Our Entertainment Weekly subscription didn’t seem to navigate our move to Northern Virginia, so until today I had only anecdotal evidence of this cute little chart in the current issue (which in the paper copy shows my book cover).

Tonight at 5 p.m. EST I’ll be a guest on Paul Edwards’ show on WLQV AM 1500 in Detroit. If you’re outside that area and want to hear the interview, you can listen to the show on the Internet.

UPDATE The audio from the show is available here.

Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua and I chatted about the book yesterday; his interview is now up, and nicely turned out, if I do say so myself.

Tomorrow’s Washington City Paper will feature an excerpt of Chapter 9, accompanied by some sharp photos by Darrow Montgomery, as its cover story. Papers will be on stands tomorrow; the story will be online Friday.

I’m never sure how people I write about are going to like the finished product. But Rock for Life’s Erik Whittington, whom I interviewed extensively for the book’s chapter on youth-oriented Christian political activism, seems to be okay with Chapter 9. From his blog:

Our chapter, Black and White in a Gray World gives an honest account of a day in the life of Rock for Life. I hope you’ll pick up a copy, share it with your friends and let me know what you think….

I am very curious to read what other people think. Incidentally, if you’re trivia-oriented, the original title of this chapter was “Black and White in a Grey World,” with the British spelling grey, because that’s how Leslie (now Sam) Phillips titled her song with these lyrics:

No distinction, no emotion for right or wrong
They tell me any choice will do
No color contrast in their dull morality
The shades of good and bad are through

Seemed appropriate.

Daniel So likes my book. A nice quote:

while one might expect a spin magazine writer to be derisive and/or condescending towards christian rock, beaujon’s accounts have been very even-handed. he even counters some unfair criticism some bands have received.

I really strove for balance when writing this book, and I’m thrilled when anyone thinks I’ve succeeded.

I just noticed my first typo in the book—on page 198, graf 2:

“At this moment, the stroller brigade arrived, too late for TV but still in time to have some fun. Four heavily middle-aged women whose heavy makeup couldn’t have contrasted more with the well-scrubbed look of the pro-choice gals unfolded six empty strollers and began pushing them in an oval in front of the Planned Parenthood supporters.”

The second sentence should read “Four middle-aged women whose heavy makeup…”

Oy. I have nothing against the middle-aged. I’m nearly there myself!

I already linked to this from my blog, but J. Edward Keyes, from someplace called Astoria, Queens, wrote a really nice post about my book on his blog.

Whitney Strub takes a whack at my book in this review. Apparently, it’s a “bit short of profound.”

You know, defaults by nature suck, but what better title for your first blog post than “Hello, World!” (the default on Wordpress)? I’m hoping it’ll seem like some wry, meta comment on blog culture, but seriously, I couldn’t think of anything better. And anyway, if you used Google Calendar, and you ran across a band with the name Dinner at Pancho’s, you’d smile, wouldn’t you, knowing you had something in common with them?

Hi, my name is Andrew Beaujon, and Body Piercing Saved My Life is my first book. This project began two years ago with a conversation at Thai Diner Too in Richmond, Virginia, with my friends Jim and Beth Coe, both of whom grew up loving, to some degree, Christian music. Jim had just finished divinity school at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond and had decided that he didn’t want to become a clergyman after all. Those reasons are best explained by him, but he was enthusiastic about my interest in Christian music. He wasn’t trying to convert me to Christianity (as I say in the book, I consider atheism to be too much of a commitment); he was just trying to explain a segment of American culture that I didn’t know anything about.

He told me about the Cornerstone Festival, and then he loaned me a tray of CDs from a church whose youth group he was running. I grew ever-more fascinated with this world of music so close to the one I covered but still rarely reported on in a non-snide way by the non-Christian media. Moreover, I kept finding out that more and more people I knew had Christian-rock pasts, or even presents. I looked for a book that would explain the whole phenomenon to me.

And that’s where the idea of me writing this book really began. I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t written by Christians who loved Christian rock or Christians who hated Christian rock. Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, for a non-Christian such as myself to try to learn about Christian pop culture?

The first step was figuring out if there really was a story here. So I pitched a story to the Washington Post on Cornerstone, and my editor, Peter Kaufman, went for it, with the caveat that he wasn’t interested in a piece making fun of people who believed in something. You tell me how I did. That became my philosophy for writing this book: Even though I encountered plenty of things worth poking fun at, I tried to approach the subject with respect, even when I found something to criticize. I hope you agree.

Body Piercing Saved My Life is the result of a year of research following that article’s publication in July 2004. I visited a youth-oriented megachurch in Seattle, learned about drinking blood out of skulls in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and nearly had an existential breakdown on a fairground in Florida when I saw just one singer/songwriter too many. It wasn’t always a good time, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything; I feel like in the past two years I’ve learned another language, one that half of America speaks. And I’ve also made some pretty good friends, whom I hope will remain that way once they’ve read the book.

This site, designed by my good friend and fellow former Richmonder Paul Goode, will serve as a place for me and anyone who’s interested to talk about the book, to read what other people in the media are saying about it, and to look at photos from the book research and from the next year while I try to get people to buy this thing. I hope the website will be fun for everyone involved (if not, I’ll go back to learning how to play golf).

Alexandria, Va., Mother’s Day 2006