, Preacher’s Kid, to this fully-produced and dynamic collection of songs. Folks who bought tickets to the sold-out show at Chicago’s Sleeping Village got a digital advance copy of the album about a week ago, and this crowd had already committed the lyrics to memory. One fan even made a homemade book of lyrics that they passed to Semler during the show. Grace said it reminded them of the church service leaflets they had to fold for her father, who was an Episcopal priest.

Like so many others in that crowd Thursday night, I find Grace to be a a kindred spirit who has helped me reconnect with a Higher Power after unlearning, or yes, “deconstructing,” the childhood indoctrination of Conservative Christian voices that told me a relationship with God was irreconcilable with my queerness.

Lately, I’ve been identifying with Grace’s video diaries about moving past simply reacting to the nasty attacks from Christian Nationalists, which grow more and more cartoonish by the day, to finding hope and solidarity in this community of other queer folks who refuse this false dichotomy that you have to be a Christian OR a queer, but you can’t be both.

Over the past four years, Grace and I have done interviews via Zoom, and we’ve even talked on the phone (off the record) a few times, but this was my first time meeting them in person. It felt instantly familiar for both of us as we connected before the show to talk in-depth about Revival in My Mind. Grace also shares how their life with their wife, Lizzie, and their 14-month old daughter, Frances, flies in the face of those looking to demonize queer people.

(This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Subscribers can check out the full recording of our conversation at the bottom of this post. It comes complete with details on how Grace and I respectfully launched high school PR campaigns to recruit members of the opposite sex to date us. You’ll also hear us remembering late CCM icon Carman’s ample chest hair — a discussion that wasn’t quite fit to print.)

Hunter Kelly: Hello, hello. I'm here on location in Chicago with Grace Baldridge, a. k. a. Semler. Welcome!

Grace Baldridge: Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Good to be here.

HK: We're in a bagel restaurant in the Gayborhood, and there is some House Music playing in the background, which I feel is appropriate.

GB: Yeah, I needed it to pump me up this morning. I needed a bagel and some House Music to get ready to release this record.

HK: Revival in My Mind is the record. This is your first full-length album, and I gotta say I've been loving all of the lead up you've been doing — how you've been letting us see what's going on in your video blog. One of the vlogs that really spoke to me was how you were talking about working out the title and concept of the album, Revival in My Mind, which is how we are taking care of our minds as queer people in this, let's just say it, fascist environment that we're in. And you said something about, “I can't let that fear be the driver in my head.” How are you living that out on a day-to-day basis?

GB: Imperfectly, I mean some days are better than others, but I think about that a lot — of who's driving the car, which is my mind and how I meet the world. I can acknowledge that things are scary and sad and disheartening. And it's not every day, but if there is a way for me to not let those feelings be the way that I drive the car, then I think that I will receive a lot of beauty in going out into the world and meeting new people and seeing that there is actually a lot to be hopeful for.

I believe firmly that hope is queer culture and that there are queer people and trans people in the future. I'm just trying to get to that future and I think the optimal way me to do so is not moving out of fear, but rather moving out of a lot of hope. And again, some days are better than others, but that's what I'm trying to cultivate with this record and with the current place I'm in in my life.

HK: Well, I am so looking forward to this show tonight, and you're playing Chicago and Nashville on this run. I know that I'm definitely anticipating being in a room full of [queer] people who, if they're listening to you, they have some kind of spiritual component in their lives. It just feels like an act of defiance to come together as community in this time.

GB: I think also it's so dehumanizing to paint the queer community with this broad brush of like it's impossible for these people to connect to God or divinity or faith. I think it's actually a way that we're seeing forces and people try to just make us feel so othered to people who might not know a queer person in their life, like, “Oh, they're godless.”

Now, I want to be clear, if you're godless, I'm gonna fight for your right to have love and freedom and all that stuff. However, if you have Jesus and love and God and faith, and these things are important to you, then I think it's important that we are putting out music and art and expressing that we look for higher love as well; That we are just not so different. I think that’s really what it is.

When people make this false dichotomy of Christian or queer, I want to be part of people representing that that is just far too simplistic. And if you can understand the nuance of a queer person, then I think that you can understand each other a lot more. And I think that breeds empathy and understanding and just helps us move in the right direction towards inclusion.

HK: “Little Light” is the song on this record that most indicates how I'm trying to not look away from what's happening. I’m a news junkie, but also part of it is self-preservation. Like, I need to keep up with what's going on. And I need to be able to feel, or understand what that evokes in me. And also moving past it to action points and also to that hope that lives inside me that I'm trying to connect with in recovery. I find that process beautiful spelled out in “Little Light. “That song does such a great job of looking at the despair and the hopelessness that we can feel, and then also coming out on the other side through community.

Has that song ministered to you? Oh, I said “ministered.” My Southern Baptist history is coming out.

