This is the way Sunny Day Real Estate ended – not with a bang, but a prayer. It’s late winter 1994, and a long, tense, tour with pals Shudder to Think and Soul Coughing has finally come to an end. Sunny Day Real Estate has as well. Just weeks earlier, vocalist Jeremy Enigk devoted his life to Christ and joyously saw his pain disappear. “I watched myself slowly shrivel up into a hopeless, bitter and lonely person,” Enigk wrote in an e-mail letter to friends that December. “I could not take it anymore, so I took a shot on calling God. He answered me. All the hope that was squeezed out of me was replaced 10 times.”

Enigk wanted his friends and bandmates – guitarist Dan Hoerner, drummer William Goldsmith and bassist Nate Mendel – to understand and feel as magically charged as he did. They didn’t. So Enigk gave himself to Jesus and sacrificed his band, which slowly crumbled as the band’s small tour van didn’t have enough room for all the feelings of betrayal, for the tattered pieces of special friendships and dreams.

Everything collapsed at a show at Washington, D.C.’s Black Cat club on an unbearably chilly night. Only the sold-out, frenzied audience – which Soul Coughing’s M. Doughty remembers as “fucking insane, just waves of kids crowd-surfing and pouring over barricades” for their emo-core heroes – didn’t know how frosty relations were inside the band. Enigk’s Christianity choked off all communication, and relations between all of the band members were in disrepair. Indeed, everyone but the crowd knew this would be Sunny Day’s last show.

“The amazing thing was the last song ended, and Jeremy started praying, really quietly – so quietly that you couldn’t make out the words,” Doughty recalls. “This is exactly the big, fucking huge rift that made everybody feel so uncomfortable. Nate just threw his hands up, put his bass down and left the stage. Dan just started drowning everything in feedback. The club got so hot they’d opened a door behind the stage, and Willie, who had worked so hard during the show – as the cold air poured in, steam is pouring off his body. He was so pissed off, just venting this incredible rage, staring at Jeremy, the steam exploding off him. From that moment on, no more rock was required in my life. It was an amazing gift, to be able to see such intensity.”

Shortly afterward, Mendel and Goldsmith signed on as the rhythm section for the Foo Fighters, one of the most successful rock ‘n’ roll bands on the planet. It seemed certain that Sunny Day’s epitaph had already been written.

SUNNY DAY REAL ESTATE NEVER GAVE INTERVIEWS during it first incarnation, so this story – from the break-up through its reunion and joyous new album, How It Feels To Be Something On (Sub Pop) – has never really been told.

“There was never really much to say before,” says Enigk, explaining the group’s previous press blackout. “The music always spoke for itself, as far as we were concerned. There didn’t seem to be much of a point to anything we had to say individually. It’s a different time now.”

The members of SDRE talk over two days in New York – lunch at SoHo’s Spring Street Natural and coffee at midtown’s art-deco-damaged Paramount Hotel – sandwiched around their second show back, a passionate Irving Plaza gig before fans so fervent they started lining up at 9 a.m. The interviews feel a little like therapy. They tell moving, powerful stories. They apologize to one another. They laugh about the terrible things they’d said about each other after the breakup. They still seem to be piecing together what happened four years ago, continuing to learn things about one another.

Certainly, considering the deep personal acrimony and bitterness that followed Sunny Day Real Estate’s collapse, the band’s reunion in 1997 seemed almost painfully easy. It happened as simply as this: The four former bandmates put personal feelings aside to help select which rarities, alternate takes and early singles ought to appear on a posthumous collection. They decided adding one new song might make the compilation a more exciting purchase and suddenly found themselves making music together again and, more importantly, having fun.

                

“It took one jam session, playing together for 30 seconds,” says Hoerner.

“And we realized we should probably get back together,” says Goldsmith. “It’s kind of weird, because we weren’t really sure whether it would work or not. Then we say down, and it all came so naturally.”

