Sacred Play: Exploring Music, Sports, and Spirituality with David Gungor

We wanted something different from our usual fare, so we invited musician David Gungor to help us see spirituality through an artist’s eyes: beauty, story, woundedness, and play. What starts as a talk about music becomes an exploration of navigating Christian deconstruction, church hurt, and the fear that life’s best days might already be gone.

David shares his pastor’s kid upbringing, the family fallout that reshaped his world, and how his songwriting moved from evangelical worship culture toward liturgical art, peacemaking, and honest ambiguity. We dig into his “threefold path” of spiritual growth, why mythos and narrative matter for meaning, and what separates art from propaganda. If you’ve ever wondered why “Christian music” can feel instantly recognizable in the worst way, this part will stick with you: great spiritual art creates space for interpretation, awe, and participation.

Things get even more real when David talks about pandemic-era health scares, anxiety attacks, intrusive thoughts, therapy, and the practice of “learning to just be.” We end somewhere unexpected: sports as structured play, where competition can become communal healing and even a kind of liturgy.

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Transcript

Meet The Hosts And The Guest

Randy 0:06

I'm Randy, the pastor half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.

Kyle 0:15

We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air around the proverbial table with a good drink at the back corner of a dark pub.

Randy 0:24

Thanks for joining us, and welcome to a pastor and a philosopher walking to a bar. Philosophers, let's just say. A group of people that we haven't talked to that Kyle and I, I think, have some interest in are artists and in particular musicians. Yeah, totally. We both love music. We both uh love what it does to you. And I came across an artist, a musician named Gate David Gunger at the Post-Evangelical Collective's National Gathering this year in Boston, just a couple months ago. And uh David is a prolific artist. He's he's the kind of the front man of the band called a band called The Brilliance, which is a really wonderful, um, I think you would call them a Christian band. They're one of those that like are definitely Christian, are worshipy and um kind of have a rich theological foundation, but also I think would be appealing to lots of other people. David's a brilliant artist, uh really smart guy, and I just wanted to talk to him and and hear his take on life as we as we're living it right now, and seeing the world through the lenses of an artist and a poet kind of helps me see an extra dimension and layer that I don't have the eyes to see.

Kyle 1:50

Yeah. And if the name sounds familiar to you, it's because his brother had a famous band, which I guess he was also a part of. I didn't realize that until called Gunger. I've had some very significant memories with that band. Uh, of course, his brother also had the podcast that was uh very influential and in some ways paved the way for podcasts like ours. So I'm not endorsing it necessarily, but you know, this is maybe the first of the the deconstruction podcasts, if you want to put us in that category, which I don't love, but it's a fact. Um, and so yeah, you may have heard from from that you know that should tell you something about the family. They've gone through a lot of uh evolution in terms of how they think about faith, and that's definitely impacted his art. And I'll just say from the perspective of a thinker, somebody who is intellectual through and through, not by choice, it's just the way not the way that I am. That's the way I think about things. It is often very difficult for me to see things from an artist's perspective. I very intentionally married an artist for this reason. Like I knew very early on that I'd not.

Randy 2:50

It's a very small quadrant of like e-harmony or whatever.

Kyle 2:53

Yeah, right. God, I used to be.

Randy 2:55

I just dated myself because that's probably not a thing in the world.

Kyle 2:58

I hope it's not. I have no idea. Yes. Um, shamefully, I once had a subscription. Um got nothing from it. I literally met my wife like a couple of months after making the subscription. Nice, good. But anyway, I knew that uh I did not need to be with another intellectual type and that I needed that kind of balance. I needed an artist who thought totally differently. Or who didn't have to think everything to death. Right. Um, and I'm and I'm not saying that um David is anything like my wife, but he definitely thinks differently from me. Yes. Sometimes in frustrating ways. Uh and I sometimes have a hard time understanding where people like this are coming from or or you know, seeing things from their perspective. But I do think it's extremely valuable to try, and I do want to have more artists on the show for sure.

