Podcast: TRYING to Get it Right with The Ruralists

Note: This transcript is autogenerated and may contain grammatical errors.

(00:06) Justin Ariel Bailey: Welcome to the newest episode of the In All Things Podcast, where we host conversations with diverse voices about living creatively in God’s created world. I’m your host, Justin Ariel Bailey, and I teach at Dordt University, which is home to the Andreas Center, the sponsor of this podcast. On this episode of the podcast US, I talked to members of the band The Ruralists, Luke Hawley and Laremy DeVries about their new album Trying. This was the 40th episode of the In All Things Podcast, and so we recorded it live, audio and video, in front of a small studio audience on the stage at the BJ. Hahn auditorium at Dordt University. On this episode, they share three songs with us and we talk about the dynamics of life and love, faith and doubt, and about trying to get it right. We hope you enjoy this episode, and as always, thanks for tuning in.

I have a friend who teaches songwriting, and one piece of advice that he always gives is that songs should be less like sermons and more like prayers. As a preacher, I’m always slightly offended, but I think I know what he means. The purpose of a song is not mainly to express information, as if a song could be reduced to a message, but to explore questions and possibilities, to cry out in desperation and hope that someone will listen. I’m reminded of the fact that Scripture contains both the voice of the prophet who makes claims and calls for repentance, as well as the voice of poets who interrogate the world and try to find our place within it. Scripture offers a response to our deepest questions, but it also questions our two comfortable answers. The preacher and the poet are both essential. They require us to confront the complexity of living in this broken and beautiful world while also answering the claims that are made on us by our neighbors and by God. Perhaps the preacher can begin to cultivate the attentiveness of the poet, and the poet can feel the answerability that is the burden of the preacher. My friend who teaches songwriting also writes and plays for a band that is well known in our local community, and the band just released their second full length album entitled Trying, and so we thought we would include others in this conversation to celebrate the 40th episode of the podcast. So we hosted a small live audience and let others tune in, and I’m glad to share this with you now.

(02:59) Justin Ariel Bailey: Welcome to this special 40th episode of the In All Things podcast. This is a live taping, both audio and video, and we have a live studio audience for this special episode, which is also the last of the season. And for this special episode, I am joined by two members of the band, The Ruralists, whose music features as the intro and the outro for every episode of our podcast. And they’ve just released a new album called Trying, so they’re sitting here with me, we have Luke Hawley and Laremy DeVries. Luke and Laremy, thanks for joining us on the In All Things podcast.

(03:36) Luke Hawley: Yeah, you bet. Happy to be here.

(03:39) Justin Ariel Bailey: So I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to play some songs, and hopefully we’ll have a good time here tonight. So the first one is really easy and is just to tell me the name the story behind the name of the band, the Ruralists. What does that mean? And then how you all started playing music together. And then if you could also tell me the story behind the name of the album. Trying. So, three things.

(04:02) Luke Hawley: Yeah. This is one we tell pretty often. So when we moved here, when my family moved here, I assumed that my band playing days were over because it’s Soup Center and there’s not much happening here. We moved from the Twin Cities, and I got a little bit complainy about it around the house. And finally, Sarah said, well, why don’t you just ask some people to play music with you? And I was really hesitant about that. I mean, I knew some musicians like Laramie, but also Laramie owns the coffee shop that I go to pretty much every day. And I was very worried, like, if it went poorly, where was I going to get an Americano?

(04:40) Laremy Devries: I would have made you an Americano anyway.

(04:42) Luke Hawley: Well, I know that now, but I don’t know that I would have come back out of sheer embarrassment or something. So that’s how we started playing. Yeah.

(04:52) Laremy Devries: And how long ago was that? Like 2016. Which feels like a weirdly long time ago.

(04:58) Justin Ariel Bailey: So you just started playing. Were you a band in your mind? Did you have a name already?

(05:02) Luke Hawley: No, we were going to play one show to, I don’t know, kind of.

(05:07) Laremy Devries: A back to school thing at the Fruited Plain in the parking lot. And you recruited your kid’s drum instructor? That’s right.

(05:16) Luke Hawley: Yeah. Our drummer was my well, I don’t know that he was teaching him drums yet. I had just heard there was a kindergarten teacher in town that could play.

(05:23) Laremy Devries: The drums, which is our former drummer, Titus. And then I think I said to Luke, I bet Jake would play bass in this band. So he wasn’t really a bass guitar player, but we just handed him a bass, borrowed somebody’s bass to get him. That’s kind of how it all started. And apparently when I was at the.

(05:41) Luke Hawley: First practice, maybe I think the first practice, I got a call from my brother’s, a musician. I got a call from a buddy of his who was looking for a band in the area to play at this fundraiser in Sack City, which was a pig roast on a farm. On a farm. And he was like, do you know any bands? And I was like, well, let me see how this goes. And I’ll call you back. So I went, all right.

(06:08) Laremy Devries: It seems like a very ruralist thing to do.

(06:10) Luke Hawley: Yeah.

(06:10) Justin Ariel Bailey: So tell me about that name, the Ruralists. What is that?

(06:13) Laremy Devries: It’s part of the legend of Dave Kramer. A number of years ago, maybe you recall, Donald Trump was a presidential candidate, and he was on this very stage. And afterwards the cafe was a buzz with reporters and everybody’s trying to get their story in, blah, blah, blah. So our buddy Kramer comes in. He had been ice fishing with his son, and he comes into the kitchen, and I believe his quote was, oh, I wonder if the gal from ABC wants to hear the ruralist position. So from there, it just sort of started to be this sort of fake political party. And we just sort of started talking about ruralism. And what is ruralism? Just celebrate and advocate a rural way of life, as we were kind of trying to figure out what to call ourselves, which is a very challenging thing. We wanted to be rural, but not like country, because there’s a difference, obviously there. And we apparently wanted to have a name that was really hard to say, especially for our children.

(07:13) Luke Hawley: You know that episode of 30 Rock with the “rural juror” anyway, it’s impossible.

