David LaMotte

May 2008 Kerrville Folk Festival

The Kennedy stage was graced with this musician’s presence in one of his final appearances before setting aside his music career to pursue a master’s degree in peace making in Australia. In this interview, recorded on the new stage at Chapel Hill after emceeing The Ballad Tree, David explains his motivations for choosing this path.

FAF: So, what is that like, people saying goodbye to you?

DAVID: Of course, when people mourn the lack of something, that’s another way of appreciating the presence of it. It’s very humbling to realize that you’ve had an impact on people, to know that you’ve connected in ways that were meaningful. It’s really nice, when Kevin [Ferrity] just told the story about some small comment I made to him many years ago, and it made him feel more empowered. It’s really nice to hear it, ‘cause Kevin’s made a lot of people smile over the years and it’s nice to think, well, somebody else probably would have said it if I hadn’t, but it’s just nice to know I had a little part to play in his art.

FAF: Your nonprofit PEG Partners, or The Guatemalan School Project, is what, four years old?

DAVID: Right. It’s four years old at this point. It started on my honeymoon with my wife. We went down there. It’s really kind of grown exponentially. But, that’s interesting because we haven’t actually been trying to grow it very much. We see an advantage in keeping it small. We don’t have any paid staff, it’s 100 percent volunteer, which allows us to take 100 percent of the donations and put them toward the project. We don’t pull anything out for administration, unless people specifically say, hey, this is also dealt with, plane tickets and such. People designate it; we put it in a completely separate bank account if they say ‘this part is for administration.’ But if they don’t, then it’s 100 percent right to the project.

FAF: You say you’re turning the general oversight of it over to Johnsmith?

DAVID: Not exactly. Johnsmith is going to be the public face of the organization. He’s going to be more of an ambassador for the organization. The oversight, and the director position, is going to be taken over by a woman named Caroline Procter, who has been on the Board since we formed it and became a 501(C) nonprofit. And so, I’ve been performing both of those roles. We’re now going to split those in two and John’s going to become a fundraiser and be able to tell people his stories. And Caroline’s going to do the day-to-day administration.

FAF: So, you’re putting aside your music career and pursuing a master’s degree in peace studies. And I’ve read that you had this choice back in 1990 to put music before peace making?

DAVE: That’s right.

FAF: And now you’re decided that peace making is your path. So, what I would like is for you to explain how this came about in 1990 and then recently this choice with the different results. Is it the times? Was it the times or was it your times? Or was it both? Were the 1990s more of a time for making music, whereas now is more of a time for making peace?

DAVE: I wouldn’t put it that way. I would say that both times were times for both. Certainly the 90s were a time for making music and also for making peace, and the same could be said of right now.

Making music is a hugely important calling. And I distinguish between your job and your vocation. Your vocation is really the bigger picture: what were you put on this planet to do? Not in terms of the details, but what are you here for? Are you here to love people? To educate them? To hold people accountable? What’s your job? And that’s at the base of the question, how do you make your money and pay your bills? I would like to think that I am switching jobs but not switching vocations.

I used to say that music connects people. And I’ve stopped saying that. It’s a subtle distinction, but what I believe now, or what I always believed but I think I found a slightly more precise way of articulating it, is that music doesn’t connect people: the fact is, we are already connected, and we forget that we are connected, every day, all the time. And, what music does is remind us of our connection. And that’s holy. That’s hugely important. Because we all have different experiences but we’re all painting from the same palette of emotions. We have these fundamental connections within us. And if a good song can remind us of our empathy; if somebody else feels what you’re feeling, that goes a long way toward beginning healing. I’m really glad that there’s really angry heavy metal in music in the world, for instance. Even though it’s not really what I need to listen to right now, it’s not where I am emotionally, but I’m so glad that if there’s some 14-year-old kid in a small town in Iowa who’s just feeling really angry and powerless and dumped on by the world, that he can at least know that he’s not the only guy in the world that feels that way.

So I feel like this move toward the work of peace making, in a more pragmatic and intentional way, is sort of an extension of what I’ve been doing. But in those days, as I tried to discern what path was mine, the music was what pulled me hardest, and making this change now arose from the fact that I’ve been doing some peace work, it’s a passion of mine. I’ve been trying to make these connections and educate myself over the years. I’ve not only toured all over the States and such, I’ve toured in Belfast when it was still hot there; I’ve toured in Bosnia. I’ve been in a lot of pretty intense places intentionally, to kind of be present with what’s going on in that way. So, it’s kind of a shift, and in other ways it’s kind of not.

FAF: What does a person such as Bono and what he does say to you and what you want to do?

DAVID: Bono inspires the heck out of me. I think he’s just great. I’m obviously operating on a much smaller scale than Bono who’s a massive, international superstar, and I don’t aspire to be that. I don’t feel like that’s my job in the world. But it’s cool to realize that this little bit of notoriety that I have, this little bit of attention that people give me, I can turn that in the direction of serving somebody besides me. It doesn’t have to just be about me and my ego. If I’m being clapped for, I can take that energy that people are pointing at me and channel it in another direction. And this work in Guatemala has really illustrated that so vividly for me.

I’m trying to learn to stop believing in the myth of my own powerlessness. We are not powerless. The problems seem so huge. But we’ve been sold this myth that we can’t have an impact. And, if you really stop and study the way the world works, it’s so abundantly clear that that’s not true. People roll their eyes when you talk about changing the world, but the truth is, you can’t be in the world and not change it. Everything you do changes the world whether you like it or not. So the question is, how much intention are we going to make? How much intention are we going to bring to the changes we are making and which changes are we going to choose?