Randy 3:45

Yeah, yeah. I I mean, uh, I'm not an artist, um, but I really do enjoy and and and mostly love the way they see the world, and I think we're better better for if we listen to it. And a fun thing about this conversation with this artist is that we end it by talking about sports in the beautiful, redemptive, uh meta-narrative kind of ways that you can talk about sports, which uh my co-host probably will be rolling into.

Kyle 4:12

I'm rolling to learn, man. That's amazing.

Randy 4:15

That's progress, that's gross. Yep. Uh enjoy this conversation with David Gunger.

David’s Story From Church To Art

Randy 4:37

David Gunger, welcome to a pastor and a philosopher. Welcome to a bar.

David 4:41

Thank you. I'm I'm very glad to be here and uh thank you for having me.

Randy 4:46

Yeah, we're excited, David. We haven't talked to enough artists and musicians and have wanted to for a bit. And judging from the way we prepped for this interview, I'm excited for the conversation. But can you just tell us and our listeners a little bit about you and your world? What has made you you, David?

David 5:02

I grew up uh a pastor's kid. My dad was an evangelical Pentecostal pastor, and in middle school, we moved from Wisconsin to Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Randy 5:14

I would say that's a downward move.

David 5:15

Let's agree. Uh so I am a lifelong Packers fan. And uh I in uh Tulsa, my parents started a church, and then a couple years into it, my dad uh we would call it at the time like a moral failure. He had an affair and told my mom and ended up resigning, but then just the fallout of that, um, the weight of that. He got out of ministry and in Tulsa, it's in the Bible Belt, and it's a small enough town to where that just kind of follows you around. And so I was in like a private Christian school at the time in middle school, and it just was like it was a really hard middle school experience to where then in high school I transferred to like a large public school, partly because I've kind of wanted to already escape the small Christian bubble that I was in. Uh my parents uh stayed together. My dad went back to school. Uh, actually, he's now he has his uh PhD in philosophy as well. And he then got back into ministry, but through a different kind of uh place. Um and ended up years later, they co-pastored with uh uh their actual marriage therapists who had helped them and walked through that journey with them for a long time. So I in high school graduated high school early. My brothers both were musicians. I come from a family of that there were three boys and one girl. All three brothers played music. Music was a kind of language in the family that uh was primarily around uh church music and jazz, a lot of jazz. And then later in high school, I like wanted to make out with girls. So I started playing the guitar and writing really stupid songs, love songs, which then got me into a place of being able to like have a gig and like play for a church, either bass or you know, then leading music. Ended up playing with my brother's band when I was in high school and touring. Uh, he had a band called Gunger. And then I moved to Southern California, was living there, trying to follow a girl, not my wife currently, but just a girl that like I had met while playing some music. Went out there and ended up getting a job opportunity at a church in Michigan. And I had been doing some, like I graduated high school early and I'd done some like you know, online college stuff and I was getting ready to go to college, but I was like, hey, I uh they offered me this job. I was like, well, I still have a little college to finish. They didn't know how much. And like, well, what's great is like we'll help you with that. So I got to tell my parents, like, hey, I've got someone helping me with college and uh I'm gonna go get a job. And so I did. I moved to Michigan and I worked at like a large megachurch. But the people I met there, a lot of wonderful people that was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is still one of my favorite, like mid-sized cities in America. Um at the time, like a lot of other young Christians, that was like the heyday of like Rob Bell being in Grand Rapids. So I'd go on Sunday nights over to Mars Hill and had a cool, like I was kind of going through my own at the time in college, you know, introduced to getting already out of the evangelical world into a kind of more deconstruction phase. Uh, but it was a beautiful place to be in with community and go through that phase.

Randy 8:56

Is this like mid to late 2000s?

David 8:58

When it's this is like, yeah, like 2007.

Randy 9:02

Yeah.