(07:19) Laremy Devries: Find an impossible word. Add ists at the end of it, and then suddenly…

(07:25) Luke Hawley: If you can get Alexa or Siri to play the Ruralists on Spotify, I would be impressed.

(07:30) Justin Ariel Bailey: I also struggled with my Rs growing up, and so every time I say it, I have this thing in my mind, “I’m not going to say it correctly,” so I go back to when I was four or five

(07:41) Laremy Devries: We have a great video somewhere on YouTube of all of our kids trying to say, like, Ruralists. It’s really fun.

(07:47) Luke Hawley: Yeah.

(07:48) Justin Ariel Bailey: So to celebrate the rural, can you say a little bit more about what that means?

(07:54) Luke Hawley: Yeah, the surprise that I experienced finding people to make music with and to make actual art with nothing wrong with COVID bands, but not cover music, like a real band was real surprise to me. And I think that’s a part of it. Even in these small pockets, these small communities, there are these really wonderful things happening. I think that urban people can think that they have all the good stuff sometimes. I say that as a former city dweller myself. And there’s lots of great stuff in cities, but there’s also lots of great stuff in rural areas.

(08:40) Justin Ariel Bailey: Yeah, that’s great. And then this album is what number album is this for you all?

(08:44) Luke Hawley: This is our second full length, our fourth release. I mean, this is the age of Spotify once like a single that goes up or something like that, and then.

(08:54) Justin Ariel Bailey: The name of it is Trying, and it has a picture on the front. Can you describe?

(08:57) Luke Hawley: Yeah, that picture is my father-in-law on a skateboard he was a missionary in Berlin and I assume was trying to impress some German kids or something. And he’s a big man on a little skateboard. And I found it and I was like, this is it. Like, this is the picture he’s got.

(09:16) Laremy Devries: His thumb up but it’s sort of kind of hard to see.

(09:21) Luke Hawley: But it’s sort of like we’re doing okay in his middle age. He’s learning how to skateboard.

(09:24) Justin Ariel Bailey: I have been that man on the skateboard; come to all of my classes. So, Trying, though, how did you land on that name and how did you kind of capture the album?

(09:34) Luke Hawley: Well, we kicked around a number of different we were really set on love songs for middle age for a while. Existential love songs for middle age, but that was, like pretty long and on the nose or something. There were a couple of other ones. And actually, I think Laremy texted me was like, what about “trying”? And I was like, what about trying what? He was like, no, for the name. Yeah.

(09:57) Justin Ariel Bailey: So it was in your mind when you…?

(10:01) Laremy Devries: I’ve been trying hard not to care about the thing I’ve been trying to see. It’s a thing it kind of keeps coming up in the songs over and over again.

(10:11) Luke Hawley: I didn’t know that. I don’t think I would have noticed it if Laramie hadn’t pointed out. I think probably almost half the songs on the record have the word trying in there somewhere, and it just kind of seemed, I don’t know, a good descriptor of what we’re trying to do as a band, as a songwriter, as human beings.

(10:23) Laremy Devries: Yeah, human beings doing all these sorts of things.

(10:36) Luke Hawley: You had a great TS. Eliot quote as well…

(10:38) Justin Ariel Bailey: Yeah, I was going to say I thought of it was the reference to TS. Eliot. He says, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” But it wasn’t quite it…

(10:47) Luke Hawley: I like that. We’ll start telling people, inspired by TS. Eliot.

(10:52) Laremy Devries: Of course.

(10:53) Justin Ariel Bailey: I wonder if you could play one of the songs that has this line trying in it. I think you’re going to play Murmur, right?

(11:00) Luke Hawley: Yeah.

(11:02) Justin Ariel Bailey: This is where Iget to request all my favorite songs off the album. So this is actually this song is my current favorite song off this album.

(11:09) Luke Hawley: All right.. Yeah. Let’s play it, then.

You’re a murmur of starlings

Darling

All your ever-shifting parts

A work of modern art

That I cannot understand

And I can’t look away

Or convey

All my slip-sliding thoughts

All twisted up in knots

Explaining how I feel

So I’ll keep writing you all these love songs

All my life long

Trying to get it right

And you’ll keep asking me

Why I do it

Why I can’t quit

But I just don’t know how

It’s just like breathing now

I’m an old tv set

Trying to get

The picture to come in

With strips of kitchen tin

Wrapped around my ears

But it’s mostly just snow

Even though

I’m giving it my best

I just haven’t got it yet

As clear as it can be

So I’ll keep writing you all these love songs

All my life long

Trying to get it right

And you’ll keep asking me

Why I do it

Why I can’t quit

But I just don’t know how

It’s just like breathing now

There’s a word that I learned

From a friend

About saying what you’ve got

By saying what it’s not

Possible to say

So then all that I know

I suppose

Of language and of rhyme

Of being and of time

Means nothing without you

(14:49) Justin Ariel Bailey: Can you say something about that song?

(14:52) Luke Hawley: Yeah, I learned that a bunch of starlings was called a murmuration, and then I got a little bit obsessed. And then, you know, I mean, I think this idea I’ve been married for 17 years, and when I proposed to my wife, I wrote her song and the verse, and I’m a little bit embarrassed about it now. The chorus was, I could write you love songs for the rest of my life. Wait. I could write you love songs for the rest of my life so let me make you my wife come summertime and the make you my wife is really feels very aggressive at this point, but I was going for the rhyme, I imagine. But it’s been one of the great joys of my life to get into try to get the right words around how I feel about Sarah. And it never gets old. Right. Somebody told me once that God is infinitely knowable and I think of people in that same way, and I know that’s true because I just keep getting to know Sarah. So the effort of writing the songs becomes the joy of it and the fun of it. Right. There was a moment where I swore that tin foil, that aluminum foil was was actually called kitchen tin. And then I was told, like, no, nobody calls it kitchen tin. But it had showed up in the in the second verse, I was thinking about televisions and how to get signals to come in and kitchen tin, and I was like, this is a thing, right?