Few recent reunions have seemed so unlikely. Enigk, confused by success and confounded by love, found peace and happiness by accepting Jesus Christ just as Sunny Day seemed poised for a breakthrough. Enigk’s embrace of Christianity didn’t sit well with Goldsmith, especially, who felt like he was losing his friend and a band to the very religion he started playing music, in part, to rebel against.

“It probably seemed to someone like William, who did have such bad experiences with religion, that he was losing his best friend to a cult,” says Shudder to Think’s Craig Wedren, whose band did an early split single with Sunny Day, then headlined (with Soul Coughing) the late-’94 tour that would be SDRE’s last.

“There was a lot of weird personal history, but it didn’t take a lot,” says Mendel, who initially agreed to record the new LP but ultimately chose to remain with the Foo Fighters. “Once everyone got the idea, we realized the brick wall was imaginary. Sure it was going to be weird for a few of us who had strained relations. What we did was we played first, and we dealt with the strained relations later. We tried to heal all that through the music.”

It worked, Everything mushroomed quickly. They repaired friendships. They’d be a full-time band again. They’d tour. They’d do press. They’d even (gasp!) play California, something Hoerner mysteriously refused to do before. Now they have a genius new record, How It Feels To Be Something On, a beautiful sprawling, life-affirming mess of power and prog rock that should make more than a few top-10 lists this year. They’re four years older, four years more patient, four years better adjusted.

“It’s so different from how it was,” says Enigk. “Now, we’re a new band. We’re new people. We want to be together. That’s all in the past. We’ve gone through it, we’ve dealt with it, with a lot of time a lot of talks. We’re brothers hanging out, basically.”

“There’s something about Sunny Day that’s a magnet,” explains Hoerner. “If we didn’t have Sunny Day and we had these big fights, we’d probably never see each other again. But there’s Sunny Day Real Estate! So, of course, we’re drawn to each other. That’s so much more important. Those side issues have become irrelevant because they are irrelevant. It’s the gravity of what we’re up to that brought us back together. The power of the force.”

Despite this force, Enigk, Hoerner and Goldsmith all agree they had to break up when they did. The three of them seem to have grown immensely sense then. Goldsmith, a wild child, has developed a serious, introspective side since recovering from an out-of-control rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle with the Foo Fighters, and then his bitter departure from Dave Grohl’s band.

After leaving the Foo Fighters, Goldsmith went back to Washington state and started playing with friends, searching for something to lift him out of his funk. “When we played, it felt like this weight being lifted off my shoulders,” says Goldsmith of SDRE. “That’s when I knew this is where I belong. You try different things and different experiences, and you really have to figure out where you belong and what you’re happy doing.”

Hoerner practically left music all together, although he and Enigk were the first to mend their friendship after the band ended. They jammed together on some experimental pieces around the time of Enigk’s orchestral 1995 solo record, Return of the Frog Queen, and talked about releasing anonymous seven-inch singles. Also, Hoerner got married and left Seattle, using his Sunny Day fund to but a large piece of land in eastern Washington where he and his wife reside, planting trees and building a self-supporting ecosystem. He’s the mellowest of the group, and he sweetly credits his wife for his new attitude toward his bandmates.

“We just drove each other crazy,” Hoerner admits. “It was being young and not being able to deal with your emotions. We learned to communicate better. When you get older and realized more about what you’re up to and what you want those kind of little monkey wrenches – ha, ha.” Goldsmith rolls his eyes at the Foo Fighters allusion. “Given your relationship, they’re not so important anymore.”

“There are mixed feelings about what we could do about me singing about Christ. I want it to be what Sunny Day Real Estate is about, so that the others out there will hear. One of the members doesn’t mind me singing about Jesus, another is very uncomfortable with idea of me singing about Jesus, and one didn’t mind but all of a sudden does. I understand where they are coming from because I was there. Jesus just isn’t anything I want to compromise with for He is far more important than this music, financial security or popularity ever could be.

--From Enigk’s 1994 e-mail to friends.