David 9:03

So I actually moved in 05. So was there 05, 06, 07, and met my wife uh while I was uh actually on tour with my brother. Uh I met her first and made my move. We ended up getting married, she moved to Michigan first, and then we got pregnant young, and so we moved back down to Tulsa. At that time, I kind of was like slowing down on music. So I was like, I think I'm gonna be a pastor. So I um was a youth pastor for four years, and during that time, I needed uh all the music that was going on was primarily around hillsong, which is like it's you know, it was its thing, it was cool. But I wanted kind of a different expression. I had already told you I'd kind of gone through a bit of deconstruction and trying to figure out what type of language I would use for my own faith and for spiritual formation. And so at the time, especially with our youth group and our church, we were really becoming more sacramental and more liturgical. And so I wanted some music to reflect that. And I was visiting New York, my brother-in-law was actually playing at Carnegie Hall, and he played uh this Bach piece. He's an amazing cellist, and it was like packed room. And the same feeling that you'd get from like being in a packed concert where everybody is like singing really loud. I had this sense of wonder, but like everyone was silent. The crowd was just like listening together, and I thought, man, there's not a lot of music spaces where I'm having it. The crowd really listen, like I'm trying to get participation, but it's more about like sing together or have this moment where you're like, cool, that was a cool light show, that was a cool whatever, but like getting everyone to a place of wonder through quiet. And so I contacted my friend and uh I said, Hey man, I want to make a record around a string quartet. And he's like, Yeah, great. My the family that I had married into, very similar to mine, in that there were three boys, one girl. I married the one girl, and obviously she uh she came from a uh classical world family, and so um started diving into that. We did our first album and it and it made money, and we were like, This is awesome! So it it got to a point where people were sharing it, it was very cool. We did some tours and then just started making a lot of albums. And the first thing that we made was around liturgical art, even though John was an atheist and I was a youth pastor, but just best friends kind of growing up, and that liturgical art, people would a lot of times be like, We love that you're making great Catholic music, or we love that you're making great reform music or whatever. And I just would laugh. I'd be like, I'm I'm not Catholic, but thank you. And we ended up from there being invited into a lot of different spaces that um was very ecumenical, and and I kind of got a taste of what peacemaking within the church looked like. And then I got invited to play a very special concert in Bethlehem in the Holy Land in front of a mostly Muslim audience who was Muslim, Christian, and Jews. We played for peace, and I played a few of these songs, and like I noticed like a Muslim audience really resonated with it. And I was like, Well, there's something to that. And at that time, also just experiencing the history and the culture of the place that is, you know, Palestine and Israel. Fell in love, but also got really disenchanted with American evangelicalism. And the thing that kind of got me back into writing music again was around themes of peacemaking. I did a protest album, and then uh from there was trying to figure out like, are we done making music? We've been making music for a while and made a lot of records. John and I have a band called The Brilliance. It's a very odd space when you're like, Well, what is your music? Because you're making like art that is very like heavily Christian influenced, but also spiritually influenced, but also we're like John is an atheist, and like we're not. So, how do you always be honest about that? And we had a conversation with a dear friend that was like, Well, what type of music do you want to make? Do you still want to do this? And we just had this conversation. We were in Chicago after a show, and we were like, What we love is a lot of our music. Once we make it, it's no longer our own. And there's so many stories, incredibly, we're kind of like a sad band where like people who go through tragedy connect with the music. So it could be like a baby was born, stillborn, or maybe um, you know, someone close to them died, and they really connected to this music. And so anytime you have that, you kind of have this sacred space where it's like it's no longer ours, but it's music that's built around empathy. And so we we were like, that's what we really love doing. He's like, Well, why don't you do that? And so we started writing these suites. The first one was around DACA Dreamers. Uh, the second one was around Is This the End of the World? And it kind of went through this sweet phase of mixing classical music and influences of instrumental music with and um songwriting, and it was no longer in the Christian space at all. The kind of fun thing was I was living in New York City, and even though I still worked as a pastor at a church, a lot of that music then would be like I went to my kids' public school and they would the choir was singing some of our music, which was really amazing for us. From there, ended up doing, you know, just kind of became in our 30s, became a dad band. Uh John, what's funny enough, the atheist kind of became agnostic, and now he works at like a super liberal church in uh Canada. And then um, yeah, I work at a church in New York. I've been here for 11 years. And songwriters, my wife is a violinist, my kids are all in music, and uh yeah, we we I make music with people I love.

