'Anonymous Confessions Of A Lunatic Friend' may not spring readily to mind as an album title, but it certainly catches the attention! BRYAN DUNCAN answers a cry of "What?" from Chris Willman.

Come now. It's hard to imagine Bryan Duncan - who could certainly compete with Randy Stonehill in a contest to name Christian music's King of Comedy - ever making a remotely bitter record. Surely that wasn't a temptation.

"I'm one of them guys that turns all the pain into a sense of humour," he responds. "And a lot of people don't recognise it. The sarcasm and stuff - it's part of that sanguine temperament. You're just this side of tears all the time. But for the grace of God, I could be one of them guys that would climb up into the tower and just start shooting at people."

(Don't worry, folks; he smiles as he says this.) "There's a deep, ingrained sense of frustration in life, and it's always been there, and my dad used to just harp on me for my attitude. He's going, 'Son, your attitude is terrible,' I've always had that, and I've managed to disarm some of that bad-mouth, get-kicked-out-of-school rebellion with a sense of sarcastic humour."

The new record is indeed so much fun that you might miss the intensity of what he's saying sometimes. There are times where it seems like he's just poking some gentle fun, but he wants to reinforce the idea that he really meant it.

"And I channelled it into some songs. And I think that I probably scared my wife to death, and I know it scared Ray, my manager, to death. It felt like suicide to me, to abandon all the safety of the Gospel and say, 'Let's look at what's wrong, let's look at the pretence in my own life, let's see if there's anything real about what I've believed all these years. How come people aren't falling down converted because of my life?'

"I hope I don't have to do this every time to get a great record review in CCM, because it was real hard."

Duncan's life is not totally unlike his father's. Growing up, his family never lived in the same town for more than two or three years at a time, as his dad would move to new pastorates. Duncan isn't quite that transitory - after having lived in Costa Mesa, California for a long time in the Jesus Music days, he and his wife have been rooted in Riverside, about an hour away from Los Angeles, for many years. As we talk on this blustery November day, the bare shell of an add-on to his suburban tract home is in place, a sure sign he plans to be sticking around. Yet the lifestyle of a musician, constantly touring, has allowed him to avoid rootedness just as readily as his parents, he confesses.

"My dad never lived in the same town for long, so you couldn't really get a feeling of resentment toward people in the church, because you didn't know 'em, for crying out loud. But that started to bother me, now that I'm in my 30s. I started to ask questions about relationships. I'm so dang shallow that I don't know people very well. I don't even know my immediate family very well. I started to get irritated by the fact that I can be real personal with a thousand people and not know what to say to somebody that I've known for five years. Because the shallow stuff doesn't work in a relationship with somebody you've known.

"I think I had enough in the Sweet Comfort Band days - enough of raise the banner, hold the standard high and in the meantime your personal life is shot to hell because you're on the road all the time. You don't have a real life, you don't have a social life, you don't know anybody personally - but you know the gospel, by dog. And you can travel the world and tell everybody about Jesus. But you don't know how to interact with your wife."

Lately, though, Duncan has been off tour long enough to get involved in a weekly Bible study with a group of fellow lunatics, and it's in this supportive atmosphere that he's been able to get to work on the working out of his salvation in a more meaningful, no-pretence way.

"I like talking to a bunch of guys who are not afraid to say, 'I don't know about that'. There's just something absolutely wonderful about being completely accepted whether you've come to all the right conclusions or not. And I think sometimes that's what's missing in Church. We're so determined to shore up the foundations of Christianity that we forget we're all human somehow.

"Especially in the Pentecostal background that I have, they've got everything all encapsulised for you. Everybody knows "A Closer Walk With Thee," but what does that mean? What is a closer walk? How do you do that? 'Brother, you get out of the flesh by getting into the Spirit.' Well, what in the world...? 'The Bible is God's road map.' I guess that's kind of true, but what does that mean? Applying Scripture, you don't just read it like a road map. Road maps are much simpler."

As you may be able to tell, Duncan has adopted a favourite catchphrase recently, which is, "Yes, but what does that mean?" Readers discovering Duncan for the first time through this article might think of him as a real thinking man's musician. But that's not really his popular image, which is more light-hearted and high-spirited. In fact, he admits he suspects a lot of people think of him as "an airhead," an image he does not think is entirely undeserved.

Has he ever feared that this persona might cause his more sober songs - of which there are certainly more than the witty ones - to not be taken as seriously as they ought?

"No. You know what? Ironically, I was afraid I was gonna turn into Barry Manilow, that people would know me for being boring, 'crying Bryan' balladeer. I kind of was a little surprised that the humour came out at all.