GB: It always happens when I’m meeting with people who also grew up Christian. We always just end up using terms like this. “What's your testimony?” We just go back to it, you know? And I think there's a comfort in that. We get to reclaim it for our own purposes.

“Little Light” was a song that I wrote about a time in my life when I just didn't want to be alive anymore. And ironically, it was when I was presenting and aspiring to be the best Christian girl, whatever that means, whatever that looks like. I thought that if I just met that standard, that I would be happy. And I was just so far from God.

What I found during that time was that when I thought about my reasons for staying here — and “Where is God right now in my life” — it was in my friends and my family and the people around me that continued to show up for me and root for me, even though I was giving them little reason to do so. That is so beautiful. That is amazing. Those are angels around me, and that’s how I know that I'm being held. It was really tangible, real relationships.

Then when I was in the writing of it, I think something that I thought was kind of cutesy at the time, but it's really stuck, was the play on one of the first gospel songs I learned, “This Little Light of Mine, I'm Gonna Let It Shine.” I thought that was such a beautiful sentiment. And I don't know when it shifts where it's like, “Actually, The Little Light of Yours, Jesus says come as you are with that little light, but don't stay that way with your little light. You better dim it. You better put it under a bushel at some point in time.”

The way that you meet me today, I was very close to this person when I was like four or five years old. And it was as I was conditioned within the church, within certain rigid frameworks, that I started changing to live for, ironically, the world — that Christian world that I grew up in. And as soon as I sort of surrender that I don't want to live for the world, but I want to live as who God created me to be — That was when I found this peace and curiosity for divinity, and where I got healthier for my friends and my family. I wasn't abusing substances anymore.

So, honestly that is my testimony. The things that you see sometimes like, “ When I was in the homosexual lifestyle I was like abusing all this blah blah blah…” I was like, “Well, you know what, when I was in your lifestyle, that was actually when I was really, really sick, and I felt too ashamed to pray.” And now I feel an access to God and a peace beyond understanding that they always said I would never find if I was myself.

HK: There's been so much of that for me, too, because my coming out dovetailed with me leaving the church and finding community in queer spaces and also working in country music. So, I was never without alcohol everywhere I went. That addiction took me away from having any kind of spiritual life.

Now I’ve been in recovery for nearly 10 years, and it's been great to actually reconnect with my higher power. It’s the same higher power that I felt when I was growing up in a chaotic home life and just trying to just survive the gay thing — trying to pray away the gay at the altar on Sundays.

It’s the same kind of opening up in my spirit, but without the shame. I’s been a whole process of accepting my queerness and not feeling shame for praying as if my queerness is a part of how I was made. That has been a total shift, and your music has definitely been a part of that journey for me.

GB: That means so much to hear that. I mean, a great hope of mine would be that my music would just find people in like-minded positions and places, for whatever that looks like — that who we are, that our queerness is actually something so beautiful.

The fact that we get so often reduced down to what we do in the bedroom or what's beneath our clothing is another way that it's just so sort of dehumanizing. It’s also people telling on themselves for their own sort of weird inside thoughts. I think about that with me as like a gender variant person — “Yeah, the same God that made you, made me, and I know that he's proud of me.”

I still think of God as a “he”. I know some people deconstruct and come up with different pronouns, but I have a great relationship with my dad. So I think I, uh, I, the, the connotation is comforting to me. But I also recognize that God doesn't have a gender.

Just to be clear, I use he/him pronouns for God. It’s not literal.I don't think of him as like Sky Daddy in the same way anymore.

HK: We call God ‘Oprah” on my text chains.

GB: Good, good, and you should.

HK: Let’s talk about another song that reclaims a word that we grew up with, “Amen.” The line in there where you’re talking about your family with you wife, Lizzie, and your baby, Frances — “If the God you believe in doesn't bless it, that's none of my business.”

In my own deconstructing and reconstructing, I’ve had to move through a lot of resentment at the way I was raised in such an anti-gay environment. But now, with the far right and Christian Nationalism taking things to such a cartoonish place, it’s helping me get past resentment towards my own church experience, because what we’re seeing now is so beyond anything that I ever lived through in the church.

GB: I had a reel of mine go viral recently. It was promoting the new record, and the response to it is about a 50/50 split between people with positive words and negative words. Something that comes up a lot is the sort of “demonic warfare”and that I’m possessed, or I'm the antichrist or something. That is just so divorced from reality. If people took a second to consider the person whose life they're commenting on, it shows that this is a really knee-jerk response to be quick to knock down queer people without any sort of consideration for the specific situation or person that they’re remarking on.

People will say things like, “You're living in lust.” I'm like, look at my life. I'm not saying that I've never experienced lust before, and I don't want to try and be holier than thou or anything, but you're basing this off a snippet of a song where I'm showing clips of my family. If your brain jumps to lust, I need you to recognize that you might be the problem. It's very like, “I'm rubber, you're glue.”

