Today I’m pleased to feature the rest of my recent discussion with Don Chaffer from Waterdeep. Read the first installment of the interview here. Today we pick up where we left off and cover topics ranging from creativity in the midst of business pressures to the “mood” of Reformed theology and the mystery of the Khrusty Brothers and Don’s role in said mystery and just about everything in between. Picking up where we left off, enjoy:

• How do you stay creative amidst the many business dealings that come with a career in music?

That’s probably a struggle for anyone who is creatively bent as opposed to administration or managerially or organizationally bent. And it’s not limited to artists. Some entrepreneurs don’t do well at managing their businesses. To the degree that you want to mature, you have to, at the very least, connect yourself to people who get that stuff and at the very least, educate yourself to some small level. And then, to the degree that you have the capacity to handle those things, it would be good to savvy up. That would be my advice.

I don’t know why I’m feeling so crotchety. I really don’t mean to be contrarian, but there is this kind of thing, I guess at this point in my life, I just don’t think there are easy answers to most of these things and that, fundamentally, we need to live well. To the degree that we do that, we will be happy and well adjusted, whether we are artists or label owners, or whatever our role might be. Fundamentally, we have these decisions to make and our communities have these decisions to make, and by communities, I mean everything from churches to groups of friends, to workplaces, whatever.

• Former bassist Kenny Carter once said: “The history of Waterdeep is all about the live show,” yet in 2004, the band went on hiatus from touring, how does this affect the identity of the band?

I think our identity has shrunk a lot publicly. I don’t think we’re on the radar like we were. In a conversation with Charlie Peacock about the transition of moving from artist to producer and he said that he felt like there was a moment in which he was waving goodbye to his fanbase. There has been a measure of that. My wife and I just finished a new record a few months ago. We released it digitally and we’re working on pulling the money together to release it in “hard form,” so I have renewed interest in reconnecting with fans so we do play a few shows but we went from 150 a year to 4 a year.

• You and Lori have both done solo albums. Why resurrect the Waterdeep name?

Honestly, it’s got more cache than either of the others, one. Two, I think there’s a unique thing that happens when the two of us are involved more intimately in the process even though we’ve always worked on one another’s solo albums and played and sung and in my case, produced and mixed hers. It’s a different thing when we have to agree upon a common direction; it winnows out certain songs that don’t fit together and so it becomes this sort of “other” thing and in this record we were sort of testing the limits of that. I would say that one of the defining characteristics of Waterdeep is Brandon’s drumming but we didn’t have that on this record. Part of that was that Lori was pregnant with our second child Ruby at the time and I moved all of the stuff home and we just recorded the record in the cracks that we had available and Brandon was real busy, he’s finishing up his degree in Percussion Performance at a university here in town. From a family perspective it made sense to do that and also from the perspective that we’d never really done an acoustic record. It always seemed like it would be a good idea based on the kinds of music we played, that it would be a good idea to do a whole record of the acoustic stuff that we usually featured at some point in the live show to the tune of a song or three.

• Many people wonder where Brandon is on this release?

There was no parting of ways at all. I just had Brandon in the other day to play drums on a record I was producing and we’re still good friends.

• Did you find it challenging to work without a drummer?

Not really, I had done a record called The Khrusty Brothers maybe a year before and had also tested limits of what I had previously understood as the way to do music. That sort of jiggled a few things loose, so when we rolled into this record, it felt like it was going to be a delight, A) to solve those problems with different means and B) to intentionally not faulter, I think we have four songs or so that have no element of percussion in them.

I love doing that. I think part of the problem of low-budget, high-power recording gear is that there is so much choice that you lose some of the immediacy of what people had at the birth of rock n’ roll. The limit of choice; those Beatles records, those are 4 and 8 tracks, maybe they made a couple of tunes at the end on 16 tracks, I don’t really know, so they were making a lot of decisions along the way. There’s plenty of those records where the entire band, drums, bass and two guitars is on one track. So I think that placing limitations sometimes is a good way to inspire. The thrill of the challenge and in this case it was absolutely no electric instruments except for the bass, I don’t play upright bass so I played electric but there’s no other electric instruments on the record so we had to do things like use vocals and accordions to get the sustain of what would have been electric guitars so we used cello and some other instruments for that. It was just a different way of looking at it and I really like the way it came out.

• You seem to work as much as a producer as a musician yourself. Do you have a preference? Does producing satisfy your creative side?