Randy 14:59

Love it. And we won't talk about your colleague Michael's love for the bears. I know, I know.

David 15:05

It's it's tough, but it's uh it's actually it's fun as well. You know, he's older than me, but it's kind of fun to be the big brother as as far as like I'm a Packers fan. So this last year they got, you know, they got a good year, but bleeding, yeah. We've we've overall we're we're we're looking up on that.

Randy 15:22

Yep. Uh we're gonna get into sports in a minute. And listeners, um, I know most of you are eye-rolling as I say that. I think you'll like this conversation about sports. However, David, could you give us just a little snapshot of how would you describe your spirituality today?

A Threefold Path Of Spiritual Growth

David 15:39

So the history of spirituality for me would be like as a child, I embraced well, first let me put it like this. Always when I talk about spirituality now, I would talk about like the threefold path of wisdom, which is purification, illumination, and then moving into the third path of wisdom where you can see the unity. And so for the first path of wisdom and like a Judeo-Christian act as a child, is like you get this idea of like what is right and wrong. And so read the proverbs, and you'll be like, here's a sense of this is a good life, this is a bad life, this is good and this is evil, this is wisdom and this is folly.

Randy 16:23

All the binaries, yeah.

David 16:25

Yeah, and then later on, like you see the other side of the coin and you read Ecclesiastes, and you're like, I've done the Proverbs life, I've tried to live this way, and life is meaningless, and you're you're introduced to existentialism, and your life really starts to, you know, you can say construction, deconstruction, whatever you want to say. And then finally, as an adult, like you're able to read Song of Solomon, be like, is this about a woman? Is this about a lover? Is this about many lovers? Is this about God? Is this about right? So you get this place of synthesis. So for me as a child, my message of spirituality was one around uh God loves me. And I am, you know, if I was gonna take that story of like what was probably one of the more important stories in the Bible for me was who Jesus was as the beloved, and I am the beloved, and so really a sense of belovedness. Uh as a teenager, I started to really see then like, well, what about the world? It's not just about me, and start to go in, like, well, where does God love the world? If God loves the world, why does evil and suffering happen? And life is hard. I think a big thing that um started to influence me in that journey of uh the second phase of wisdom of illumination was like Richard Rohr. He would talk about uh five things that a boy needs to know to become a man. Life is hard, you're not important, your life is not about you, you're not in control, you're going to die. And you know, as a young man, those are like things that are you you can hear them and you don't learn them until you actually start to experience them. Um, and then through that trauma, you kind of evolve into a different you know, viewpoint of life. And so for me as an adult, my spirituality became about learning to be for me, spirituality as an act of play. And so as an artist, the thing that like connects me to art and beauty is that spiritual act of play with others. Um, so it is communal. Uh there's a quote by Pablo Picasso, and it says, The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off of our souls. And so I think for me there is also something of like a constant act of almost penance, and I don't mean that in like beating up myself, but like examining my life of like I want to be a good dad, I want to be a good friend, and kind of examining like I could believe all the right things, I could say all the right things, I could whatever kind of language about like justice or whatever you want to say, but like, is it making me a better dad? Yes, or am I still like a shitty dad? Yeah, and I think that's where art for me really becomes a place of like um self-reflection, even though often I'm not writing the music around myself, I'm more writing it around like bigger thoughts of humanity and wrestling with that. So I think for me, if when you say like what is my spirituality based around now, it's around learning to just be, and it's around a spiritual act of play.

