Fetch The Compass Kids - The Danielson Famile (2001)
“Even if the melody's a flop we're gonna sing your way right through the top”
Daniel Smith is a courageous musician. One may think that all art requires a certain amount of courage, or at the very least confidence. Yet musicians who write music for a known, ready-made, audience operate with a certain safety net. They’re providing goods for a pre-established market. This form of art lacks the same bravery as those who create art with no natural constituency. Or in the case of Smith, music that has two seemingly mutually exclusive constituencies.
The Danielson Famile are Smith’s actual family (“famile” is pronounced “family”). The band is comprised of his sisters, brothers, wife, and best friend. They make pop music - in the broad sense - but it’s not music that you will ever hear on the radio, on TV, or in a shopping mall. Their songs are often upbeat and filled with incredible hooks, striding with the certainty of a group who are assured of their abilities. Yet the band’s arrangements are often built on a series of bewildering choices for anyone with a conventional understanding of pop music, taking strange twists and turns, impatient and hyperactive, like children changing their minds mid-cartwheel. Added to this, Smith has a shrill falsetto that frequently jumps several octaves into what can only be described as a screech.
As a result, the Danielson Famile have often been categorised as “outsider music”. This a category that seeks to describe musicians making music without any kind of self-awareness, or understanding of conventional styles or trends. It is considered to be a more “authentic” form of music-making. These types of musicians exist outside the mainstream not because they want to, but because they are uninfluenced by - or unaware of - the pressures of acceptability or acclaim. They often may think they are creating popular music. Their naïvety is considered their value.
Although there is some overlap between this kind of art and the music of the Danielson Famile, it would be misleading to portray the band completely in the same way one would The Shaggs or Daniel Johnston. More like Japanese band, Maher Shalal Hash Baz - the musical vehicle of Tori Kudo, who actively recruits bad musicians in order to make an intentional wonky sound - the music the Danielson Famile make may seem off-kilter, but it actually has intent. A musicianship that is professional in its amateurism.
This kind of music has a niche audience. Yet it is one that has been cultivated online as people have uploaded obscurities to YouTube, and its much lauded algorithm has given new leases on life to long forgotten music, or even music that was never known in the first place. A project like Awesome Tapes From Africa, has taken home-made cassette tapes made with limited resources that were traditionally distributed in local markets in West Africa and given them a new global distribution network and appreciation.
There’s a certain ear required to hear this kind of music. Although not an entire reversal of one’s expectations of music, as these artists are not bad. The appreciation of this type of music is not ironic. But instead one is listening for an additional spirit within the music. To understand more of the personalities and circumstances that have gone into creating music. To grasp that process is just as interesting as the final product. The Danielson Famile exists somewhere in this milieu. They are a spiritual band, you need to feel them as much as you need to hear them.
This spirit is also what marks the Danielson Famile as unique, because they have an added component that makes them quite distinct from the music most obscurity hounds gravitate towards. The Danielson Famile make Christian music. Or to be more accurate, a great many of their songs have direct and overt Christian references, while all are immersed in Christian themes. It is the band’s central, explicit, motivating force. Although one would not call the band evangelical in an overt manner, conversion is not an explicit goal.
Yet usually when we think of Christian music there’s an assumption that this music would be mostly bland adult contemporary or other middle-of-the-road genres. Even Christian music aimed at younger people tends to try and fix itself to the prominent styles of the time. There is an obvious purpose to this, as the music is intended as a vehicle for a collective spiritual connection, to communicate a universal message, and an attempt to attract people towards Christianity. It needs broad appeal.
What makes Daniel Smith such an intriguing songwriter is that he has discarded this general assumption about the purpose of Christian music. He simply writes through instinct. Operating without a blueprint, or an intended audience, instead his music seems almost to be a series of involuntary spasms. It’s the sound of an id, it has a child-like discord to it. The music goes where Smith feels it should go, to not be restrained by any rational calculations.
This is the courage to make music devoid of any social expectations. What Smith has instead is faith. Not just religious faith, but rather the faith that someone, somewhere, will hear the Danielson Famile and it will make a connection. His is deeply human music, because it embraces the eccentricities of humanity. It upholds these as an unambiguous good.
Yet this is not music that is interesting simply because it is strange. The band’s uninhibited positivity is also a pleasure to hear. Once you adjust yourself to their approach, and let your own inhibitions subside, there is a real joyfulness to their music. One that doesn’t require being a Christian to embrace.
Fetch The Compass Kids was the band's fifth album, and the album where Smith began to develop greater focus, and the ability to self-edit. Previous albums had been sprawling messes that were captivating in their own way, but lacked the ability to consistently translate what is so beguiling about the band into an accessible block of songs. Fetch The Compass Kids instead was 12 short, sharp songs that retained the band’s astonishing strangeness, but gave these attributes some more conventional form.