I can answer these types of questions very easily because they’re about me. I can say definitively that producing, does not satisfy my creative “jones,” but I love doing it; I love being on both sides. As far as the balance of the spotlight versus not the spotlight, it’s a function of what I’m doing. In other words, if I’m producing, then it’s not about me but about the artist. If I’m playing, it is about me, and bring on the spotlight! It’s about the art, but I’m the one bringing the art and I know that and it would be dumb of me to pretend that it isn’t me doing it. I’ve sat in group prayers before Christian concerts where people say “Lord, we just pray that You’d get this band out of the way so that Jesus can shine” and I’m like, well, if I’m not quote/unquote “in the way,” then there is no concert! From a theological perspective, how far do you want to carry that? Do you want to get Jesus out of the way so that Jesus can shine, because He was a human being and there’s an implicit endorsement of humanness in that. He didn’t create us and say “It’s OK,” or “not so great,” He said “It is good.”

I’m happy to be in the spotlight and doing my thing and I’m happy to be behind the scenes, because that’s still doing my thing. Life doesn’t take place on a stage. Even when you’re on the road, it’s taking place a sadly small amount of time, apart from schlepping your gear out to the trailer and sleeping too little and bouncing around the back seat of a van, listening to iPod and reading magazines.

• As a producer, how do you seek to bring your creative voice to the work of other artists without imposing yourself?

I’ve thought about that. It varies. It’s probably somewhat instinctual. There are times when I’m into my guitar playing, especially if I think it fits and then there are vast stretches of time when I’m not where I don’t think I need to do anything other than watch other people do stuff and encourage them. I would also say that I have a pretty heavy input on background melodics and structures and arrangements and rhythmic motifs and things like that. That’s how production works: “change the kick pattern to this, what if the bass line slides up here and sit sup an octave so that we can leave more room for blankity-blank?” All of that kind of stuff is what production is. In the old days, they used to actually have arrangers that would do that stuff but producers can do a lot of different things now. Ultimately, if these things get done and if they’re done well or not depends on who is doing them and whether they’re good at it and whether they’re having a good day. I guess on the one hand I would say I try to be somewhat invisible and on the other hand I’m not dumb enough to think that I ever succeed.

• There’s a lot on this album that seems to be about taking stock of one’s life, am I interpreting that correctly?

Absolutely.

• As you take stock, what are some of the grand themes that emerge?

Do I just have to tell you the grand themes? You’re right, it is a taking stock record. It was actually a taking stock record about three years ago; a lot of these songs are older, but they’ve weathered well, which I’m happy about because not all songs do from a personal perspective.

When we got off the road; I’ll give you the metaphorical legend or key as in maps to the record. A lot of it was in the wake of leaving the road and reconsidering “What did we do?” I used to say that at the conclusion of Waterdeep’s road time, I felt vaguely like we built our house on the wrong lot. Like we found out, suddenly at the end, that actually, we thought our address was 5505 but actually it was 5506, you know, we were supposed to be across the street and slightly to the left. In particular, that was because, when I compared what our body of work was, what our legacy was with what I thought I wanted to do, in say, 1990 or 1992 or something, I felt like I had fallen pretty short and sold a lot of things up the river.

I felt like I had followed the Christian music money train, which is a good one because you make pretty good money at churches and youth groups and events; more than you do at bars, far and away. I was talking to a friend who played in a mainstream rock band and they freaked out when they had an all ages show and sold $250 worth of merchandise and that was a bad night for us. The fact is, when people aren’t buying beers or mixed drinks, or whatever, they’ve got a lot more discretionary income to use, and, not only are they not buying beers or mixed drinks that night, they’re not buying them any night. So there is a financial reality to the Christian sort of thing, not to mention the fact that the honorariums are higher because churches place a premium on experience. So they want to create these experiences in which something transformative happens, whether they’re misguided or not, it’s a reality. There’s just a lot of money in it and people value it; intriguing, because as much as people seem to value it, there also seems to be a sort of catch-22 that, while they place a premium on the power of art, they don’t always want your power as much as they want their own.

We’re back to authority. You spend all this time crafting this artistic message and show and following your instincts, which is something you’ve had to train yourself to do, presumably the instincts themselves are a gift, and that’s part of what people want out of you and then you build this sort of fine castle of rocks at the end of this stream and someone just kicks it over and puts a bit plastic daisy in it at the end of the show by some speech that they give with completely antithetical statements to everything you’ve said and done throughout the night through the music and it can be really discouraging.

So, coming off of those types of experiences where we felt maligned and misunderstood, whether intentional or unintentional, I think a lot of that record for me, at least my portion of it, comes from that. That having been said, it also comes sort of in the wake of a number of family tragedies, losing both my parents and going through a lot of difficulties in the run-ups to that. And then also, as is common, just shards of childhood scattered about, especially Lori’s songs seem to have more of that on this record than mine. I think that’s the flavor of the record: taking stock, and then as I mentioned, the transformative experience of childbirth and having these little kids around that you want to provide something solid and firm and/or changing; appropriately changing for, and feeling the weight of wanting to be a good parent.