(16:24) Laremy Devries: It’s a song that young people probably are very unfamiliar with, the idea of rabbit ears and snow like snow on your TV. Like, nobody knows what that is anymore.

(16:33) Justin Ariel Bailey: But, yeah, we can put that in the show notes with that you can look it up on Wikipedia.

(16:35) Luke Hawley: And then I think of songwriting often as you, me, us, these three different versions of the same thing. And so that first verse is you, and the second verse is me, and the third verse then opens up to the universal do you know the word apophatic? Apophatic, yeah. Right, which doesn’t you don’t really work that into a song.

(17:04) Laremy Devries: You worked achromatic into a song.

(17:08) Luke Hawley: I did work achromatic. That rhymes with apophatic. Yeah.

(17:11) Justin Ariel Bailey: The apophatic word is this idea that you can’t say things positively about God because no word could capture who God is. And so you say that God is not something. And that is a way of knowing by not knowing.

(17:25) Luke Hawley: And it’s a way of saying that you love someone, too. Like how you all the things you don’t know or something.

(17:33) Justin Ariel Bailey: Yeah.

(17:33) Luke Hawley: It’s beautiful.

(17:34) Justin Ariel Bailey: Yeah. I was telling Luke today that this is my favorite song right now. And he’s like, that’s kind of weird because it’s a song you wrote for your wife. Right. But to me, I was thinking, it’s such a great picture of what it means to love anyone, right. Or to offer anything to the world. You keep on writing these love songs. You keep on trying to get it right, and you never quite get there. But the act itself is sort of a way of knowing and a way of being known, as you go.

(18:04) Laremy Devries: Yeah.

(18:05) Justin Ariel Bailey: Talking about writing for people or for others. So both of you writing and playing music is not your day job, so to speak?

(18:13) Luke Hawley: Not yet. Not yet.

(18:14) Justin Ariel Bailey: Yeah, we’re trying. So you both work as college professors. Luke teaches English literature, composition. Laremy teaches philosophy. He also, as you’ve said, runs the local coffee shop/restaurant/gathering location, the Fruited Plain, where the Ruralists are sort of the house band. And my question for you is about the overlap between writing and playing music and teaching. Spending a lot of time with college students, some of whom are here in our live audience. But how does that interact and inform each other teaching, interacting with college age students, either at the Fruited Plain or in class? As you write songs, as you play songs, how do those things come together?

(18:57) Luke Hawley: You go ahead. All right.

(18:59) Laremy Devries: Well, I don’t know what to say. I don’t write the songs. I think there is just something about yeah. I mean, either as a teacher or somebody who is trying to help exemplify a way of life that we care about. So I think being a teacher, it’s just always on your mind, how am I going to express this, being a parent? It’s kind of the same way, right? How am I going to show my kids how I’m going to show my students what it is to be a good person? I had Jim Schaap as an English prof when I was a Dordt student, and he was obsessed with “Show Don’t Tell.” I think whether it’s my work, my work as a professor is probably a lot of telling. But I think then when we get to the backpack, we get to show we really mean this, or when we’re lived philosophy, pouring ourselves into our work, making great coffee or whatever it is. It is a showing that I think is important. But I think having students, it puts you in a kind of certain kind of posture of, yeah, there’s somebody who I’m talking to in a more specific way, maybe, than other people do.

(20:25) Luke Hawley: Yeah. I think this is something that the rural experience has taught me, too. I’m 40 years old and I have three kids and I’m not going to make it anymore. Whatever it is, right? Like fame and fortune are they’re not on my horizon. That’s okay. And I’m really, genuinely, truly fine with that. So now what do I do now? I think you turn to the people around you and you try to make things for the community that will be helpful. So we created this space behind the free to play in the backpack where we have shows and people come out. And I also think that it’s certainly influenced the way that I write songs. I don’t know how much I don’t know that I could really even say how much. But I know that there are 20-year-old kids who are going to be singing these things back to me. And that matters. I take that responsibility pretty seriously. I think about lines from songs that I carry with me that sort of help me understand how to live in the world. And I like to offer that to some people. Maybe I’m writing songs to the 20-year-old version of myself, too. I would have been a better person had I known some of these things. You can’t get them until you’ve lived them. But yeah, I think that there’s a give and take there. I think audience matters enough.

(22:06) Justin Ariel Bailey: This is an album that breathes with faith but also with doubt, with hope, but also with disillusionment. With a question. What if this is all that there is? There’s a question you ask in many ways on the album and one review of the album. Genevieve Trainor and the Little Village writes “the Ruralists and this album use faith as a lens, not a hammer.” And that strikes me as a pretty good description. So there’s a line I want to ask you about from the song called Helluvathing. And it goes like this: “when I mention Jesus Christ, I know you roll your eyes to tell the truth most days I do, too.” So I’m wondering, what do you think of Trainor’s description of faith as a lens rather than a hammer? And then how does the lens of faith or doubt or hope or disillusionment shape the music that you write and play?

(23:01) Luke Hawley: Yeah, so I wrote that song. One of my dearest friends is a former worship pastor. Now, I don’t think a militant atheist anymore, but certainly an agnostic to the bone. And he and I used to make music together and used to have these conversations pretty regularly. So that song starts with when you talk about stardust and how it’s in all of us. How it’s in all of us. I think I might cry like when he talks about the beginning of the world as an explosion that turns us all into people from stardust. That’s a really lovely picture. And I always come back with Jesus, which is also a really lovely picture, but I don’t even know if he rolls his eyes. I think I probably imagine that he rolls hurt at his eyes. Yeah. Yeah. And and I do, too, sometimes. And I I just I don’t know what else to say that except to be as honest as possible sometimes. That is a rolling my eyes at sort of a more general public Christianity, American Christianity that I feel like is doing a lot of things that don’t seem to really jive with what Christ said or talked about. But eye rolls for me, too. Sometimes I think, why do I keep believing this stuff? I think one time in your presence, I was like, the story of Jesus is bonkers.

