“The storms of this life shatter our plans. They tear through our world and destroy our hopes and dreams. They ruin sunny days, flatten the structures we depend on, and shock our world views. Hello Hurricane is an attempt to sing into the storm. Hello Hurricane is a declaration: you can't silence my love. My plans will fail, the storms of this life will come, and chaos will disrupt even my best intentions, but my love will not be destroyed. Beneath the sound and the fury there is a deeper order still- deeper than life itself. An order that cannot be shaken by the storms of this life. There is a love stronger than the chaos, running underneath us- beckoning us to go below the skin-deep externals, beyond the wind, even into the eye of the storm. Hello Hurricane, you're not enough- you can't silence my love.” —Jon Foreman

It’s been nearly three years since the San Diego-based rockers Switchfoot released the experimental Oh! Gravity. and they are now returning to the spotlight with their latest endeavor, Hello Hurricane, a twelve song masterpiece full of the best songs the band has written so far. I’ve been listening to the album for the past week but it wasn’t until I was driving home this past weekend at night, nothing but headlights for miles, that I realized the full brilliance of this album.

The album opens with the expansive “Needle and Haystack Life” which immediately shows a maturity in lead vocalist and principal songwriter Jon Foreman’s writing. Always know for his deep and poignant, lyrics, Foreman’s writing on this album takes that even further tackling themes with a thoughtfulness we haven’t quite seen before. “This song makes me think of abundant, overflowing life,” comments Foreman, “The math involved for life to be possible at all is staggering. Let alone beauty. Love. Joy. Forgiveness. To hold someone in your arms is to hold a living, breathing miracle. At any age, this life is a gift.”

“Mess of Me” follows and is exactly the style of song we’ve come to expect from Switchfoot. Loud guitars, a stirring melody, and reflective lyrics make this class Switchfoot as it tackles the theme of prescriptive drugs. Follows is the ballad “Your Love is a Song,” the final song in a trilogy (also including “Let Your Love Be Strong” from Oh! Gravity. and “Your Love is Strong” from Foreman’s solo album) that could have easily fit on one of Foreman’s solo albums. Another rocker “The Sound” follows which will surely be a fan favorite and a concert staple.

“Enough to Let Me Go” is an interesting look at love and loss and Foreman’s ability to parallel this concept with breathing is another prime example of his unique thinking process that make his songs all the more poignant. The title track captures the theme of the entire record in it’s brilliant chorus: “hello hurricane, you’re not enough / hello hurricane, you can’t silence my love / I’ve got doors and windows boarded up / all your dead end fury is not enough / you can’t silence my love.”

The second half of the album slows it down a bit with the vertically focused “Always” which showcases a different style of writing we haven’t seen much from the band. One of my personal favorites, “Yet” has an old, analog feel and a steady beat before picking up at the close. The album closes with arguably two of the band’s strongest tracks of all time. The spiritual “Sing it Out” slowly builds to an epic close before the album closes out with the reflective “Red Eyes.” As the final song fades away, the chorus of “Needle and Haystack Life” quietly plays, blending the two choruses together as if to wrap the album and it’s overarching theme into one proverbial bow.

Hello Hurricane is musically diverse, lyrically relevant, and thematically substantial. In an interview I heard, Foreman said that I had written over eighty tracks for this album and that the way they’d decide which songs made the cut is by asking themselves “Is this a song we would want to die singing?” That’s a heavy requirement and a high bar to reach, but after a few listens, I am confident that these San Diego boys have achieved it. Every song is perfect on its own yet it all fits together into one fantastic message.

And that message, in Foreman’s words is:

“Yes, I will die one day—of this I am certain. But I'm not dead yet! No, tonight there is breath in my lungs- pushing, pulsing, yearning to break free... I will dream, for dreams are the seeds of what may be. I will wonder, for without wonder, how could life be wonderful? And I will sing.

Yes, until my pending death I will sing. In the face of indifference, I will sing. In the face of adversity, I will sing. I will sing about the pain. I will sing about the mystery. I will sing of the hope, the cage, the bullet, the winter, the dreamer. I will sing of all of these. I've seen miracles there in your eyes. It's no accident we're here tonight. We are once in a lifetime.”