• What’s next?

I don’t know. The most immediate thing is that we’d like to get the pressing done for both The Khrusty Brothers record and the Waterdeep record. Just by the way, I’ve shadowboxed with the truth of The Khrusty Brothers thing and stabbed at the idea that it was me, and it is me. We haven’t sold very many of them and I think partly because I came up with this long, concoction of a story that said that I sang the vocals because the lead singer got sick. It’s me and I kind of hate to rip the veil, but on the other hand, I’d just assume have people hear it than not. Here it is, I’m going public on Colossians Three Sixteen! So anyway, I’d love for more people to hear it than not.

I’m actually in development on a musical of The Khrusty Brothers story. There’s this whole back story about this family of Appalachian brothers. I have actually been working on a project for Thomas Nelson doing a translation for the book of Job and I’ve done a few of the Psalms, some of which have been represented in the Voice albums. That’s a bit different, it’s kind of translation work, though I’m not working from Hebrew and Greek. I used to write for Relevant magazine. I think when I get older I will do it (write) and it may be older by a year, I don’t know. Right now I need to focus, I just finished building a new studio in Kansas City about ten months ago and my primary focus is producing here. I’ve also been doing more songwriting and I go off to Nashville once every six or eight weeks and I’m doing co-writing sessions with various artists and staff writers.

• What artists have inspired you?

The big three for me have always been Dylan, Paul Simon and The Beatles and they’ve proven to be surprisingly deep wells to return to, to be shockingly consistent in their inspiration. More recent favorites, I’m into the Flaming Lips and maybe to a lesser degree Wilco and Sun Kil Moon. I’ve never really heard the Red House Painters or Mark Kozelek’s solo stuff but I love the two Sun Kil Moon records. Modest Mouse. You know, this might shock people but I’ve never really been a fan of the Grateful Dead but I just jut Europe ’72 and from note 1 I was hooked and it was like “Oh, I get it! All of the sudden I understand what the deal is!” There was a bus driver at the University of Kansas who would always play Dead tapes and there were some real transcendent moments but I’ve always figured that it was a needle in a haystack. It seems like when they’re on, they can be kind of unstoppable but they weren’t always on. I like Beck.

• What are you currently reading and what are some of your all-time recommendations?

I’m reading a book by Daniel Okrent, I don’t know what it’s called (Editor’s note: the book is: Good Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center), something about the building of the Rockefeller Center. That would lead you to believe that I’m as awesome a reader as Andy Osenga, but I’m not (Editor’s note, read Andrew Osenga’s interview here) and it would lead you to believe that I have these flights of historical interest that I pursue, but I don’t that that’s as true as I wish it were either. I don’t spend as time or energy on it as I wish I did. Thomas Merton, I really like. I like Frederick Buechner.

I’ve had an enjoyable time, a good friend of mine is a big reader and he’s been feeding me books and he’s not missed yet. I really enjoyed Mary Doria Russell: The Sparrow and The Children of God. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and he’s the guy that wrote Everything is Illuminated. I find him to be just utterly and incredibly, geniusly engaging. I was stunned. I like Salinger. I’m a big fan of that family of stories. I liked Catcher in the Rye back in the day of course, because I thought everyone was a phony too. Franny and Zooey. I actually haven’t read Nine Stories yet but I want to. I went on a similar Hemingway kick but it’s been since high school and it played pretty heavily into a depression that I had a difficult time recovering from and I’ve always been a little frightened to go back.

I’m intrigued every time I interact with that era. I don’t know if it’s postmodern, that literature era. I’m always a little bit shocked at how despairing it is. I guess I think of despair being so “today” and yet it’s so nakedly visible and with such a wild sense of morality in those early works from the ‘20’s that I’m just repetitively surprised. I read The Stranger recently, which I had never read. The Stranger is the whole “killing an Arab” thing from The Cure. I guess I think it was pretty intense and I think that; I’m not sure. What else is intriguing to me, and maybe that will answer what I thought of it: the whole Marshall Mcluhan thing; his whole idea and his dissection of image in the context of early television and then also early rock n’ roll, the kinds of records that people made. I’ve been into some comedy records from the ‘60’s like The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, stuff like that. What I find is: Bob Newhart does this whole run in that record about “What if Lincoln had a Press Secretary?” It was just outrageously funny to these people and it was only moderately funny to me, if even that. It was more like: “What a curious thing that these people think that’s strange.” I think we have become so saturated with the concept of image manipulation in the public sector that we don’t even think twice about it.