(24:33) Justin Ariel Bailey: I often use that word, actually. Inspired by you. Bonkers.

(24:37) Luke Hawley: Yeah, it does. It seems crazy, and there are days where I absolutely think it is crazy. And if I don’t admit that, then I’m not actually living into that. I don’t know if that’s doubt or if that’s just like an unwillingness to sort of to claim anything as totally certain. I think certainty is, like, maybe one of the more dangerous things in the world. And so I want to keep space for things to breathe, for possibility to breathe. There’s a line from a Sinclair Lewis book where he says he calls I think he’s talking about God, actually, but he calls it “The Great Perhaps.” And I love that line. I think everything is the great perhaps in some ways. And so if I can keep that space open in my head, then I worry less about belief and more about sort of the act of being in the world and living and interacting with people.

(25:43) Justin Ariel Bailey: I’m going to press you on that just a second. Before that, let’s lean into this “great perhaps” thing because that’s another question I have, because there is this, to use a Cal Seerveld term, “disciplined suggestiveness,” in your songs.And there’s often this… I’m going to ask some grammar questions. Luke teaches grammar. So I might get this wrong.

(26:07) Luke Hawley: Not anymore.

(26:08) Justin Ariel Bailey: But you often use the subjunctive mood, which is the mood of might be maybe, what if, perhaps, as you just said, I went through and put boxes around all the places where you’re sort of saying might maybe, might be, perhaps. And I wonder if you could say more about what you’re hoping for. So that’s the optative subjunctive for those who are keeping track what you’re hoping for by inviting your listeners to consider what might be or what may be. Because even as you talk about not wanting to have a faith that is too mired in certainty, that doesn’t breathe anymore, you also sort of invite us into divine possibilities. And three songs Mother Mary, Helluvathing, and Time are also three of other favorite songs on the album that I really like that kind of open up the possibility, the perhaps. And so I wonder if you could talk about the suggestiveness that you have going.

(27:08) Luke Hawley: Yeah, I mean, I think we could take this all the way back to faith as a lens and not a hammer. I like songs that revolve around questions, because I think you can invite people into a question in a way that you can’t invite them into an answer. And when you give people an answer, I mean, that’s a way of using a hammer. It’s a way of closing something down, and it’s hard to find any sort of common ground. If we start with this is my answer, and this is my answer. Right. If we start with, I don’t know, how do you do the right thing? Right? Yeah. Then it gets easier for me to think about a different way of being in the world and a different way of treating people. I’m going to step in it here probably because I don’t actually know what you do with imaginative apologetics. I just know those two words you put together, those existing yeah, I think apologetics are a waste of time. I don’t know why anybody cares.

(28:24) Laremy Devries: Abraham Kuyper thinks that too.

(28:26) Luke Hawley: It’s okay. I’m a good company, I guess. But the imaginative part that I can get behind. I mean, when I teach literature, I teach about why do we interact with literature? For identity, like, to figure out who we are or who we aren’t. For imagination to try to imagine a world different than it is, and for empathy, and I think imagination and identity and empathy are tied together in that way. You can’t be empathetic with somebody else if you can’t imagine a way outside of the way that you live.

(29:00) Laremy Devries: I think there’s some you know, you brought up Seerveld and, you know, just the idea of allusivity, the idea of playfulness. It’s probably hard to write a song that it doesn’t have this sort of perhapsness this playfulness I mean, if you’re going to play with words and language and music. Yeah.

(29:26) Luke Hawley: I sort of think I’ve always done it, but never more than now. I mean, this is the glory of Middle Ages. You realize how little you know, and it’s really nice to know that you don’t know anything and you also I had a roommate in college who swears that I told him one time that I believed I was right 99% of the time. And he then proceeded to rightfully, as good friends do, like, hanging over my head for years still. I ran into him a couple of years ago, went to Royals game together. He was like, you remember when you told me you’re right about I was like, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was 20. And I thought, I don’t think that way anymore, and it’s a much better way for me to live then the whole world is ripe with possibility. Yeah.

(30:14) Justin Ariel Bailey: So maybe another way of saying this is there are two sorts of people that don’t ever ask questions. If you think you know all the answers already, don’t ask any more questions. But then also, if you think there are no answers, you don’t ask any more questions. So you clearly are not you’re not trying to build a castle and nothing right. You’re looking for boundaries, right? In some way, yeah.

(30:38) Laremy Devries: This is not a nihilistic record.

(30:42) Luke Hawley: Yeah. I think that’s the hope that’s knit into it all. You busted me. I want to believe that there are answers to certain things. There is a way to be kind to your neighbor that might be wildly different depending on your neighbor. Right. There is a way to see the world as beautiful even when it’s not beautiful. That sort of dissonance that runs through everything. On one hand, I can’t say I’ll get to all the answers and on the other hand, I can’t say there are no answers because then you can’t live in the mess in between and I’m really interested in living in a mess in between and muddling through or whatever.

(31:38) Justin Ariel Bailey: And there’s a song called In Between, but I’m going to ask you to play a different one. So this song, Mother Mary, which I think is the second song on the album yes. Do you want to say something about before or after?

(31:48) Luke Hawley: I will say that you should go listen to it on the record because the Reverend Dr. Jeremy Perrigo plays a wicked saxophone. Yeah. So I’m a fiction writer, too, and I was working on this story about this kid who was thinking about becoming a monk. And I had just been in this weird conversation with Jamie Smith and he probably doesn’t remember it at all, where he called me an Arminian. And I was like, I don’t know what that is. So sure, but the broader conversation was about the difference between Protestants and Catholics, which had never really been articulated to me when I was a kid. Everything is holy in the Protestant world, right. Because everything belongs to God. And in the Catholic world, there’s this transcending that happens, and I’m really interested in that. Everything is holy, but I think that it’s really easy to begin to believe that nothing that’s right.

(32:46) Justin Ariel Bailey: Ifeverything is holy, then nothing, is right.

