COIN’s Cemetery

On September 23, CAB hosted the annual Stokes Set concert with the guest artist of the year, COIN.

COIN is a pop rock band from Tennessee. They were founded in 2012 and released their first album in 2015 and their latest just last year.

Their appearance at Stokes Set was filled with energy and attracted a good crowd despite the rain. Though they played a wide range of their discography, one song stood out as having a message that fits into a Christian worldview: “Cemetery.”

The song focuses on a Scrooge-like wealthy man so focused on his money that he becomes removed from everything else in his life. It describes his loneliness, his distance from others, and his lack of care towards his family, always followed by the chorus of the song saying, “But he is the richest man in the cemetery.” 

It is an upbeat song but the words carry this grim message. Even the sentence “the richest man in the cemetery” shows how earthly wealth truly loses all its meaning and that the rich and the poor alike will find that their earthly lives end in death.

One Bible passage that comes to mind is Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” Christ Himself tells us that earthly wealth is itself something that people often put in the place of God and He makes it clear that it is a stark choice: one or the other.

Another good aspect about the song is that it mentions his relationship with his family, saying that he “never made time” for them. It seems that fewer and fewer songs or pop culture works tend to mention the importance of the family except children’s movies and media. We are called to love and support our families. To hear a pop song reference a man’s lack of attention and love towards his family as one of his greatest faults is refreshing.

Overall, the song itself is refreshing since so many songs especially in the pop genre are focused on couples forming or breaking up. Any idea or story can be presented by the artist, but the art form is losing some of its lyrical creativity because the love stories tend to be the most popular.

Hearing a song that has a parable-like story of a tragic character who gave his life to money and success is something I did not expect from a pop rock album released in 2020.

I am sure few people were thinking about those words during the concert. Even I was distracted by the enjoyment of it all, but for a brief moment I heard the lyrics and was struck.

If you have not heard of the song and are a fan of the genre I highly recommend giving it a listen; it carries a good message that few other popular songs do.