Switchfoot, celebrating the 20th anniversary of its debut album, to perform at Great Jones County Fair July 19

Twenty years ago, Switchfoot took a gut punch after turning in “The Beautiful Letdown,” the album the band had just finished and was set to release as their major label debut on Columbia Records.

Instead, upon hearing the album, the label rejected the album, dropped Switchfoot from the Columbia artist roster, moved the band to the smaller Red Ink subsidiary and essentially left the band to figure out where to go from there.

“It was mainly the person at the very top of Sony Records at the time,” Switchfoot singer and primary songwriter Jon Foreman said in a video interview. The Christian rock band will perform with Creed and Finger Eleven on Friday, July 19, 2024, at the Great Jones County Fair in Monticello. “When someone in that position says you guys have no hits and I want to drop you, you second guess yourself. You think man, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe these songs aren’t what I think they are.

“But then a week later, after coming together and really talking it through, we came to the conclusion, I don’t care what anyone else thinks,” he said. “I think these songs need to be heard. I believe in them and I don’t care what the man at the top of the building says about them. We’re going to put them out anyway. I look back at that story and that season and I’m really thankful that it happened. I think it was a true galvanizing time for us to really come together and remember why we’re doing it in the first place.”

So “The Beautiful Letdown” got released in 2003, and seemingly against all odds, a pair of singles, “Meant to Live” and “Dare You to Move,” connected at radio and the album became a double platinum breakthrough hit.

Now, 20 years later, there’s another chapter to “The Beautiful Letdown.” In May 2023, Switchfoot released a newly rerecorded version of the original album under the title “The Beautiful Letdown (Our Version).” Then last September a deluxe edition of the 20th anniversary version of the album arrived. It added a second disc on which a variety of contemporary music acts — including the Jonas Brothers, Owl City, Ryan Tedder and Jon Bellion — have each recorded their own version of a song from the original album.

This second disc is further proof of how impactful “The Beautiful Letdown” became after its original release.

“It started in a really pretty organic way,” Foreman said of this all-star tribute to Switchfoot and the original version of “The Beautiful Letdown.” “We just had a couple of conversations with people when … we were celebrating the 20 years. They were hitting us up saying ‘Congrats, that record really meant a lot to me. It’s the reason why I started playing music’ or ‘That song got me through some hard times,’ whatever it was. So we replied back to a few of them and then reached out to a couple of friends saying maybe we could do a couple of these songs as if they were redone or re-imagined by these artists that were inspired by them.”

Foreman didn’t expect the idea to turn into something so substantial.

“These are all really busy people that have their own lives and families and careers to worry about,” he said. “So we were expecting a lot of people saying ‘Man, it sounds like an amazing project, but unfortunately we can’t pull it off this year.’ That’s kind of what I thought we were going to have. But it was not that. It was a lot of people saying ‘Yeah, I’m in, let’s go.’

“I mean, what a gift!” Foreman said. “More than a Grammy or those kinds of awards, to have your peers, people that you look up to and really respect, singing your songs, it’s a high honor.”

The original “Beautiful Letdown” stands as a pivotal album in Switchfoot’s career. At the time, the band had made an impact on the Christian music scene, with three albums that had sold in respectable numbers. But original members of the group — Foreman, his brother Tim Foreman (bass) and Chad Butler (drums) — were reaching a time in their lives when they had to choose between music and other paths in life.

The band, which by then had added Jerome Fontamillas (guitar/keyboards) to the lineup, decided to make “The Beautiful Letdown” thinking more likely than not, it would be the final Switchfoot album.

“We’re thinking our drummer just got married,” Foreman said. “My brother and I had dropped out of school to try and chase this thing down, but we’re at this point (in our) mid-20s, trying to think like, I had just moved out and (was) renting a place, having those conversations about getting married. And, you know, playing in a band that sells 150 tickets somewhere doesn’t really give much inspiration for starting a family. It was really this thing where we’re at a crossroads. We thought, OK, this will probably be our last album. We’ll make the record and then break up and get real jobs.”

A double-platinum album later, the guys in Switchfoot were making plans for their future in music. The next album, “Nothing is Sound,” went gold and was followed by “Oh, Gravity” in 2006 before Switchfoot switched labels to Atlantic and in 2009 released “Hello Hurricane.” That album became another double-platinum hit and also won a Grammy for Best Rock Gospel Album. The band has since released five more albums, solidifying the band’s place as a popular act within both mainstream and Christian music scenes that can be reliably expected to deliver honest and musically compelling albums and inspired live shows.

The initial plan for the 20th anniversary of “The Beautiful Letdown” was for Switchfoot to re-record the album and see what two decades of musical growth and experience did for the songs.

“The original was done so fast, and we were pretty young. And (producer John) Fields was really young as well,” Foreman said. “We’ve all learned so much over the course of a couple of decades. So some things are immediately easy to improve upon — drum tones and mix elements. I think one of the bigger things for me was feeling like as a singer, there are more places (now) that I can go to.

“ …(S)till, there are very few cringe moments on this album,” he said approvingly of the original album.

Switchfoot’s new versions of “The Beautiful Letdown” songs stick largely to the original arrangements. But the outside artists who recorded the songs for the deluxe edition frequently take the “Beautiful Letdown” songs to markedly different places. Bellion’s version of the edgy hit single “Meant to Live” is re-imagined as a string-filled ballad, while Dayglow puts a poppier spin on the rocker “Adding to the Noise,” with a playful, tinny beat and synthetic/electronic tones replacing the guitars.

With the deluxe now available, the third component to the 20th anniversary celebration of “The Beautiful Letdown” is underway with a tour on which Switchfoot, for the first time ever, will play the album front to back, along with a selection of other songs. This will require the band, which normally switches up its song selection from night to night, to take a more structured approach to the show.

“This is the first time we’ve ever done a tour where we will stick to the set list (for much of the show). That’s the way the album is,” Foreman said. “So we’ll find other ways to make the changes, I suppose, along the way. I mean, that’s what I love about live music, kind of embracing the unknown and the chaos.”