This Side of: St. Danger

I stumbled into playing in a band. I’d been a good distance runner in high school, and the extent of my extracurricular plans for freshman year was to try out for the cross country team. I spent much of the summer before that year training to make the coach’s 5k standard. But he suddenly left Princeton and his replacement told me only the day before classes began that they wouldn’t be taking walk-ons. So I drifted around a bit aimlessly for a few months of my freshman existence, not really knowing what to do with myself.

That December, my friend Maxson Jarecki ’16 invited me to come listen to him and a few friends play music. One night, I went down to the practice room in Bloomberg where they were set up. Maxson and Conor McGrory ’16 were playing guitars and trading off solos and Kenny Hulpach ’16 was laying down the beat on the drum kit. Things sounded pretty good. Someone handed me a bass, I started playing along with them and things sounded even better. Soon enough we decided to form a band. We called ourselves Moxie, and played together for about a year. When Moxie fizzled out, Conor, Kenny and I eventually got back together to write new music in our current configuration as St. Danger.

I’d never really written music before college, and on some level I believed that it was strictly an innate ability. I remember reading, for instance, that Tchaikovsky only had to incline his head to one side and melodies would come to him, fully formed. Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” in his sleep. I certainly didn’t have access to that wellspring of inspiration, so I didn’t let it bother me.

I was surprised and pleased to realize that it didn’t have to be that way. When we write a song (and it is usually a collaborative effort), it does start with some little nugget we’ve come across by chance or inspiration — but that’s it, just a riff or chord progression or lyric. We work outward from there in a very deliberate, almost empirical process, seeing what works and what doesn’t, gradually building until we have a whole song. This comes with an amazing sense of discovery and vitality that I rarely find elsewhere.

For me, playing with St. Danger is an activity that stands a little apart from the prevailing culture of Princeton. The ethos of the university, made explicit from the very first moments of opening exercises, is something along the lines of: We are Princetonians, we are participants in a grand tradition and leaders of the future, and you’re damn right we embody excellence.

This is all well and good, but I think the competitive spirit that comes along with it encourages many of us to play to our strengths in a lot of different arenas. For instance, to stand above the wretched masses of McCosh 50 in intro-level econ classes, it’s wise to have taken the A.P. equivalents in high school. If you want to make even the club soccer team, you’d better be pretty good at soccer already. In a very general way, we respond to these dynamics. On the one hand, this means that Princeton students tend to see a lot of success in their endeavors. But on the other, playing it safe like this means that many of us feel a bit reticent to try things we don’t already know.

Conor, Kenny and I have each been playing music for a very long time, but none of us have played our current instruments for much more than three years. Conor came to the guitar from the bass. I did the opposite. And Kenny played piano for years before he ever touched a drum kit. We’ve bumbled along, taught each other and figured things out. This is an ongoing process, but it’s been very affirming and gratifying to see our progress. I think this is largely possible because — purely through messing around, and without meaning to — we created a really good space for experimentation.

No one’s gunning for our spots. No one’s watching us. And sometimes that’s a great way to be.