Likewise, the other thing that we have become so saturated with is the criminal mind. When you look at The Stranger and you’re thinking about what is it that causes a man to snap, well, we’ve all seen CSI and Law and Order and all these things where, presumably we have, albeit not nearly as well done nor as incisive a thought on what happens to a person to cause them to get to this point. There’s a reasonably elevated level of psychology that draws from the experience and benefit of hundreds of years of this stuff that we didn’t have a hundred years ago. Everybody’s a nominal Freudian psychoanalyst with a nodding acquaintance with Camus and stuff from their Western Civ. Class that they quit to make films. I just think that a lot of this stuff is taken in and processed and is being either re-articulated or crapped out with varying degrees of excellence.

• Who are some of your own theological influences?

Jesus Movement era fundamentalists. When you say influences, I guess I’m thinking in terms of the experiences I’ve had. There’s the sexy answer which is, “Oh, Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen and Frederick Buechner” and there’s the very unsexy answer of a handful of Midwestern pastors and Christian radio and sort of tawdry books of contemporary spirituality. Consequently, there was a short story called, I think, “The Sonata,” about the future society in which everyone had their role that was genetically predetermined. One guy was a musician and they took great pains to keep the musicians separate from the rest of society; they didn’t want them to be influenced. Then, some “listener,” so there were people that were genetically appointed to be listeners of music, slipped him a cassette of Bach and the guy listens to it and then the police come eventually a few concerts later and they say “You’ve been listening to Bach, haven’t you?” He asked how they knew and they said Because all of the natural presence of fugue, which for lack of a better term is like a round, “Three Blind Mice” in the most basic of terms; something, reiterative musical ideas that play over one another, they had all disappeared because you heard it and you wanted to be conscious of not letting on that you were influenced by it.

So I would say, theologically, that’s the stuff that influenced me and it’s taken me a long time to come back around and make friends with it. I just led worship recently at a charismatic church and I was greatly enlivened by the fact that people were getting up and getting all excited. It was like, “Oh, this is really fun. I forgot.” As long as people can remember that part of the gig in being a Charismatic Christian is to have fun, and not over-spiritualize everything, then, great, have a good time. To the degree that everything has become so hyper-spiritual that it borders on Gnostic, we’re in deep serious, but if we can tap into the natural fun of that, then great.

Likewise, the pristine beauty of orthodox worship, or the Catholic stuff. One thing I’ve noticed is that the centralized authority of the Catholic Church lends itself to a wildly diverse dialogue around spirituality because there are certain things that are just given, they’re not going to be up for debate. Consequently, Catholics don’t seem to be as concerned about the reality of the Trinity or Divinity or the role of Mary or all these different things; those are all settled, they learned them in Catechism and they’re done. Everything else then becomes thrilling.

I’d say probably my least favorite, and this is more from a mood perspective than it is from an actual theological perspective, is Reformed Theology. I’ve been more bummed out talking to Reformed people than I have any other constituency. They just have this, icy, almost robotic approach; everything is so pre-determined that you can almost feel the lung collapsing as the door gets caved in. I don’t know, does that make sense? Again, I’m talking more mood than theological distinctions. People like John Piper seem to have done a good job at being happy at least.

I don’t really think that the distinctions that we’re making among Christians are the same ones that Jesus was making when He attacked the Pharisees. Or, if they are, it’s more along these mood lines than it is along theological distinction lines. Not to say that the subject of theology isn’t important at some level, it’s just to say that, if it is divorced from the heart and from action, it becomes just deadly. That’s what Satan was really good at, though I certainly don’t mean to go from Reformed Theology to Satan! I wasn’t implying any connection there.

• Anything else?

I do have one other thing. The one thing that I think I am passionate about in sort of a general sense about Christianity and the arts, is this thing that Madeline L’Engle talked about and several other artists have talked about. Dorothy Sayers does a great job of discussing this in The Mind of the Maker, but it’s this concept of permitting freedom to the creation. So, as far as God gives man and woman the choice to follow Him, we likewise, in order to be really good artists, we have to give our creation the choice to follow us as opposed to superimposing our own agenda and ending up with a fairly lifeless, uninspiring thing.

I think that again, it depends, if we’re sort of trying to play the manure role in the garden of culture, then fine, all bets are off and then make something kind of cool and sweet and awesome. I mean that as seriously as one can mean such a statement; I mean, I mean it playfully. But, insofar as we’re trying to something insightful and meditative, and maybe deep art, I think that we have to give it room to breathe, not try to tell it what we think. It’s a scary endeavor. It means that things will get told about us that we might rather were hidden. It means that things might get told about things we love or people we love that we might rather were hidden. Ultimately, art ends up confirming all the things we love the most more than it ends up destroying them, if it’s honest art. So, I think that’s what I think these days, though as soon as I say that I think of a host arguments but I do think it’s an important concept we need to wrestle with.

• Read part one of this interview
• Visit the official Waterdeep website