Thoughts On My Faith

The title is an inquiry, not a declaration. "Thoughts on my faith" positions the song as an act of examination rather than testimony. There is no altar call here, no confession of belief or disbelief, only a mind turning something over, testing its weight, checking whether the thing still holds. For a collective whose entire existence was built on the infrastructure of recovery, the question of faith has always been present. What changes on this track is that it is finally put into direct language.

Track eleven of a double album, arriving near the end of a record written during what Zach Choy described as "a winter of prolonged grief,"^[1] "Thoughts On My Faith" carries the accumulated pressure of everything that came before it. By the time you reach it, the album has already taken you through grief, endurance, and the specific kind of exhaustion that comes from staying alive through a difficult period. The song does not offer relief. It offers honesty.

A Collective Built Around Recovery

Crack Cloud emerged in Vancouver in the late 2010s not as a conventional band but as something closer to a mutual aid project with a recording studio attached. The founding collective drew heavily from people connected to addiction recovery and mental health programs, both as participants and as support workers.^[2] Choy has described the project as "a means of unravelling, dissecting trauma, negative feelings and cynicism" and, with characteristic directness, as "our rehabilitation outlet."^[3]

This origin story matters for understanding what "Thoughts On My Faith" is actually doing. In recovery culture, faith is not optional. Most twelve-step frameworks center explicitly on surrender to a power greater than oneself, a deliberately vague formulation designed to accommodate everyone from committed believers to lifelong skeptics. The concept functions as a kind of cognitive scaffolding: it gives the person in crisis something to lean against while they rebuild. Whether or not they believe in it is, in some sense, beside the point. It works through use.

This is the context in which Crack Cloud arrived at the topic. Not from a position of theological curiosity but from the very practical question of what a person does when the mechanisms that kept them alive are themselves called into question.

The Weight of Being Twenty-Nine

The biographical dimension of "Peace and Purpose" gives "Thoughts On My Faith" a specific gravity. Choy's father, Danny, was diagnosed with leukemia at age twenty-nine and died when Zach was eleven, leaving behind poems, song transcriptions, audio journals, and handmade objects for his family.^[4] When Choy sat down in his Calgary basement at twenty-nine to write what would become this album, the parallel was not subtle. He was recording with one microphone and a collection of junk instruments through a winter of prolonged grief, at exactly the age when his father's life began to collapse.

This biographical weight reshapes the meaning of "faith" on this track. Choy is not asking abstract questions about God. He is asking what his father believed in, and whether any version of that is still available, and what it means that he is now the same age his father was when the answer began to matter most. The song is, in part, a conversation across a gap that can never be closed.

Danny Choy left a creative legacy, a series of objects and recordings meant to be found after his death. There is something inherently faith-adjacent about that act: you make something and trust that it will reach someone, that the future will hold a person who needs it. Zach Choy inherited that act and, with Crack Cloud, has been performing a version of it for over a decade. The question of whether that inheritance still sustains him is exactly what this song is circling.

Faith as a Technology of Survival

"Thoughts On My Faith" approaches spirituality not as a system of beliefs to be evaluated but as something that does work for a person. The song is interested in function: what faith actually performs in a life, how it organizes experience, what it costs, and whether those costs are worth paying. The narrator is not asking whether God exists. They are asking whether their relationship to the concept of faith has served them, and whether it can continue to do so.

This framing puts the song in territory that is both more honest and more complicated than standard religious expression. Conventional faith claims do not usually include an audit of the faith itself. But "Thoughts On My Faith" is exactly that kind of audit. It holds the experience of believing, or trying to believe, or having once believed, up to the light and examines it with the same unsentimental attention the rest of "Peace and Purpose" applies to grief and loss.

There is also the question of what constitutes faith for a person in this collective and at this stage of recovery. The obvious candidate is the collective itself. Crack Cloud is thirty people building something together, a community of practice with its own rituals, its own shared vocabulary, its own version of accountability and grace.^[2] The collective model functions as a secular analogue to religious community: people who gather regularly, hold each other, make meaning together through shared work. When the song asks about faith, one of the things it might be asking about is this: whether the project, the people, the work itself, still constitutes something worth trusting.

Where the Song Lands in the Album

The sequencing of "Peace and Purpose" is deliberate. The album is constructed as a stream-of-consciousness exercise, Choy working through grief in real time over a year of recording.^[1] By track eleven, the listener has been through a significant amount of emotional territory. The album does not build toward resolution. It builds toward a kind of unflinching clarity about what cannot be resolved.

"Thoughts On My Faith" arrives at the point in the record where the initial intensity of grief has not dissipated but has shifted into something more sustained, more reflective. The song is not a breakdown; it is a reckoning. The narrator has moved past the acute phase and is now doing the harder work of assessing what remains and what the tools they have for surviving are actually worth.

Critical reception of "Peace and Purpose" noted its emotional rawness and its refusal to sand down difficulty. Reviewers described it as "terrifying, inspiring, vital, invigorating"^[4] and praised its ability to locate higher meaning in the deeply personal. "Thoughts On My Faith" is perhaps the clearest example of this quality. It takes a private reckoning and renders it in terms that anyone who has ever leaned on something invisible to get through a hard period will recognize.

Other Ways of Reading

The song resists any single interpretation. "Faith" in common usage extends well beyond the religious: you can have faith in a person, in a system, in your own perception of reality, in the idea that things will eventually improve. Someone who has navigated addiction knows something particular about all of these. Trust becomes difficult when your own judgment has failed you. Confidence in your perception of reality is exactly what addiction distorts. The decision to act as if the future is worth surviving toward requires something that looks a lot like faith, whatever you call it.

On a secular reading, "Thoughts On My Faith" is about the cognitive architecture of a functioning life: the structures people build to make experience coherent, the decisions they make about what to trust, and the ongoing work of maintaining those structures when events put pressure on them. The song does not resolve this question either. It just names it, which is sometimes the most useful thing a piece of music can do.

There is also a specifically artistic faith at play. Crack Cloud's entire project rests on the premise that making music and making community are meaningful acts, that art has the capacity to process what ordinary language cannot, that the work is worth doing even when it does not immediately pay off. That faith has its own history of being tested. The albums, the tours, the collective's expansion and contraction over the years, the move from Vancouver to Calgary, the ongoing process of building something this complicated with this many people: all of it requires a form of belief that is not guaranteed by evidence.

The Value of an Open Question

"Thoughts On My Faith" does not end by answering the question it poses. This is not a failure. It is the most honest position available. The song belongs to a tradition in art-punk and post-punk that treats religious experience seriously without necessarily affirming it, that acknowledges the genuine human need for transcendence without pretending the available options are adequate to that need.

Crack Cloud has always understood that recovery is not a destination, that healing does not arrive and then stay. It is something that has to be continuously practiced, continuously renewed, continuously questioned. A song that asks what you actually believe in, and what that belief is doing for you, and whether it can survive what has happened to you, is not a crisis of faith. It is faith working exactly the way it is supposed to work. The questioning is the practice.

In that sense, the song earns its place near the end of a long, difficult record. It does not offer comfort. It offers company in the middle of a question that does not have a clean answer. For anyone who has sat with doubt and stayed anyway, that is enough.