Enigk summed up the band’s dilemma pretty well at the time. He wanted to share the gift of Christianity with everyone he came across. Mendel says there might have been room for compromise had Enigk been able to step back for a moment.

“There were these two things,” Mendel says. “Jeremy was young. The rest of us were young and naïve, but we were excited about what was happening. Jeremy is intensely into the music he makes. All musicians take it very seriously, but Jeremy is intense. He found it difficult, I think, to work with three other people. He felt frustration with the ideas he had about how the music was going to turn out, compared to how someone else interprets it. Then when he decided to make Christianity a very important part of his life … We could have found a way around that, because eventually, of course, as he did remain a Christian, it became not so all-encompassing. His impatience was more of a problem. An impatience with working with other musicians.”

Enigk has always had a religious side, but never took it particularly seriously. “I never really stepped over that line in such an intense way,” he says. “It was like ‘Christ! Oh, such glorious miracles.”

Troubled, confused and lost – just as Diary’s first single, “Seven,” climbed modern-rock charts and the group’s shows started selling out – Enigk dropped to his knees and asked for help. “I pretty much stumbled into God, which changed my life and made me want to get rid of anything and everything that held any kind of fear of going away from the path of God,” he says.

Enigk discusses faith with his casual grace, without weirdness. It’s just a natural part of his life. “Sunny Day was such a huge thing right in my face – it was success, money, popularity,” he says. “I just wanted to be a humble carpenter or shoe salesman. All of a sudden I just wanted to be unknown. I just got on my  knees and said, ‘Jesus, if you’re out there, let it be known. I have nothing to live for. If you are there, please answer me.’ And the sun shined on my face. I had brilliant dreams, visions, that my mind could never come up with. Just obvious miracles. I’d go to a friend’s house for Christian fellowship, and there would be this spirit in the room, literally and physically flowing through my body. You could breathe it in. It was really intense. Things were more clear than ever, but also more confusing now that I look back. It was so overwhelming that I didn’t really know what I was doing and how I was reacting toward my friends. I had so much love, that I didn’t do right along the way.”

“Well, I kind of acted like a dick, too,” interrupts Goldsmith, laughing.

“It’s a big thing to accept, and I was like, ‘Willie, this is the way it is – and I want you to have it,’” Enigk explains. “Instantly I became a Christian. I just wanted my friends to know, to experience the same thing. The joy and the happiness and the amazement and the life. I was so alive. It was the first time I’ve ever felt so alive.”

For Goldsmith, however, organized religion only reminded him of his own painful adolescence. While Enigk drew life and energy from God, Goldsmith found the church repressive and dogmatic.” My negative reaction came from growing up Catholic,” Goldsmith says. “My idea of anything religious has always been negative. It’s always been the thing I wanted to rebel against. The way religion was taught to me wasn’t helpful. It was confusing. It fucked you up when you were a kid. It was, ‘you masturbate, and you’re going to hell.’ But I can’t help it!”

So no one really knew how to talk about Christianity. On that last tour, the Shudder to Think guys, perhaps confusing Christianity with their own D.C. straight-edge roots, weren’t sure whether they could drink or curse around him. “It was really hard for everybody,” says Shudder’s Wedren. “Especially Willie, who is this love machine, party monster, beautiful Bacchanalian.”

Soul Coughing’s Doughty remembers Enigk signing autographs with the inscription, “Hi, Jesus loves you,” and spending hours chatting cross-legged about God with the female groupies who wanted to take him home. “I definitely loved watching girls try to pick up Jeremy,” Doughty says. “They’d invariably fail, but were so transfixed by the erotic power of Jeremy Enigk that they’d sit with him on these dirt floors talking about Jesus.”

Archie Moore, guitarist for the now-defunct Velocity Girl (whom SDRE opened for just prior to the Shudder/Soul Coughing tour), remembers hearing stories of Enigk and friends preaching to fans after playing. “They were very young,” says Moore. “Jeremy must have been in his teens. We heard weird things by the end of the tour, about a buddy of his preaching after the shows to the kids straggling around afterwards.”