(32:49) Luke Hawley: Yeah. I didn’t get all the way through Charles Taylor’s book, but I’m sure what he was saying was good stuff. So this was my way to I think, also I was really terrified about people who said, like it seemed like there was a lot of research that said we were just chemistry in brains. Like we were just brains firing things off and no different than robots or AI or whatever. And AI is existentially terrifying for me, too, but I just refuse to believe that there’s not something that is the breath of God in people that human. Spark. And one way you get there is through poetic language by saying so there’s a long list at the end of this song about different ways to think about the heart. And that was me sort of working my way through it. So anyway, all that’s in here. There’s also a verse about my wife, as usual, so she doesn’t get her own love songs, but she gets a verse in just about everyone. So I think she’s okay with it.

(33:51) Luke Hawley:

I keep trying to see the face

Of mother mary full of grace

In an apple core

In a sticky bun

In a stretch of clouds

In the setting sun

But all that’s there is just the flesh and peel

Just the carmeled crust and the pink and teal of harvest dust

I keep trying to tell you how

I have always loved you like I love you now

But my tongue gets thick and my brain brain goes slack

And all these words come out bric-a-brac

And all that’s there is just the metaphor

It’s not the whole of you

It’s not the crux and core

It’s not the through and through

I keep trying to understand

How a dram of atoms makes the man

And the woman too

Is that the whole of us?

Just a clump of dirt?

Just a cloud of dust?

And that’s there is just some chemistry

The arithmetic of you and me

And the human heart is just a fine machine

Not a work of art filled with kerosene

Not a mystery of colossal scope

Not a duffel bag of fear and hope

Not a megaphone of love and hate

Not a talisman to keep us safe

Not a rattletrap always breaking down

Not a spiderweb

Not a shantytown

Not a creaking bridge

Not a tank brigade

Not an oracle

Not a masquerade

Just a thing that bangs and beats and pounds

And throbs and churns and wails and sounds

And maybe all we are is dust

Maybe that’s the whole of us

But maybe we are magic too

Impossible and completely true

Through and through

(37:59) Justin Ariel Bailey: You want to say more about that song? I know Laremy says that’s the most Dooyeweerdian song on the album. He just likes to say what does that mean? To say that something is a Dooyeweerdian?

(38:08) Laremy Devries: Well, listeners of this podcast will be very familiar with Herman Dooyeweerd.

(38:12) Justin Ariel Bailey: Some of them will be.

(38:13) Laremy Devries: And his 15 modal aspects. But especially yeah, when he goes from the chemistry to the arithmetic yeah, the numerical mode. He’s working all of these. It just seems like it really is trying to hit it all 15. Not in a very systematic way, but just the idea we’re looking at what a human person is in all of these. How do we function in all of these different ways? And again, I mean you’re saying not but you’re also saying are right.

(38:42) Justin Ariel Bailey: It’s not just one of these.

(38:45) Luke Hawley: Yeah.

(38:46) Laremy Devries: So even as you keep saying it’s not this, it’s not this, it’s not this, it is all those things. Like it is a duffel bag of fear and hope. It is a masquerade, it is a rattle trap always breaking Dooyeweerd would say it’s all the things everything is all the things.

(39:05) Justin Ariel Bailey: Everything is all the things. That’s Dooyeweerd. Is there anything else you want to say about that song?

(39:10) Luke Hawley: No, I think that’s it. The irreducibility is pretty crucial to maybe to return to a theme that we’ve been talking about before.

(39:13) Justin Ariel Bailey: We have this long running conversation or joke between Luke and myself that he gives this advice in his songwriting class that songs should be less like sermons and more like prayers. And it makes me feel bad every time because I am a preacher who preaches many sermons.

(39:37) Laremy Devries: But you do also like to pray, right?

(39:38) Justin Ariel Bailey: I do pray as well. But one of the songs on this album also says less preaching, more prayer, which I felt like it was a shot at me. No, I’m just joking about that.

(39:49) Luke Hawley: Writing songs in community allows you to feel like I meant that.

(39:53) Justin Ariel Bailey: Just that’s, right?

(39:54) Luke Hawley: Maybe I did.

(39:55) Justin Ariel Bailey: “You probably think the song is about you.” So we talked about the suggestiveness of the song, but you just said a little bit ago that you’re also sort of making claims. Right. In fact, that trainer review says that conveys unsubtle messages alike. “Let’s make a plan to be as kind as we can because people are people too.” Or in the song you’re going to play in a bit, “take a long look at the things you love.” So I wonder if you could say more about that dynamic. You have to make claims to live in the world.

(40:26) Luke Hawley: Right?

(40:26) Justin Ariel Bailey: So if we think of the role of the preacher as making claims in some sense, and the role of the prayer is sort of praying or hoping that something might be the case, what’s the relationship of those two things? That dynamic or the in between the middle voice or something like that? How do you put that together as you have claims that you make in your songs about the way the world is or should be, and then the hopes that you have of what it might be?

(40:54) Luke Hawley: Yeah, good question. So first of all, that comes from an interview with Justin Vernon where he said he was trying to write songs that were more prayers than he says.

(41:07) Justin Ariel Bailey: Blaming it on him.

(41:08) Luke Hawley: Yeah, blaming on him, absolutely. Yeah. What do I want to say? I come from generations of preachers and it’s hard to get rid of that. In some ways, that’s the good news, right? There’s a better way to live, I think. And I think the subjunctive is pretty important there, right? Like prayer is subjunctive generally, right? I’m going to make that claim.

(41:40) Justin Ariel Bailey: Okay. Is this in the mode of possibility?

(41:45) Luke Hawley: Yeah, in the mode of possibility. I mean, even things that we really don’t think are possible.

(41:53) Justin Ariel Bailey: Beyond we ask or imagine.

