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Waterdeep

Here’s part three of our in-depth interview with Waterdeep’s Don Chaffer. If you missed either the first or second part, make sure to click the links and catch up on the conversation. In this installment, Don talks about valid art and what it means to write a meaningful three minute song.

Soul-Audio: You said you were sick of Waterdeep at one point, so I didn’t know if you thought about a different moniker or put it out there in a different way?

Don Chaffer: There are two reasons we didn’t. First, it was just sheer marketing reasons. People know who Waterdeep is but they don’t know who Don and Lori Chaffer is as much as they do Waterdeep. I think at a certain point, the other driving force and even more significantly, was because we came up, as I mentioned earlier, with this false dichotomy between faith and life in the world that so many Christian leaders had put on so many Christians, we partly wanted to knock over a few walls. We’ve grown up since you last heard from us and we have some new things to say. There’s an implicit or maybe explicit endorsement of living life as it is.

SA: What do you mean by that last statement?

Don: Well, I guess what I mean is that there’s such a heavy emphasis on Purpose Driven Church or other Christian paths to holiness or wellness or development or sanctification or whatever – whatever it is that people are focused on – there’s been so many prescribed paths to accomplish these things that Christians sometimes carry the illusion that they are in control of their own lives. When in fact, most of the world most of the time is not in control, regardless of their faith. This is a cultural inheritance because it comes with being North American and materialistic. You would think you have control over all of this stuff.

So the goal for us is to be able to talk about these life forces that are happening and the emotions that come with them. You confront things like death and birth and friendship and loss and heartache and childhood and all that stuff. These things are bigger than you but that’s okay. That’s part of the story of God that we fit into this much bigger story. We aren’t really the central character. So coming to a place of surrender and acceptance of that yields to this sort of beauty in life where there used to be dominant and haunting shadows. Does that make sense? I guess that’s what I mean.

We did a deluxe version of the album and I wrote this essay called “The Thing We All Do Not Even Talk About” and it’s about the idea that most of our life transcends any verbiage we want to attach to them. We experience things and we try to talk about them. I’m talking about everything like skipping down the street to writing a song to having a baby to cooking a meal. We say ‘this meal was good’ or ‘isn’t my child beautiful’ or ‘playing mini-golf was fun’ and we may even carry on and on about how fun it was, but that doesn’t mean we’ve captured that experience into words. So that leaves us with experiences that are untransmittable. We cannot get our experiences into somebody else.

Lately, I’ve been captivated by the idea that maybe these experiences were never meant to be transmitted. That’s the nature of life is to be in it and be okay with that and having knowing looks and smiles and words, of course, but that part of the gig of being human is to actually be human and not have to qualify or quantify everything.

SA: That’s really beautiful and I love that you’re wanting to write about that or that you’re driven by that. But then you yourself sit down and try to communicate that within a three minute pop songs. That just seems impossible.

Don: That’s a really interesting question and I think the answer is that you don’t. I think you just continue to take snapshots that elicit… the goal of doing something with words and music is to capture a mood and then the mood blossoms in the listener in its own unique way. So you have your own words and experiences that you bring to the table and then I tell you a story that is peculiarly unique to me and certain details will send you off on your own recollections or feelings. That’s touching the common ground that we all stand on and that’s the miracle of art – that you create a sense of togetherness that the details were so specific that they actually didn’t apply and yet the feeling of connection still happens. You can’t communicate the concept that experiences can only be felt and not discussed within a four minute song, but you can talk about experiences that were so transcendent that the words were falling short. Even though the words are falling short in the medium itself, there’s enough of a ripple of a wave that people remember their own transcendent experiences.

SA: You discussed valid art before and I wanted to ask about that. I know this is all personal and subjective, so we can keep it focused in that way, but for you, what is valid and what invalidates art?

Don: David Bowie in the ’80s said that he suddenly got interested in the surface of things. So he did the Let’s Dance song and that record with the intent of being all glittery and all ’80s, just obsessed with materialism at some level. David Bowie is a real artist so there were echoes of something else beneath it, but broadly speaking the idea of being obsessed with the surface of things, which is the same thing that Bono says on Achtung, Baby when he says, ‘Let’s slide down the surface of things.’ Those things are the opposite of what I would value as valid art, and yet those are a couple of good records right there. I think those still pull off being transcendent.

So I think all of this is a mystery. I think it’s good to have conversations about it, but there are certain things that can be overanalyzed. Maybe that’s at one level a copout but on another, I think it’s really true. I do occasional workshops on songwriting so I do have things I like to say about it. I used to think that I didn’t have anything to say about this because how do I know if it’s true for anybody else. There’s a phrase a pastor friend of mine used to say from the Talmud and it was ‘May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi’ meaning may you be so close behind your rabbi that he’s kicking up dust and it’s getting all over you. Where I used to think it was possible to achieve some distant objective approach to this stuff, now I believe you just go with all the peculiarities of the people that you’re with and that’s what art it.

So that having been said, I’m a big proponent of honesty and getting rid of artificiality and making art that cuts through the BS, for lack of a better word, and get down to some true, emotional reflection. But again, I work with people who that’s not necessarily their thing and I’m comfortable with that and they’re comfortable with that, too. So I’m not willing to call the other stuff invalid. Validity exists more within that personal world.

SA: But that’s the art that resonates with you?

Don: Yeah, I listen to pop music every once in a while, but not for large amounts of time. It’s like some people don’t like going to depressing movies. They want to escape when they see a movie. But I feel like it’s my right to be moved when I listen to music so if it doesn’t move me at one of those levels, then it’s not that I think it sucks, but I’m just not going to listen to it. [Laughs] I do want to say one thing. It might sound like I’m trying to be diplomatic about this and I do have relationships with different artists and I don’t want to offend some. But overall, this really is what I believe.

Especially in Christendom, there’s been way too much moralizing within art. There’s been too many people saying, ‘This is legitimate and that’s illegitimate.’ I’m just not interested in that. The number of gifts in people are so varied and so many that it would be a crime against the arts and against humanity to deny them a good chunk of escapism or a good bit of transcendence or mining for personal emotions. If you define art as one or the other, you lose the one side. I don’t want to see either humanity or the church become poorer for having lopped off the arm while favoring the leg. I just wanted to clarify.