If true, Velocity Girl’s Sarah Shannon, who briefly dated Goldsmith, doesn’t remember it, recalling Enigk as so low-key he “barely spoke on stage.” Whatever he said, it was loud enough for Goldsmith, who would play as loudly as he could to sabotage the prayer.

“It was my gut reaction,” Goldsmith says, grinning sheepishly. “It’s weird, but it ran deep. Because of my experiences, I’ve always wanted to musically appeal to a darker side. We had this thing so positive and full of life, and I wanted it to be dark. I think ultimately that’s a reaction to the way I grew up. When Jeremy found God, I didn’t think it would be the end of anything. For me the drive behind my music is religion as well. My god was always my sister that died. That was the driving force for me. I felt that if I hit hard enough, I could crack the Earth and get her back. I found that if you start a battle with the Earth, you’re going to fucking lose. I hurt myself. Now I’m trying to somehow come to terms with it and understand that’s the way things are, and you can’t understand it. I’m trying to make peace with whatever it was I was trying to fight.”

For Hoerner, who finds his spirituality in nature and conveys a quiet but stubborn sensitivity, Enigk’s religious passion just made Sunny Day more inspired.

“I think it’s awesome – that passion,” says Hoerner. “I’m not a Christian at all, but I have such respect for it. There’s obvious inspiration there, and to see it, to see something flowing through somebody, is amazing. I love to be part of that. I was stoked for him. I think anything that inspires is good. The only think I was bummed about was that it seemed Jeremy couldn’t have both. Maybe now he can.”

Enigk thinks it might be possible, which is exactly why Sunny Day is trying again. “There was a time when I wanted to freak out and change everybody’s life,” he says, “but that’s not me. I’m not the changer. The best way now is just to live to the best of my abilities, and that will speak for itself. The fellows in the band aren’t Christian, but [Sunny Day] is another medium to get the message out there. Not that I do the most wonderful job. I don’t go out there and preach by any means. I thought I wanted to, but I’m definitely not focused enough with speech to be a preacher. “

Still, when Enigk talks about the band as a vehicle for Christ, he’s talking about using his life as an example for others, not using either Sunny Day’s songs or concerts as a pulpit. “There’s a time for everything,” Enigk says when asked whether he would talk about God on stage. “I wouldn’t think it’s very appropriate. I think that would be too selfish of me to do that. Ultimately, in the big scale of things, it might focus more on love, but in a selfish kind of way.”

And this would jeopardize something pretty rare during these days when independent counsels investigate extramarital affairs: a second chance. How It Feels To Be Something On is the group’s third studio album and by far its best effort yet. Sunny Day’s 1994 debut, Diary – despite an influence in the emo-world second only to Rites of Spring – shows a young band still very much getting comfortable in its own skin and processing its influences. It was also recorded when the band was burned out from touring and in shock that Sub Pop showed interest in the group. There’s not a whole lot of warmth for Diary inside the band. Everyone seems to agree it would have been a better record if they’d captured those songs two months earlier. If Diary is the sound of a band finding its footing, the untitled “Pink Album” is the sound of a band splintering apart. The record is patched together, the band members were feuding – and it shows.

Something On lives up to the hype, a comeback disc that’s aware of the band’s legacy and import that doesn’t fear new directions, whether dabbling in orchestral splendor (“The Shark’s Own Private Fuck”), a new storytelling approach (“Two Promises”) or taut, unrivaled pop (“Pillars”).

“We definitely wanted to experiment a lot more and be more experimental in the studio – more free-flow,” says Hoerner. “There was kind of a formula we got used to, which was really easy to break out of because we hadn’t played in a long time.”

“I don’t think we set out like we needed to make this record really different or we needed to pick up on this old sound,” says Goldsmith. “We did it the way we always did it – fuck around on a part until it turns into something else. The basic tracks were all done in one to three takes. No editing. There’s tempo fluctuations and it’s not perfect, and I love it that way. We did a good, solid organic take, and then we did a dance.”