Which isn’t to say these songs are easy listening. They still consist of skewed song structures with odd counter-melodies, baffling shifts in tone and tempo, and Smith’s idiosyncratic voice that tends to chirp and squawk both above and beneath the music, intersecting in complex ways with those of his sisters and wife. It’s all quite awkward. But at the same time this is pop music. It invites you to tap your toe and sing along. Yet there’s just some work you need to do in order to accept the invitation.
The album’s title is a subtle, but clear, indication of the album’s themes. This is an album about finding an ethical and purposeful compass within a rapidly changing world. Yet this is not a reactionary sentiment. Inquiry into the shifting nature of human relations is not the same as being suspicious of it.
Yet there is a deep contradiction within our dominant politics that houses an (often justified) moral indignation coupled with cultural permissiveness that blurs the lines about what we owe each other as humans. The “self-actualisation” that has come to be central to what people expect of their place in society is often built on an anti-egalitarian individualism that prioritises the self over community goods.
Smith is not a scold. But there is a recognition within his lyrics that we are in a period of cultural decadence that is eating away at human bonds. Two decades on from the release of the album this is even more pronounced. One doesn’t have to root this critique in Christianity to recognise its salience.
But as Smith is a Christian, he does. Seeking to find a more common humanity within his Christianity. Here the album’s title track asserts that “the compass kids run to the compass passion.” Of course, The Passion in the biblical sense encompassed a period in Jesus’s life that runs from his return to Jerusalem through to the crucifixion and resurrection. These events included acts of anger like his expulsion of the merchants and money changes from the temple, yet rather than an emotive or excited state, Smith is instead using the passion in a form closer to its Latin root, invoking Jesus’s endurance and patience.
The song’s chorus is a plea for this compass to “lead me to the passionate tree.” This line links it to Fathom The Nine Fruits Pie, a song later in the album which enthusiastically runs through a list of the fruits of the Holy Spirit - “Love and joy and peace and patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” When performing solo, Smith has often played from within a nine fruits tree.
Yet these songs are far from dour theological tracts. There is a playfulness to Smith’s lyrics, and a sly sense of humour that one wouldn’t necessarily expect from an artist who is also serious about their religion. Rallying the Dominoes draws an analogy between Smith’s fear that he cannot organise his time effectively and the early-1990s toy Domino Rally. With the song inexplicably containing pleas from his sisters and wife to “Calm down, Dan!” While We Don’t Say Shut Up absurdly contains the shouted refrain of QUIET TIME! IT’S THE QUIET TIME!
While the band is generally unable to be categorised, the influence of twee-pop is clearly strong. This is a genre that is often derided as confecting innocence and being far too cutesy for grown adults. But more sympathetically it could be deemed to be drawing inspiration from the playfulness and imagination of youth. This doesn’t necessarily exclude being without serious ideas. The Danielson Family can easily fuse the creativity of youth with the search for spiritual fulfilment. To do so may even be necessary.
This is an added element of Smith’s courage. It’s the convergence of the unorthodox nature of the Danielson Famile’s music, which can often be respected depending on the musical niche, and the general suspicion towards Christianity within the artistic realm more broadly. For artists - of any type - to announce themselves as Christian is to invite suspicion. It is deemed to not only be very uncool, but it arouses scepticism towards their work. It is seen as anti-intellectual, a belief in magic over substance.
Yet religion in general is an attempt to make sense of the world, in the same way as art. Most importantly, within the roots of religion lies a desire to do so without cynicism. Religion’s initial approach - before it became an identity - was curiosity. Religious ideas are born from a seeker’s eye, and a mind that thinks critically and creatively.
This is an obvious contrast to much of the Christianity that has come to dominate the United States, which has instead become deeply cynical and often highly manipulative. Here religion’s attempt to understand the world has transformed into a fearful and insular hostility towards it. It has moved away from curiosity and communion towards a form of cultural zealotry, while also ironically abandoning the struggle with doubt that is usually a central tenet of Christian faith.
Smith is not unaware of these problems, which suggests that the endurance of The Passion and the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit that Fetch The Compass Kids is built around is not directed at unbelievers, but instead at Christians themselves. Smith is not only presenting himself as a highly unconventional artist to a highly sceptical indie music culture, but also as an innovative thinker to Christian culture that often seems divorced from its principles.
The album’s most beautiful, even conventionally beautiful, song is its penultimate one, Can We Camp At Your Feet? A song that is also potentially its most radical. Its sentiment is one that sees the curiosity and communion of religion as not being reliant on a church or an authority that claims to hold the key to spirituality, or indeed heaven. Smith and his family are not Quakers, but there is a Quaker sentiment here. That the relationship between the individual and god needs no intermediary. That the temptation of corruption that comes through hierarchical structures is real, and frankly pervasive, and that this requires challenge.
That this challenge is also coming through music that is challenging could be considered an essential part of the process. These philosophical movements towards an improving humanity don’t come without serious work. There is a new protestantism here within Fetch The Compass Kids. One that recognises the degradation and decadence of the modern church, and in response, in his own idiosyncratic manner, Daniel Smith nailed his 12 theses to the Church door.