The Daredevil Christopher Wright
Hopefulness Is Godliness, Or A Circus
Jul 30, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
-
Welcome to Daytrotter
-
A Conversation About Cancer
original version appears on In Deference To A Broken Back
This song was drawn from an e-mail I received from my mother. She was recounting a recent visit to a friend from church who at that time had been living with cancer for 5 years. My mother is a good writer, she was an English teacher years before I was born and aspires to write a novel which she has started but has put on hold of late…I think she's struggling with a bit of writer's block. Anyway, my mother and her friend spoke of David and Goliath and strength and Jesus and illness and hope. It was a beautiful e-mail. My mother's friend passed a few years ago now.
-
How To Get My Head Back On …
original version appears on In Deference To A Broken Back
This song was written about our brother and sister-in-law moving to Long Island for her to go to graduate school. It's fairly biographical though a bit chronologically jumbled. There's a history in there if you look for it. They're back in the Midwest now.
-
My Attempts To Grow A Beard
original version appears on The East Coast
This song was released on our first EP. One of the first fruits of our labors as a band. It's pretty much a fiction I think.
-
The East Coast
unreleased
This song is about marriage and the four seasons (times of the year, not the hotel). It's also a fiction for the most part. This is the first time it has been recorded and as of yet is not due to be released on an album. I played it on twelve-string for the Daytrotter recording which was great, though it is a bit of a bear to get all the strings you want pressed down at the same time. Currently my face is existing in my third and by far, best attempt to grow a beard to date.
Maybe only when you're bedside with one of your best friends, talking about the marauding, dictating, warlording cancer that's laying siege to their body - even if that afternoon things seem better and beating the odds is more than just a passing thought - does the word hope mean its full potential. Maybe only then can someone truly feel as if they're witnessing hopefulness in its maximum potency, its highest esteem and regard. It's at that time that people are brave and strong in the face of it and then later, when they've retired to their room, or just after getting into their cars to return home, they put their heads in their hands and find themselves sinking into a convulsing, shuddering weep. It all happens out of admiration for the strength and out of understanding that hopefulness is just another way of saying that there's nothing else out there working on your behalf than some magical invisibility.
It's putting faith in everything unseen, whether or not the unseen has any viable healing powers. Eau Claire, Wisconsin band The Daredevil Christopher Wright has a song called, "A Conversation About Cancer" that is just that, a song that's structured around an e-mail that lead singer Jon Sunde received from his English-teaching, aspiring novelist mother after speaking with her dying friend. It's about those overcoming circumstances bigger than anything else imaginable - the David and Goliath references were a bulk of the conversation - or at least portraying the useful hope needed to do so. One thing about hope is that it doesn't work half the time. It's not a pessimistic statement or a defeatist attitude, it's just that hope and faith are turned to when there's nothing else, when the odds are sliding right off the table, to crash on the floor and shatter into a thousand little pieces. This is obviously not to say that having it isn't a good idea or the best idea there is.
Sunde, his brother Jason and drummer Jessie Edgington must be firm believers in all of the various hopes that are out there fluttering around like fireflies - non-existent for all but a few hours every night and only during a couple months out of the year, in certain parts of the country. Most of the time, it would be easy to convince yourself that there's no such thing as a firefly and then the lights dim on a July night, the cicadas start to chirp their mating calls and pop go the shutters of the mysterious guests, arriving as hope does, briefly, but with more of a regularity. A lot of the songs on the band's debut full-length - In Deference To A Broken Back - an album that was produced by buddy and fellow Eau Claireian Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, carry with them allusions to the man upstairs or at least the things he's supposedly telling us to live by, the words that are of the scripture that apparently carry more weight and resiliency than anything else we can imagine.
These three guys stir their hopes with Beach Boys-y melodies that get kooky and do things that Interpol might try doing with more California raging through them, should they feel that they could roll up their pant legs and take a tan. Sunde sings that the love of a father (or The Father) is stronger than cancer and that someone finding out if that's true or not can teach him a lot about everything. The dimmer the outlook, the brighter the hope can be and there's a desire to make it so blinding that it has an effect. The passion that is inside every one of the Daredevil songs generates feelings of similar importance, similar tantalizing possibility - where the sky can break off from the dirt that holds its roots hostage.
The Daredevil Christopher Wright MySpace Page