One person described me as “carnal,” and that’s not what I’m expressing in that song. But if that word is top of mind for you, then I think you might be living in some carnal stuff. And to be clear, I don’t care. I'm really a very live and let live type of person, so long as you're not harming yourself or other people and doing your best to love yourself and your neighbor, then great. But you're projecting a lot of stuff onto me about a God that you clearly worship, but that's not who I'm talking to when I pray. So, it's kind of none of my business.

HK: Well, I just love the video for “Jesus From Texas,” and I gotta say, it took me awhile to appreciate that it was the same song I’d first played on my old show Proud Radio years ago. The production on that original version was so spare, and this is fully fleshed out. Elsewhere on the album, you’ve got big electric guitar sounds, but also some fiddle and banjo on the record. So, musically speaking, what did you get to do on this album that you’d never been able to do before?

GB: I love you for asking this question. Thank you. I have wanted to rerecord some of my music for a while, and I wanted to infuse it with energy. If you've come to a Semler show before, I'm so proud of the people I get to work with and play with on stage. I'm proud of the people that show up. We have a lively show. It gets rowdy, and I love that about our shows.

On Revival in My Mind, I really wanted to capture the energy that you feel in those shows. We did a lot of stuff live to tape. We incorporated a lot of instruments that we would mess around within the studio. Zach, one of my producers, taught himself banjo, and he was always doing Metallica shreds on banjo. And I was like, let's actually throw that in there. I love this punk rock banjo. Graham Dickey, who is in The Collection, plays horns on it. Ethan Luck from Relient K, does slide guitar. Jax Anderson was on gang vocals and synth sounds.

I just got to ask all my friends to play whatever instrument they're an expert at. I wanted to hear all of their ideas.I almost had no notes for anybody cause I just really trust the people I get to work with.

I was so sick of waiting around for a label to tell me it's time to make a record. So, I had a pocket of time, and there was a studio available. So, I just went in with my friends and I was like, “Let's get every idea on tape.” We mixed it down, and I just couldn't be more excited. I hope it feels like the energy that you get at a live show.

HK: There are so many songs, like “In the Ether” that really just open up into this rock place.

GB: Yeah. I love a big crescendo. “In the Ether" is one of my favorite bridges I've ever written, and I really want to film a cinematic video for that. If we're going to make an album, let's do it in a big way. So, we just didn't hold anything back. And I also want to share with your readers that there's more in the tank too. So if you like the direction this is going in, there’s more on the way.

HK: Last question. It was so amazing to see you and Derek Webb and Flamy Grant at the Dove Awards. Of course, Preacher's Kid being number one on the iTunes Christian chart was huge. But moving forward, do you feel you need to keep interacting with the Christian music industry and the Christian music world or do you feel like you're able to move beyond it?

GB: I think I'm always going to be open to it, because it's just so foundational to me and my artistry. It just formed my brain, and how I write music. So I'll always be open to participating in the genre, but I also will never force it. So we'll see what the future holds.

I am so proud of my contributions to Christian music. I don't mean to sound like “The Joker,” but I do feel that the contributions of people like myself and Flamy and Derek and Jennifer Knapp will be recognized in my lifetime,. I think there will be that moment of reckoning, and I’m not going to keep poking it. I think it'll happen in its own time, and I'm proud of what I've made and what I will continue to make. If the right sort of collaboration or project comes along that's a Christian project, I'll know that, and I'll be excited about it. But, I'm not going to force it anymore.

I feel like we began with Preacher's Kid, and I feel like ending Revival in My Mind with “Don't Grow Up Too Fast,” which features the sounds of my daughter and my mom and my wife, I'm at a really exciting point where I'm looking forward to diving into new themes on future music releases. But this one feels like a Christian offering for me, and there might be more in the future. I'm open to it.

I've had some exciting conversations and, and meetings, in the lead up to releasing the record. So, if I can ever be part of a positive change within the genre, if I can be a voice of representation, that there is hope for the future for queer people of faith. I'm gonna do that. I will ride that until the wheels come off. However, if it's gonna be another uphill battle of trying to dance for people who don't even like me, I'm probably not gonna do that.

So no, I'm not buying a ticket to the Dove Awards. But if they would like to invite me in the future, then maybe. Just don't sit me next to Skillet.

The year after Flamy and I went there, they had the guy from Skillet perform, I also want to point out, if the guy from Skillet is reading this, and do print this, that when you dye your beard, that's gender-affirming care, right? I just hope he knows that his beard dye is gender-affirming care. So. that’s cool. But just fight for the rights of other people who need that.

For reference: This is the guy from Skillet, who looks like he’s recently received some botox and fillers. Bless him and his holy beauty regimen.

Get the audio recording of my conversation with Grace Baldridge when you subscribe!