Kyle 20:14

What does that mean? Like specifically the play stuff that's intriguing to me. And how is it so one thing both in my own spiritual life, such as it exists currently anymore, but also in church contexts I've been in? A question that I feel like I've continually returned to is how is what we're doing here or how is what I'm doing here any different from what other folks are doing over there who don't use any kind of religious terminology for it, and there's no religious context at all, even. Um, so I play, you know, my kids play, we all play, but we don't think of it as spirituality. So what so what does that mean?

David 20:53

Yeah, I think that God is most God when we are just human, and we are most human when God is most god, and I think there is a a narrative that comes with that when you start saying what is the role of story, and mythos becomes very important for me of like bringing a certain sense of uh meaning. Like, what is now I'm gonna borrow from a lot of different philosophers here, but you'd be like, is love meaningful in and of itself? You'd be like, no, what is love? It brings meaning to others or to other things. So light, you can't see the light, you can see what the light illuminates. And I think for me, what narrative and story does is it helps illuminate love and and moments where we can go, who am I? And what is what is this? This thing that I'm experiencing? Is it only like a projection within self that is uh that in a in and of itself, you're like, well, how does ethics have any meaning? Like, is it just something that like I make up all the time, or is it a shared thing? And so within the Christian narrative, I think the narrative of creature leads us to a narrative of knowledge of self and the need for creator. And the mythos narrative is uh fundamental to the knowledge of self and like what is consciousness. And so when I say that, the reason why I'm a Christian is not because I would say, hey, I believe that Jesus was born of a Virgin Mary, and uh all of these things happen. He was the per, like, there's a lot of mythos to that that I can't say for sure, whatever that is. But within the Trinity, within the idea of like, what does it mean to be, there is an interconnectedness to consciousness, to the other, as well as to creation, as well as to all of these things where it's like it influences, it's not just a solipsistic bubble in which I think and therefore I am, that other reality is like the reality I see is not the only reality. And so within the act of play, um, when you say, like, well, what is how is playfulness a part of that spirituality? I think that the thing that connects us to God or to the eternal is woundedness. And when I think of the story in the Bible that like I love uh for playfulness is like the story of um wrestling with God. And you when you wrestle with God, what ends up happening, you walk away with a limp, but you also have this thing where like you have a different name and you have this story, and so for me, the act of spirituality is learning how to not only by yourself but with others wrestle in the mud with these bigger thoughts and ideas and myths and narratives, and see that through the woundings, like we actually are tied together and we have a connected tissue, a scar tissue that ties us together. And that to me is something that it brings meaning in, like shines that light, and it connects me not only to my children and my friends, but to people around the world. As I shared earlier, one of the things that like sparked my imagination was being in the Holy Land and hearing different stories where you'd be like, all right, well, the story I grew up with was, you know, at the end, at the end of the age, Jesus returns to Jerusalem at the top of the hill. And what does he do? It's like the end of the world. And then you'd be like, oh, whoa, it's really interesting that Islam also has this story of like Jesus returning at the end, but it's a totally different ending. And for Jews, they also have a different story, and then you you get these different stories in all of these different religions. And when you talk about these stories, it's interesting to go, like, okay, what are the things that are connecting us through these stories? And also what are the differences to where you can be unique? And for me, that is the Trinity experience in that you have three the mythos of it is you have distinction to where like there is individual individuality, but it's totally connected to the other, it's totally connected to to that. And to me, spirituality is the act of longing for connection. And so I I like those moments to where um if my spirituality isn't playful for me, it's not real. So it is an act of joy, it is an act, even though it's often going into the suffering, into those moments where like it doesn't feel like I'm necessarily happy. I'm not trying to say it's an act of happiness. It is something that um goes beyond a mystery of pain.

