When I was involved with the church, there remained one thing in Christian doctrine I never could adopt: its stance on homosexuality. My view on the matter predated my time in the church and was built on experience, not doctrine. Having known several gay couples, I couldn't conscionably sit in those pews and call it wrong. The pastors would occasionally take to the pulpit and denounce homosexual behaviour as sin. I'd think to myself: what about everyone else in the room sinning in a dozen other ways, quietly and repeatedly, with nothing more than an occasional confession required of them? The church's line was that homosexuality was just another sin, no different to blasphemy or envy. Yet those other sins were tolerated so long as you fessed up now and then. A gay couple walking through the door wouldn't have been met with the same grace. Sermons preached kindness and acceptance across race and colour, then turned around annually to denounce homosexuality as a corruption of God's intention for humanity. The hypocrisy was too much at times. I had gay friends. It was a bridge too far for me to call those people polluters of God's will simply because they loved another person of the same sex. So, in a rare moment of moral defiance, I left it as the one thing the church and I disagreed on — strange, given how much else I'd simply conformed to. As the years passed and I learned more about who Jesus actually was, I came to believe he'd probably have stood with me on this one. Then I heard this song. As has happened so many times in my life, the poetry said it better than I ever could — pointing at the conservative belief that sexuality is a choice to be treated or prayed away, and at how easily "God loves all his children" gets set aside in favour of a strict reading of a book written three and a half thousand years ago. Musically, the track works because it refuses to hide behind Macklemore's usual bravado. The beat is understated — a simple piano figure, a steady kick, room left open around the vocal — and Mary Lambert's hook carries the emotional weight the verses build toward. It's produced like a hymn rather than a rap single, which is exactly the point: this is a song asking to be taken as seriously as scripture, and the arrangement backs that claim rather than undercutting it with spectacle. Truth is, society doesn't treat gay people the way it does because it believes them unforgivable sinners. It does it for the same reason our species has always treated difference: fear. Homophobia is xenophobia's direct descendant — the same ugly instinct behind slavery, segregation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, even misogyny. Different degrees of evil, same root sentiment. Difference gets read as threat, and threat gets met with oppression. It seems written into us. Either way, this song lands on some hard truths. Love cannot be denied. My advice to anyone still hiding behind xenophobic or conservative Christian attitudes on this: step out into the light and join us. You'll feel better.

What a thoughtful and striking indictment of organised religion this song is. Ben Gibbard's opening verse pulls no punches — Catholic school discipline rendered as its own kind of small violence, a nun's warning that fear sits at the heart of love, and a narrator who simply never goes back. I'm not sure I need to say much more. That verse pretty much sums it all up. The chorus turns from indictment to something gentler: the idea that heaven and hell, for all their certainty, might never actually be satisfied — that the afterlife as we've built it in our imagination is exactly that, a construction, not a re-creation of anything real. What's poignant to me is the honesty underneath it. Nobody has existential proof of what happens when we die. So at least at the outset, we're all heading into the dark — into the unknown. Musically, the song does something quietly radical for a Death Cab track: it strips almost everything away. Just Gibbard's voice and a single nylon-string acoustic guitar, played in a fingerpicked pattern that never really resolves into a strum. There's no percussion, no bass, no wall of production to hide behind — which suits the subject matter perfectly. A song about facing death alone is delivered almost entirely alone. The melody sits low and even in his register, more spoken confession than performance, and the sparse arrangement means every lyric lands with nowhere to hide. It's one of the rare moments where restraint itself becomes the emotional argument. There's something about calling it like it is on the subject of death that appeals to me these days. All the belief in the world can't change the fact that you're going to die. What this song suggests instead is that our focus, at the end, should be on who we're with — not on what happens next. I think I like that idea too. More than that, the notion that it's the soul that moves on, not the body, seems to sit right with me. I'm not saying we return to dust. I'm not saying we store up treasures in heaven. What I'm saying is: I'm at peace not knowing where I'm going. Just as long as it's not Geelong.

Champion’s best songs are not just novelty songs. They are pieces of Australian folk zeitgeist, built on timing, observation, understatement and a deep instinct for how ordinary people actually think. “Slow and Mournful”, from his 2002 album Shady Tree, is a perfect example.