(41:59) Luke Hawley: I don’t really mean as a shot. I do wish that having heard any number of sermons in my life. I do hope that people would start from the stance of the subjunctive before they get behind a pulpit. Start from the stance of prayer. I have this short story I’ve been working on for a long time where this small town pastor is sort of losing it or something, but he begins to get up every Sunday and say, it’s complicated, and then sit back down. That’s how I feel a little bit like how I would preach if that were my job now. And I appreciate that you don’t, your sermons are lovely. I don’t know. Are you going to ask me the next question about these things being helpful? That’s part of it. And I want the songs to be helpful. And maybe that’s a way of making a claim and then sort of backing away from it. Maybe that’s a little bit of cowardice or something, but I like to think of it as openness, like, Here, you can have this thing, this question invitation, to take up this way of seeing the world.

To go back to that idea of a lens and not a hammer to take a long look at a thing that you love. That’s a line from a song, a line from Flanner O’Connor first.

(43:36) Justin Ariel Bailey: Can you say something about that line? Because I think that this album very much kind of epitomizes that line. So you can say something. So that line is what’s the story behind it?

(43:48) Luke Hawley: The story behind it is that in Mystery and Manners, this collection of essays from Flanner O’Connor, she’s talking about writing, and she says people without hope don’t write novels. What’s more, they don’t read them. They refuse to have any kind of experience. They refuse to take a long look at anything. And when I read it, it blew my mind and I started to think about that. When you read a novel, it’s not just something that you get done, which sometimes is an English prof. That’s how I feel about it. Like, I just got to get this thing read. It’s a way to have an experience. It’s a way to spend time with characters, fictional people, and have an experience of the world. And I think that that advice to take long looks at things. I like to think O’Connor would say it even more now in the world of cell phones, but it’s harder and harder and harder to take long looks at things. But it is really like it’s a practice that leads to an openness in the way that you see the world and the way that you see people. Like, if I’m willing to take a long look at my neighbor, then I have to look past the things that drive me crazy and into some of like, well, why do they do these things? Or Why do these things drive me crazy? So the line of the song is take a long look at the things you love. Don’t be afraid, don’t look away. Because they’ll be going on before, you know, because nothing made fails to decay. And then the course of that song is we appear, we disappear. We appear, we disappear. But while we’re here, take a long look at the things you love.

(45:53) Justin Ariel Bailey: And it’s that loving attention, though, which is, I think, all throughout the album. Which is why existential love songs fits really well. Because the love songs are not just to your wife, to Sarah, but in some sense, to this place where you live and to your neighbor and to all of these things that surround us that we miss and you’re encouraging us to give loving attention to it.

(46:22) Laremy Devries: I think one of the Teresa’s, I’m not sure, and somebody will correct me on this, but describes contemplation as taking a long, loving look at things and even the things that you don’t love at first glance, but you keep staring at it until you do love it. So it kind of fits into this sort of contemplative way of being in the world as well,

(46:46) Justin Ariel Bailey: Which is the Dooyeweerdian insight as well. Right? It isn’t always applied that way. The point of it is the sort of turning of the jewel and keep looking at the keep looking and you can always see more.

(46:59) Luke Hawley: Yeah. That’s the one spiritual discipline that I have, potentially. And I’m no good at it. I’m really not. So I keep writing songs about it, hoping that will make me better at it. But taking long looks at things and trying to live in the dissonance in the in between, which is which is hard to do. But good practice, I think. Yeah, it’s good. Yeah.

(47:22) Justin Ariel Bailey: Let me ask you about something. You just mentioned this thing I told him after I saw this album release concert that the Ruralists played where they played through the whole album. And then it ends with Luke saying, I hope you find this album helpful. Like a benediction almost. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a musician use that particular adjective to describe their hopes. It almost sounded ministerial. This is that long line of pastors that you come from.

(47:51) Luke Hawley: You watch your mouth.

(47:53) Justin Ariel Bailey: But I did find it helpful, actually. Even the other day it was graduation here at Dort and I said goodbye to all these graduating students. And you always feel, as a professor, did anything I say make a difference? Will I ever see anyone again? Maybe I just think that because I have a high opinion of myself and my forgettability. But I was feeling sad. I was feeling sort of some grief at the end of something. And I sat and I listened through this whole album, and it was helpful to me in dealing with that existential crisis in a pastoral way. And so maybe I just felt that as a pastor or a fellow person in my early 40s suffering the existential crisis of getting older and losing things, letting go of things, trying to hold things loose and tight at the same time, like you say in here. So I wonder if you could say something about that pastoral sensitivity in these songs. Is there a pastoral heart? How do you think about that? Is that just me reading my own experience into your songs? Or is that something you’re really sort of this is your way of pastoring?

(49:01) Laremy Devries: I always considered myself to be the great interpreter of Luke’s songs, but you’re rivaling me here. This is really good.

(49:07) Justin Ariel Bailey: Yeah, we have a couch here.

(49:11) Luke Hawley: I grew up in a faith background, where they called them preachers, not pastors. Pastors were what the Lutherans had or something. But I like that word. I didn’t remember that. I said, I hope you find this helpful.

(49:25) Justin Ariel Bailey: You don’t remember saying that?

(49:26) Luke Hawley: No, but I’ve been thinking about it since you were the one that pointed out and I think it was so the second to last track on the album ends with the sort of ruckus sing along, Let Yourself Off the Hook. And I’m looking out at all these college kids who are anxious and have a lot going on. They’re taking too many classes and trying to do too many things, and I wanted that to be helpful for them. Like you. You don’t have to do it all. You can let yourself off the hook. I mean, it’s a line that I wrote for myself, too, in fact, one that you didn’t really believe, or maybe you didn’t believe that it goes, let yourself off the hook. I know you want to do it all by the book. Let yourself off the hook. And he accused me of not doing anything by the book ever, and sort of jamming that in there as some sort of, like, well, the rhyme is nice, but I was hoping that was going to be helpful for them, because it’s been helpful for me. And when I sit down to write a song, I don’t really sit down to, like, certainly it’s not like sitting down to write a sermon, I don’t think. Maybe it is. I don’t write sermons. It’s an act of discovery. I start with an idea of some kind, and then I sort of watch where it takes me. And usually where it takes me is to something that helps me love my wife more or better or love my neighbor more or better or see the world. And if it does that for me, then I guess I’m hopeful that it does that for other people, too. Yeah, I don’t know that’s Robert Frost line about no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader, no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. They’re just as helpful for me. I’m hoping that they’re helpful for other people. I mean, we’ll play people or people, too. Here in a minute. But it’s a really dumb syllogism. Is this syllogism? Something is maybe a tautology. Tautology. There we go. Yeah. People are people Too is so obvious and stupid. And I say it all the time. Like, anytime somebody drives me crazy right now, I go, people are people, too. Right. And it’s like a way to make me a better, more loving, more open and gracious human being. And maybe if I just had written it down somewhere and made a bumper sticker, it would have done the same thing. But something about singing it and something about singing in a room full of people that are also singing it, I think it sticks a little bit more. Yeah.