When Music Becomes Spiritual Play

Kyle 26:26

The one thing I would follow up with is asking about the connection between all this and uh music, because I'm or maybe artistry in general, but specifically music. Uh maybe it's the old question of what does it mean to even be a Christian musician or a Christian artist? Um, but like the way that you've described spirituality seems to be very fluid in the sense of not needing any particular tight connection with any particular um doctrines or dogmas or religious claims of any kind, really. And you even said that your your bandmate is an atheist or an agnostic, and that hasn't been an insuperable obstacle for you guys to put out music that um is religious in some sense, right? Or at least has connections with uh religious context. So I remember read when I was in um I must have been I don't know, I may have been in college. I don't remember your brother wrote something somewhere that made the rounds in the Blogosphere uh about the kind of meaninglessness. I don't remember the actual thrust of it, but um what it means to be a Christian musician, you know. And I remember him talking about how you can flip through the radio dial and back when people did that and uh instantly within a few seconds recognize uh when a song was Christian or not without having h heard any of the lyrics, like there were these aesthetic, you know, tropes that went along with that. Um and so that you know, I was enmeshed in a an evangelical culture where that was the music of the day, and questioning it was uh not something you were supposed to do, right? And so, in a way, just thinking about that issue, I wouldn't say it started a deconstruction process for me, but it definitely like opened up a wedge for thinking about spirituality in a broader sense in a different way. Um, so given the ways that you've described spirituality, I'm curious as a musician, as an artist, um do you think in similar ways about music? About um do these things overlap for you? Does one leap feed into the other, if that makes sense?

David 28:18

And and and and and that connected with that, what does it even mean to be so melody, melody and and rhythm are these things that like actually our body responds to? And what melody does is it's a shared experience that then transcends language. So there's certain music and bands that I love to listen to right now that um I can't understand them, and I actually can get into it more. So one of my favorite bands is Oterno, uh, which is a Brazilian band. They sing in Portuguese. It's incredible, incredible music. Um, and I can't understand the lyrics, and even though I'm an artist who loves to write lyrics, like it gets me outside of just focusing on the lyrics. I'm experiencing music in a different way. Um, and then there are certain things where it's like, man, I'm all about the lyrics. Like my one of my favorite songwriters is Leonard Cohen. I can literally just take his lyrics and read it, and it's musical without even me hearing a note, right? Um, it's a shared language that moves beyond difference and languages and barriers. And with music, the other fun thing is there are times where you can have rules, just like in a game, where it's like if we're gonna play a card game, there are rules to the game in play. And it's like we're gonna do this, and this is the fun thing. And then there are ways that you can kind of have some fun and maybe try to break the rules a little bit. And if you're not trying to break the rules a little bit, you're not actually trying to win, right? There's something in it that's like it's fun. There's jazz rules, there's classical rules, there's tonal music rules, there's different cultural rules, and all the time we're building why do these rules exist and how do we expand, and then how do we come back to and find the beauty in? And what's interesting about religious music is we often, because you were wounded from it from a lot of different things, you may be turned off from it. I'd say the religious music you're turned off from is probably just bad music because there's so much good religious music that's not religious, but it's completely religious. Like, I'm gonna name someone and be like, Do you like Soufion Stevens? Okay, it's religious music. Do you like George?

Kyle 30:23

Leonard Cohen for that matter.

