After more than a decade spent magnifying his personal idiosyncrasies into full-blooded post-punk anthems, Cursive's main songwriter Tim Kasher has become a man with a message on fifth album ‘Happy Hollow’. It's an unlikely role for the self-deprecating front man sat in the King's College classroom-turned-backstage area and he explains his view on the harmfulness of religious belief with the conviction of a former Catholic, and the self-doubt of someone who’s more used to judging himself than other people.  The album itself is as indirect an attack on religion as you can get, with quirky storytelling and swinging near-pop vibrancy acting as the hefty spoonful of sugar Kasher imagines we'll need to digest his anti-establishment medicine. 

His phobia of the soapbox is understandable since Cursive’s fan base of earnest emo-kids already hang on his every word, and Kasher virtually shudders at the memory of being treated as "some kind of relationship psychiatrist" in the wake of Domestica, his 2000 "divorce record" with Cursive.  But his first-hand experience with Christianity, first as an insider, and now as an observer of its effect on American foreign policy, makes it impossible for him to withhold judgement - even if people close to him take offence.    

 "I was kind of losing sleep about it while we were recording," ventures the soft-spoken Kasher.  "I come from a catholic background, my family for the most part is catholic, I went to catholic school till I was eighteen.  And now the record's released I'm going to be running into people who would have a very aggressive reaction to it."  The lyrics include songs about a gay priest, a knocked up pseudo-virgin, and holy war, but that's not to say that Cursive have eschewed subtlety for run of the mill religion-bashing. 
 
Kasher's own catholic experience makes him all too aware of the complexities involved.  "It's really difficult to sing about religion without preaching," says Kasher.  "And that was a really touchy issue with this album: if we're upset about people preaching we don't want to preach ourselves...  And it’s really impossible.  There's a point where you have to a little bit, and in the song 'Rise up Rise up' that's it.”  Propelled by the song’s careening campfire-core, he sings, "Live a full life/'cause when it's over, it's done.”  "For that song,” he says, “that's not really a character anymore.  It's just myself speaking directly to the organisation that raised me: 'I've left and here I am I've come back and this is what I've learned'." 

 But he’s keen to stress that the album is actually much less about him than previous albums have been, and he says this was a conscious step away from 2003’s ‘Ugly Organ’.  "I recognised things that I shouldn't be singing about any more, like self-actualization, self-deprecation, self-reflexivity...  These things that I'd really hit over the head with The Ugly Organ.  It's such a small personal record in that sense,  so this time we wanted to make sure to get outside of ourselves, to get outside of our own heads, and write about other people and other things."  However, the success of the Ugly Organ made self-consciousness even more difficult to escape.  "There's this wide audience now, and I feel this responsibility," says Kasher.  "I'm definitely conscious of the fact that people will be listening, cause if I weren't conscious of that  we'd be more willing to say more heinous things about religion.  If I didn't think the songs would leave my bedroom,  then I may not have taken such a mature approach or tried to take a more enlightened approach." 

Kasher's intention was to write an invitation to  dialogue rather than a politically driven rant and after Bush’s re-election he felt compelled to take a deeper look at the people who could vote republican in 2004.   "We did a lot of research on what was really going on, cause so many blanket statements came out [at the time of Bush's re-election].  Like, 'oh it was the religious right that swayed the vote,' then we started getting interested in what [religious right] really means, where is it starting, what is it all born of,  what is their mission...  and that does kind of get you worked up."  That quest, for Kasher, spotlighted the feverish insatiability of the American Dream which he sees as a fantasy akin to the blinkered religious conservatism he experienced growing up. 

Until his mid-teens, Kasher was a fully fledged Catholic to the point where he admits to being “scared” of supposedly satanic bands like Kiss and Alice Cooper.  As he got older, however, bands that questioned religion became more and more important to him (The The’s Mindbomb was a particularly important influence) and he became frustrated with the religious "complacency" he saw around him, and began to resent the church’s controlling nature.  His crisis of faith peaked during a particularly horrific "retreat" he attended at the age of sixteen.   "We went my junior year of high school," he says.  "There were these three singing nuns who played guitar and would go into spiritual voices after they'd stop playing, - speaking in tongues - and then they'd show us pictures of the virgin Mary [appearing in the dents on] a trashcan.  They made us watch videotapes on how heavy metal is satanic and we should stop listening to it and then at the end I was forced to go and pray in a dark church by myself and for a moment I felt Jesus entering my body.  Then I realised that I was falling for the whole sham  and I was so angry, I stormed out of the church." 

Kasher now describes himself as an atheist, although, bafflingly, he says, "I'll be God-fearing for the rest of my life.  I've spent the first half of my life believing in God and Jesus, and I don't think I’ll ever get that out of my system. "  And if that wasn't enough to muddy the waters of Kasher's complex belief system, he admits that Jesus is still a role model for him.  "I can say I practise [the teachings of Jesus] in day to day life, and that's good.  I would hope that everybody would.  Maybe not specifically Jesus, but just that sensibility of kindness." 

Before the halo can fully materialise over the now moderately inebriated Kasher, thoughts of organised, corporatised religion and the American religious right remind him why Happy Hollow was worth those anxious, sleepless nights.  "I get so fired up that I want to inflict pain on those people," he says with a mischievous smile.  "So I have to quell those urges when you see people picketing outside an abortion clinic, cause fighting about it is the whole problem to begin with.  I'm trying to be soft about [his criticism of religion], to be caring about it, but truth be told if there are people out there, in particular young people  who maybe are still trying to figure things out...  If a song like that can aid them to figure out  ways to believe in themselves,  instead of placing all their belief and faith and trust in some entity - some non-entity...  Then that's great.  I totally hundred percent believe in that message."