Song of the Day 4/14: The Caulfields, “Devil’s Diary”

Trump finally did something that pissed off even his Christian nationalist supporters when he posted an AI collage centering on an image of himself as Jesus. After enough people called him a blasphemer, he deleted it from his social media account, but not before blatantly lying that he thought it showed him as a doctor.

Who does he think he’s fooling? He slags the Pope for daring to criticize him, he posts himself in a robe “healing” someone who looks a lot like Franklin Graham – he pretty clearly thinks he’s bigger than that wimpy Nazarene.

Granted, proclaiming yourself bigger than Jesus is a good way to get attention, even if a lot of it’s negative. John Lennon once brought the wrath of the self-righteous down upon the Beatles for saying they were bigger than Jesus (considering that the band sold a lot of records in the non-Christian world, he wasn’t wrong). And sometimes just singing the phrase gets you your 15 minutes of fame.

That’s what happened when Newark’s John Faye and his band the Caulfields released “Devil’s Diary” on their debut album “Whirligig” in 1995. The song, with its refrain “I’m bigger than Jesus now,” got them exposure on MTV and made the charts in Australia. The band broke up shortly after their second LP dropped in 1997.

Faye’s post-grunge power pop, which drew comparisons to Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson from critics, has otherwise failed to get the attention it deserves. After the demise of the Caulfields, Faye formed a series of bands – the John Faye Power Trip, IKE, John & Brittany and, for the past decade, John Faye and the Meddling Kids, which took its name from this tune.