(52:08) Justin Ariel Bailey: You want to say more about that?

(52:08) Laremy Devries: Well, I was just going to say, too, it’s weird. I think we kind of talked about this as we were sort of putting the album together and making choices, and I think that we maybe thought about this album a little bit more for us, or we wanted to not necessarily think about an audience while we were crafting it. We wanted to make our choices in the studio, so to speak. So then there’s a little bit of when you unveil it to people, you’re sort of hoping, like, I do hope that you find this helpful. It’s our thing. It’s something that we crafted together. But now here it is out there.

(52:49) Luke Hawley: Yeah. It belongs to other people now, right? Yeah. So there’s something I mean, I hope people like the songs. Like, that would be great, and I hope they like to listen to it. That would also be wonderful. But I don’t hold out hope that everybody’s going to dig all the songs musically or whatever, but I do hold out hope that there’s something that can grab them and that they can take with them.

(53:11) Laremy Devries: But it’s that weird thing about the idea of having an audience. I mean, sometimes, you know, the audience is there, but yet you want to kind of ignore the audience while you’re sort of trying to serve the song, create the song, and then when you have an audience again, then suddenly yeah, you just hope that it’s helpful.

(53:29) Luke Hawley: Yeah. The last song on the record is how do you do the right thing? And it’s also pretty obvious, but the chorus is how do you do the right thing? You do the right thing, right? How do you do the right thing? You do the right thing, right. How do you do the right thing? You do the right thing, right? And this is just me, like, having fun with words or whatever, like allusivity. Right. What does right even mean? What does it mean when you put an interrobang after it? And I know that Laramie will occasionally sing to his children, how do you do the right thing? You hang your coat up or things like that. To have songs that have worked their way into to have lyrics that worked their way into people’s lives is really incredible.

(54:11) Justin Ariel Bailey: I wonder if you could sing the song. People are people too.

(54:14) Luke Hawley: Yeah.

(54:14) Justin Ariel Bailey: Then do you want to say any more about the story of it?

(54:18) Luke Hawley: Yeah, this one took me a long time. This song I have been working on this song for years. And you can’t tell when you listen to it.

(54:21) Laremy Devries: It had the word Keds in it at one point.

(54:31) Luke Hawley: From the tops of their heads to the souls of their Keds was one of the but I started it as, like a I think as a song to somebody, like, explaining to somebody, like, hey, you have to start thinking that people are people, too. And I was really angry, I think, and it took me a long time to discover that I was angry. And then it took me a willingness to sort of point the lens back at myself. And I think that’s what made the song possible and it’s also what made the song, like, truly, fully communal. Right? Like, if this is just me yelling at somebody, then it’s not a song for everybody. It’s a song for when you want to yell at people or something.

(55:22) Laremy Devries: And the media is the message on this song. Your brother recorded some stuff. He had some of your other militantly agnostic, buddy.

(55:34) Luke Hawley: I sent it out to the Internet, and I said, hey, if you want to add anything, it’s kind of boring. It’s just eight verses and what ended up on the record.

(55:45) Laremy Devries: It’s a real like, I’ve never had.

(55:46) Luke Hawley: More fun putting a song together. My brother sent me a bunch of stuff, and it was fun to sort of building with Legos or something. I had all these different bricks and sort of put them in the right places. But that was an open invite because I thought, how else do you sing a song about all sorts of people except to invite people to so actually, the song at the very beginning on the album, you hear a choir of people who are singing in my old barn at the back of my property that makes it sound like I have a lot of property. In my backyard, there’s an old barn. It’s a lot. And every Memorial Day, we have a Memorial Day barbecue and people come, we play Wiffle ball on the street. And last Memorial Day, we gathered in the barn and I handed out lyric sheets, and I felt like I was back in Acapella Church where I grew up. Like, we’re all just sort of holding these things and singing along and people are making up their own harmonies.

(56:42) Laremy Devries: Luke is the only one who has, like, the click track, so he’s sort of directing us all. Were you there for that or were.

(56:48) Justin Ariel Bailey: You I think I had gone home already, yeah.

(56:50) Luke Hawley: Wow. Anyway, it was quite an experience. And yeah, there’s a lot of this particular place on the album and that part in particular, but yeah.

(57:04) Luke Hawley:

People are people too

Just like me and you

From the tops of our heads

To the foot of our beds

People are people too

You seem to think they’re not

You seem to think they’re not

You treat them like things

And not human beings

But people are people too

Of course it’s the same for me

Of course it’s the same for me

It’s hard to admit

But I often forget

That people are people too

So then what can be done

So then what can be done

Just what do we need

For us to agree

That people are people too

People are people too

Just like me and you

From the buds of our tongues

To the air in our lungs

People are people too

People are really strange

People are really strange

We do what we won’t

And believe what we don’t

But people are people too

Sometimes they drive you nuts

Sometimes they drive you nuts

So we try to negate

With our labels and hate

But people are people too

Time here is really short

Time here is really short

So let’s make up a plan

To be as kind as we can

Because people are people too

(01:00:16) Laremy Devries: Yeah Iused to often drive Luke nuts with my…. Yeah, it’s more mouth overtone singing. Mouth harmonics. We sang a song in choir once that had it. So, anyway, Luke was gone somewhere and and the rest of us just recorded a bunch of crap that we thought he would sneak in someplace. And I was really shocked to hear that I got included in the people will drive you nuts.