And then I think it’s about biting off chewable pieces. We don’t have to do the big and dramatic. The history of big social change is the history of people making really small decisions, for the most part. We have a cultural mythology that that’s not the way the world works, that the world is changed by heroes and we’re not heroes: heroes are the ones that change the world; we’re normal people. And we try to make the stories conform to that. We’re given the impression that Rosa Parks made that decision not to give up her seat on the bus on the spur of the moment. The truth is that Rosa Parks, by the time she was arrested, had been the secretary of the NAACP for 12 years in Montgomery. She had trained the summer before she was arrested at the Highlander [Folk School at Monteagle, Tenn.] in non-violent activism. But they don’t tell us that part of the story because they don’t want us to believe that activism works. If the story is that heroes change the world and they make these spur-of-the-moment decisions, then your instructions for how to change the world are: Step One, Wait. And that’s not how it works. Rosa Parks was not waiting. If we believe activism works, then it’s incumbent upon us to be active in some way. When I say activism I don’t necessarily mean marching in the streets. I mean taking any action to make things better than they are.

FAF: But, sticking to the premise, of course, that no matter what we do, we are action, we are producing some action...so we need to take responsibility for that action and put it in the right direction.

DAVID: Right. Right, and I think responsibility is a really important word for you to bring up. I think that’s really right: we do have to take responsibility. And I think we shouldn’t spend too much time on blame: not blaming ourselves, but holding ourselves responsible. And, not blaming each other, but holding each other responsible. That’s a subtle but very important distinction.

FAF: In your song “Drops Like Me,” I’m assuming “one drop of water” is a metaphor for each individual and then it would follow, of course, that “the mighty tidal wave” is all of humanity? Or is this really just about water – or both?

DAVID: I would say “the mighty tidal wave” might be all of humanity; if we’re lucky, it’s at least a movement. It’s at least a bunch of us working together. And we’re all out there. There are a lot of people doing a lot of good work in the world. There is a lot to celebrate. And that doesn’t stand, for me, in contrast with all the really negative and terrible stuff that’s going on in the world. It’s woven right into it.

All of us who are trying to have a positive impact are also having a negative impact. I mean, this work in Guatemala that I love and believe in, and I think is a good decision, involves my flying to Guatemala a couple of times a year, and that’s not so good in terms of Carbon footprint. All of our efforts are imperfect. Paul Loeb, who wrote a wonderful book called Soul of a Citizen [Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time], talks about the perfect principle, and I won’t go through all of that, but he tells a wonderful story about going to protest an oil company in northern California, I think. They were driving out to this very remote site in a car, four guys in the car, and they stopped on the way out to fuel up. And while they were putting gas in the car they looked up and realized they were buying gas from the people they were going out to protest. Which, is incredibly disheartening in the moment, but his point in telling this story is, you know what, it was still important that we go to protest that oil company, and that was the best way for us to get there. And it wasn’t perfect.

And you know what? No movement for social change has ever been perfect. It’s wrong for us to accept them to be. If you’re doing good, positive work, it’s self-defeating to try to pick it apart. I mean, yeah, let’s try to do the best job we can and be as pure as we can in our intentions and whatnot, but not devalue the effort because it’s not perfect. That’s ludicrous.

FAF: And perfection is not possible anyway.

DAVID: It’s not possible. No movement that has ever changed the world had perfect knowledge of the issue, had perfect intentions; it just doesn’t work that way, it’s not how it is.

FAF: In your song “Peter (What I Said),” who are you speaking to in this song? Is this about 9-11?

DAVID: Broadly, yes. I actually wrote it six months to the day after 9-11. I didn’t realize that on the day I was writing it; it was later when I was scribbling down something about the song I realized, oh wow, that was exactly March 11, 2002.

I come from a long line of Presbyterian ministers, and my dad is a Presbyterian pastor, a neat guy, and he gets it: that his job is to love people. I think he represents his thing very well. But I grew up in a church setting. That song is, perhaps arrogantly, me trying to imagine a conversation between Jesus and Peter. I guess I’m writing the song for church folk who don’t see the irony of Jesus’ pacifism, as I see it. Jesus preached nonviolence, without exception, in the New Testament. People make arguments to the contrary, but none of them that I have seen yet have convinced me that Jesus wasn’t absolutely nonviolent in his teachings and his actions. And so, the first verse of that song takes a strong anti-war stance and then the chorus, if you’re steeped in that tradition, reveals to you who is speaking. So you have time to have reaction to this anti-war statement, and then you have to re-evaluate that in light of who’s making the statement.

FAF: Do you see yourself following in your father’s footsteps, only on a whole different plane?

DAVID: Well, I thought I was being such a rebel because, you know, here I am being a long-haired folk singer after my father, my grandfather and my sister are Presbyterian ministers. I’m a Quaker—and a long-haired folk singer—and I thought I was being so rebellious. But the fact is, the bottom line, when you really break it down, I see my place on the planet is to love people, which is what my dad sees is his place on the planet to be, I think, and, to show people love, his own and God’s. And yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at! So, I don’t see myself going to seminary and becoming a pastor in the way that he is, although I profoundly respect his path, and my sister’s. But I do feel like I’m doing that work in another way.