Tony Cummings reports on the indie rock band from Tucson, Arizona, STRINGS & HEART

Strings & Heart

In America's Relevant magazine Emily Brown wrote insightfully about Christian music. "For decades, Christian music has been dominated by industry gatekeepers - radio programmers, record labels and mainstream church culture - determining which sounds and messages were fit for mass consumption. The result was a genre that often felt predictable, formulaic, even sanitised. But that's changing. Thanks to the rise of social media and streaming platforms, a new generation of independent artists is breaking through without the need for corporate backing. Strings & Heart is among them, joining the ranks of artists like Josiah Queen and Forrest Frank who are reshaping what it means to make faith-driven music."

Strings & Heart comprise of three brothers from Tucson, Arizona: Angelo (singer, songwriter and guitar), Michael (bass and piano) and Eric Espinoza (drums). Their early experiences of music making were far from happy ones. As children and teens they were dragged into piano lessons and church band rehearsals, resentfully learning worship songs under the watchful eyes of their parents who once had a Christian rock band of their own. Angelo remembered, "It was like, 'If you're going to do something, do it with all your heart.' At the time, we didn't want to do it at all."

Angelo's attitude towards music making and indeed everything else was to change dramatically. He told The New Wave website, "It was after I had an encounter with Jesus: I grew up in church, but it was like 'Okay, my parents are Christian, so I just call myself a Christian, but I didn't really live out the Christian life.' I'd go to church and put on a mask when I went to church and then I'd be with my group of friends that played baseball and I was a different person and my other group of friends from school and I was a different person. I was just living this life of hypocrisy. I never doubted God's existence because of things I'd seen; I knew he was real, but I felt like I just didn't really know him. I just thought that he hated fake people. he hated the Pharisees, and I'm as fake as it gets. So I'm like, 'he must not want anything to do with me.' So I kind of just drew away from church and all that and Christianity and just tried to do my own thing and try to find that as I grew older into my teen years."

He continued, "I was 15 when I just stopped going to church and stuff. You kind of just have this void. at least for me, there's kind of this need for something and you don't know what it is. I was trying to find it in either a friend group or in a relationship with a girl or whatever it was. Then I realized at a certain point I'm like, man, 'I'm using people for something I'm looking for.' I decided that I was just gonna get away from everything, everybody. I isolated myself, and that's when it just got like 10 times worse. I started struggling a lot with depression and anxiety, because the enemy loves when we're in isolation. That's where he could just throw the darts and get in your head. I started struggling a lot with suicidal thoughts. Especially if you're in isolation, you just kind of keep thinking these things over and over and you're just like "it probably would be better if I'm not here. It'd be better for everybody." I was struggling a lot with that and even attempted suicide a couple times. It was just a really low point in my life."

After his conversion Angelo approached his siblings with a proposition. Emily Brown described his idea. "What if they formed a band - not a church band, not a group forced into playing Sunday morning specials - but a real band, one that wrote its own songs and shaped its own sound? They called it Strings & Heart, a name pulled from Psalm 150's call to worship with every instrument available. It was a nod to their roots but also a commitment to creating music authentically - without the pressure of labels, formulas or expectations."

Over the next four years, Strings & Heart developed their own eclectic style, taking in everything from '60s mainstream pioneers like the Beatles and the Beach Boys, grunge, post-punk practitioners plus a myriad of other influences and approaches. They began to record and stream their creations and were met with an immediate appreciative audience. Their breakthrough moment came in 2023 when their song "Flowers Dressed In Blue" took off online, pushing their monthly Spotify listeners from a modest 13,000 to nearly a million. Said Angelo, "We didn't pay for marketing. We didn't boost posts. It was just social media. It's crazy how one song connecting can change the game."

More releases followed the compilation album 'Secret Place' in 2023 and two years later the Eps 'More Of You' and 'Evergreen'. Said Angelo, "We get comments all the time like, 'I don't follow Jesus, but I love this.' That's huge. That means something's connecting." Their 'Plastic Wine' album is, to Cross Rhythms ears, the best Christian rock release heard for years. It has already produced the radio hits "Oasis For My Soul" and "Empty Airport" and other tracks are sure to follow. The title 'Plastic Wine' was inspired by a church service where their pastor urged the congregation to recognise the weight or communion, not just going through the motions. The phrase "plastic wine" became a metaphor for anything hollow, anything performed without conviction. Observed Angelo, "It made me think, what have I been doing that's just going through the motions? What's been fake? People are looking for authenticity. It's what our generation craves."