(01:00:40) Justin Ariel Bailey: That’s the right place for it.

(01:00:41) Laremy Devries: But anyway, there it is.

(01:00:44) Justin Ariel Bailey: Is there anything else you’d like listeners to know about the record or where they can listen to it?

(01:00:50) Luke Hawley: Wherever they stream the things. I mean, you can come to the Fruited Plain and buy a CD if that’s your thing, or you can purchase the downloads on Bandcamp, but otherwise you stream it at Spotify or Apple or wherever.

(01:01:06) Justin Ariel Bailey: Yeah, and we’ll put links to all of this in the show notes at In All Things podcast as well as the video.

(01:01:09) Luke Hawley: We play weddings. We’re not a great wedding band.

(01:01:15) Laremy Devries: No, but you got to be kind of super fans to get it. We don’t do going to the chapel.

(01:01:22) Luke Hawley: Or whatever we could, I suppose. Thanks so much for having us.

(01:01:26) Justin Ariel Bailey: Yeah, it’s really great.

(01:01:28) Luke Hawley: Yeah.

(01:01:28) Justin Ariel Bailey: This has been the 40th episode of the In All Things podcast, and our guests are The Ruralists. Well, two members of The Ruralists….

(01:01:36) Luke Hawley: Jake and Christian are not here because we didn’t invite them. That’s not quite true.

(01:01:46) Laremy Devries: It would get too many voices.

(01:01:48) Luke Hawley: I mean, the two of us do enough talking as is. Absolutely. Christian is my 19-year-old next door neighbor who started playing and writing his own songs because The Ruralists live next door to him. His dad is the friend that teaches me apophatic, and Jake is our bass player who lives across the street from us.

(01:02:15) Laremy Devries: We all live within, like I live the farthest away at one block.

(01:02:17) Luke Hawley: Yeah.

(01:02:18) Justin Ariel Bailey: Anyway, well, again, our guests have been two members of The Ruralists, Luke Hawley and Laremy DeVries. Luke and Laremy, thanks for joining us on the In All Things podcast.

(01:02:39) Andreas Center: Thanks for listening to the in all things podcast from the Andreas Center at Dordt University. Original music is provided by the Ruralists and thanks are in order to Ruth Clark, Channon Visscher, Vaughn Donahue and the production team at the Andreas Center. You can find us online@inallthings.org or follow us on Twitter under the name at in underscore all underscore things. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify and wherever podcasts are found. And if you find our content beneficial, please help us out by leaving a review and sharing with others. Thanks for tuning in.

Lyrics to “Murmur”

You’re a murmur of starlings

Darling

All your ever-shifting parts

A work of modern art

That I cannot understand

And I can’t look away

Or convey

All my slip-sliding thoughts

All twisted up in knots

Explaining how I feel

So I’ll keep writing you all these love songs

All my life long

Trying to get it right

And you’ll keep asking me

Why I do it

Why I can’t quit

But I just don’t know how

It’s just like breathing now

I’m an old tv set

Trying to get

The picture to come in

With strips of kitchen tin

Wrapped around my ears

But it’s mostly just snow

Even though I’m giving it my best

I just haven’t got it yet

As clear as it can be

So I’ll keep writing you all these love songs

All my life long

Trying to get it right

And you’ll keep asking me

Why I do it

Why I can’t quit

But I just don’t know how

It’s just like breathing now

There’s a word that I learned

From a friend

About saying what you’ve got

By saying what it’s not

Possible to say

So then all that I know

I suppose

Of language and of rhyme

Of being and of time

Means nothing without you

Lyrics to “Mother Mary”

I keep trying to see the face

Of mother mary full of grace

In an apple core

In a sticky bun

In a stretch of clouds

In the setting sun

But all that’s there is just the flesh and peel

Just the carmeled crust and the pink and teal of harvest dust

I keep trying to tell you how

I have always loved you like I love you now

But my tongue gets thick and my brain brain goes slack

And all these words come out bric-a-brac

And all that’s there is just the metaphor

It’s not the whole of you 

It’s not the crux and core

It’s not the through and through

I keep trying to understand

How a dram of atoms makes the man

And the woman too

Is that the whole of us?

Just a clump of dirt?

Just a cloud of dust?

And that’s there is just some chemistry

The arithmetic of you and me

And the human heart is just a fine machine

Not a work of art filled with kerosene

Not a mystery of colossal scope

Not a duffel bag of fear and hope

Not a megaphone of love and hate

Not a talisman to keep us safe

Not a rattletrap always breaking down

Not a spiderweb 

Not a shantytown

Not a creaking bridge

Not a tank brigade

Not an oracle

Not a masquerade

Just a thing that bangs and beats and pounds

And throbs and churns and wails and sounds

And maybe all we are is dust

Maybe that’s the whole of us

But maybe we are magic too

Impossible and completely true

Through and through

Lyrics to “People are People Too”

People are people too

Just like me and you

From the tops of our heads

To the foot of our beds

People are people too

You seem to think they’re not

You seem to think they’re not

You treat them like things

And not human beings

But people are people too

Of course it’s the same for me

Of course it’s the same for me

It’s hard to admit

But I often forget

That people are people too

So then what can be done

So then what can be done

Just what do we need

For us to agree

That people are people too

People are people too

Just like me and you

From the buds of our tongues

To the air in our lungs

People are people too

People are really strange

People are really strange

We do what we won’t

And believe what we don’t

But people are people too

Sometimes they drive you nuts

Sometimes they drive you nuts

So we try to negate

With our labels and hate

But people are people too

Time here is really short

Time here is really short

So let’s make up a plan

To be as kind as we can

Because people are people too

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