"All the humour was reactionary - like reactions to the fact that the PA was not there! I'm in Podunk, Kentucky somewhere, playing on a piece of garbage for a system, trying to pretend like I'm a musician; I've got a little keyboard here and I'm playing tracks. You can't take yourself seriously, and it was either cry, shoot yourself in the head, or look at the audience and go, 'Ain't this a kick.' As many times as you sing, 'I did it my way,' life usually isn't your way, and you can either be stuck up about it or find some sense of humour in it.

"The seal-and-otter show at Sea World (in San Diego) was the beginning of where I realised that I was not gonna be able to go out there and be Mr Rock Star or try to have some sense of integrity on my terms. They'd be barking and holding balloons on their noses, and I'm going on right after them! How can you be serious about something like that? It smells of raw fish in the back, there's no dressing room back there, and it's a wet stage. Teri DeSario was supposed to do the show with me, and she was in tears backstage. I was real bummed too, but I'm just going,
'What do you do? I'm trying to start a solo career - is this the way it's going to be?' And absolutely, it was like God was saying: 'Yes, this is the way life is, it's a gigantic circus out there, and you can either scream about the smell of the fish or get out there and say, 'Hey, ain't this a circus?'"

Duncan didn't have nearly as comedic a persona in the old days.

"I was oppressed in the Sweet Comfort Band days, extremely oppressed," he explains, tongue only slightly in cheek. "I was quickly beat upon for being smart-aleck or goof-off. We had an image to uphold, we were trying to be rock guys, we were trying to be big-time. It wasn't a bad thing. It was as much me, too. When you're young, you want to be something.

"But if I made any cracks or anything, somebody was always on my case about, 'People don't want to hear that kind of nonsense. Don't tell 'em what's happening in our lives because they don't want to hear that.' It was effective because it was evangelism. Keep your personal life out of it and present the truth.

"When I finally quit that, though, I didn't just want to present the truth from a non-partisan point. I wanted to present a more realistic picture, because I saw a lot of people falling away. Most of my friends don't go to church any more. They're like what Tom Willett (Duncan's A&R contact at Myrrh) describes in this book he's writing as 'Christians In Exile.' They're the bewildered, the disheartened - because somehow the standard was there but there was no love and there was no compassion and no acceptance. If people knew who you were, then they weren't gonna love you anymore.

"I started to realise that there's a lot of people I could minister to on a church level if I wasn't so interested in 'crossing over' or being something that I'm not, if I just tell my story. There are people that can relate to it and people who won't.

"If I can talk to somebody on a deeper level, that means more to me now than making the headlines. Because I'm finding that I'm in my 30s and my life is very shallow. It's very empty without any meaningful conversation, without any meaningful relationships with people that I've known for years. I like where I'm going at this point. And in the Sweet Comfort Band we knew exactly what we were doing, but we didn't know where we were going, and we certainly couldn't understand why we weren't getting anywhere.

"We wanted to be in the rock'n'roll business. And Christian music grew up around us, kind of. I was a little disillusioned with all of that, because there was no such thing when Sweet Comfort started. Love Song was just a band that had come to know Jesus and they were talking about it, and that was all we wanted to be, a band with some new convictions. But they built a little wall around us and said, 'This is Christian music,' and they effectively kept us from being anything. They neutralised any effect that we had in the world by tagging us with a title. And I've always resented it.

"I'm not so bitter now about the fact that I'm a Christian singer - I mean, it can't be avoided, I'm a Christian and I'm a singer, I guess that's it. But I still want to be part of the world, the way Jesus was; he hung out with publicans and sinners, and I want those people to feel accepted when they're around me."

Suddenly, Duncan is excited not just about being a Christian, but about being a human.

"I kind of like it," he says, like a kid who's' just discovered some nifty new concept. "In the church environment I grew up in, you always had that sense that it was you against the rest of the world. And I hated that. I started to really resent the fact that I was being asked to fight off the whole world, like it was my job. There was a sense of 'separate yourself, come out and be apart;' it was taken real literally in Pentecostal circles. You know, if you completely build a wall around yourself and just associate with your little group, you don't affect anybody. I like the way it feels to feel like I'm part of the human race and I have something that I believe is the answer. And it feels good to not feel like I'm in this little group and these people are off in their own world. I kind of like the idea that maybe they're not any different from me.

"I just don't want to be on that team anymore. I'm tired of feeling like I'm on the cheesy team, tired of feeling like I'm on the loser's side or the team with all the rejects, where somehow I've got to defend the gospel. I'm tired of feeling like I have to defend God to the world. I'm not supposed to have to defend Him, I don't think'; Christ is supposed to be my defence."
That's what fathers are for, right?
This article first appeared in America's 'CCM' magazine.