Hoerner had hoped to do more with orchestration, a la Enigk’s Frog Queen album, but ultimately, that never happened.

“I think Sunny Day can get along with less,” says Enigk. “It’s so much more full. My solo thing, when it just had the songs without the orchestration, it just needed something extra. Vocally, I wanted to be a little more elaborate – I wanted to sing out more. The first record, I was singing with a dead voice. We toured for two months then recorded for two weeks, so my voice was not really the way my voice is. The second record, I didn’t care. Nobody cared. This record, it was a very intense time. I’d run into some very emotional things, personally, that really let my voice be the way it really is when I’m just hanging out by myself, playing guitar and singing.”

The band steps up lyrically as well, despite knowing that every word will come under a microscope. Enigk doesn’t explicitly address his faith, but it’s always there. “I’m kind of talking about myself, even though ultimately it applies to two people,” Enigk says of Something On’s opening track, “Pillars.” “I’m walking in circles. I’ve gone astray. And I’ve seen ultimately nothing, but everything, at the same time. I’ve seen all the evidence, and it’s left me basically confused. ‘How it Feels’ to me is pretty literal – ‘If I break down all that I am.’ The lyrics came out at a time when I felt like I needed to be broken and humbled in order to be built up again.”

So forget about emo. Forget about the U2 references that made the band blush – or even the Stone Temple Plagiarists crack that made the group laugh through clinched teeth. Grander things await.

“I, personally, was looking for the whole Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan thing, mixed with the orchestra,” says Hoerner, giving props to the late Pakistani singer he and Enigk love. “It just didn’t happen. On the next record, I think I’d like for me and Jeremy to at least try and score one or two songs. And I’m so looking forward to experimenting with all kinds of different instruments, different percussion stuff.”

Adds Goldsmith, “There are going to be a lot of people that say, ‘I hate the new Sunny Day. I miss the old Sunny Day.’ Just wait. The next record will be a lot different from this one.”

Which in itself is good news for fans. The members of Sunny Day plan on making this work for the long hall. They’re going to break it into bite-sized pieces to make sure they’re OK. Instead of touring for seven weeks, they’ll go on the road for three and see how it goes.

“For me, it’s more like, ‘Life first, then music,’” says Enigk.

“We’re not out to conquer the world,” adds Goldsmith. “Just to write good music and record it as quick as possible.”

One person who isn’t sure how it will go, however, is Mendel. The bassist, after coming back into  the Sunny Day fold when he thought it would only be a part-time gig, opted to stay with the Foo Fighters when SDRE reunited as a full-fledged touring band. Jeff Palmer, formerly the bassist for the Mommyheads, became his replacement. Shortly before the band’s reunion tour, Palmer left SDRE; Joe Skyward (ex-Posies) currently fills the bass position.

“That was an extremely difficult choice for me,” Mendel says. “It had to do with the instability of all the people involved, strained relationships. I didn’t know if the band would last. I really do love playing in the Foo Fighters. I think we’re making great music, and I love the people involved. I looked at it and said, ‘I don’t know if this band’s going to last.’ I also get a strange feeling in my stomach when I look at going back and picking up the pieces of where I was three years ago. Those were fucking hard times for me, and I couldn’t bear to go back to them.”

No one knows the people involved better than Mendel. So what does he think has to happen for the band to make this work?

“They’re all very different people,” he says. “I think they need to be honest with each other. That’s all. Otherwise misunderstandings arise, and they may come to a point where they destroy the band.”

But four years older and wiser, everyone a different and more knowledgeable person that he was when the band split, it seems a good chance that SDRE will continue on.

“Basically, we grew the fuck up,” says Goldsmith. “I’m ready to be happy.”

“We’re accruing experience,” adds Hoerner. “We work through issues and have fights. We’ve gotten mad, gotten happy, gotten stoked. Argued and hugged. It goes on and on.”

extra, extra special thanks to Bryan Robison "sidra3@rocketmail.com" for typing this article!!!