David 30:25

Do you like Leonard Cohen? Do you like how many people do I need to name? How many huge songs? And it's in pop culture all the time. All of soul music. When you're talking about like how much religious music do you like? You probably like so much. And if you like any classical music, how much of it was curated as religious music? So much of it, but that's culture, and that's it's easy to look at other people's culture and go, that's culture, and I can see difference, and I'm not gonna worry about it. But when it's your own culture and it's wounded you, that's where it's hard to grasp it. And I'd be like, Yeah, of course there's tons of shitty Christian music, but there's also so much amazing music that has so much Christian influence and that wrestle theologically and wrestle philosophically that are that are incredible. And and so I it's not a war of is it Christian or religious? It's a thing of like, is it good music? And usually it's not, because it becomes propaganda. If you're gonna say art, why now this is the this doesn't mean that it's good as in you like it. I mean it's it's art that stood the path, like the time, and people still are drawn to something of it. So why does the Mona Lisa still draw all these people to it? You could just say the history of it, you could say that it's not finished, you could say she's happy, you could say she's sad, you could say so many different things. There's interpretation involved. And the times that you can connect and interpret things and have a take that doesn't have to be the absolute truth, that's where it's play, and that's where you're involved in it. If it's propaganda, there's only one way to interpret it. And most Christian art is not Christian art, it's Christian propaganda. So you say a lyric that, like, our God is the greatest. Our God, right? And it's something that you can kind of like. Yeah, you just kind of go like, okay, right. But there is something about like even when you're like meditation and things where like you can say things over and over, like you can have music that does that. That's amazing. Like, so it's not just about even the form. I think it's more about how are you approaching it. Does it bring you to a place of awe and wonder and beauty, or to a place of like when you're listening to it, like it is actually connecting to you something bigger and deeper? And that is the act of spirituality, connecting to something bigger and deeper, which is you playing with your kids, which is you, whatever kind of thing that you want to say, which is what draw us into like, oh, I you might not be into sports at all. I think sports are totally an act of art. They're not an act of, and you go, well, how is that? It it it's a it's a it's a sandbox where we're gonna play. We're gonna say, here are the rules. And the hard thing is we have aggression, we have certain narratives and stories where it's like, if I don't play right now, me and you are gonna have some beef.

Kyle 33:30

Yeah, yeah.

David 33:31

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna set up a place where we can have beef, but at the end of the beef, we're gonna have a hey, good game.

Kyle 33:38

Yeah.

David 33:38

And there's I like this a lot.

Kyle 33:40

This reminds me of something Stanley Howard said about baseball. It's like it gives like it gives boys who would be otherwise prone to violence a way to work out this uh this thing in a nonviolent way.

David 33:50

Which is also the mythos of Christianity.

Kyle 33:53

Yeah.

David 33:54

Like that's where you'd be like, yeah, we are violent creatures who are trying to become nonviolent. So the more human thing is to look at the is instead of just going, hey, this person is not as smart, sexy, big, beautiful, they still have meaning. They still have value. And there's something about that that is like different than the other animal culture for us. That's what I mean to be human is like to look at something and not just go, it's a dog eat dog world.

Kyle 34:24

Yeah. Well, David, I I uh I appreciate that. That's gonna stick with me what you said about the there. I'm gonna, this is my paraphrase of what you said about the music thing, is um what sort of distinguishes the good from the bad, which is kind of what I was um getting at in my question, is not so much the messaging of it or even necessarily the style of it uh or the form of it, it's the space it creates for possible interpretations. And good stuff can bear multiple interpretations, whereas the propagandistic stuff, the stuff that I immediately want to turn the dial on, cannot. I think I think that's intriguing to me, and I'm gonna think more about it. So I I appreciate that. That's the it's the first, like uh maybe real insight I've heard about that since I've been wondering about it for a long time. So so I like

Midlife Questions And Anxiety Truths

Kyle 35:09

it.

Randy 35:09

So let's stay in the music and arts um world, but let me get a little particular. Your most recent album has been living in my head really wonderfully and richly. And the whole the whole record sounds like someone who is in my stage of life, which is I'm about to be 48. My oldest of four graduated high school last year. She moved away, kind of like really triggered a really beautiful, emotional, kind of coming of age journey for me personally, is really wonderful. But you asked some questions in the song that I just want to hear about where this song came from and just where you are, how you process midlife. And in this, you say, What if I already lived the best days of my life? You're asking some questions that all of us ask but are really kind of scared to ask. What if I already lived the best days of my life? Would it change the way I feel? What if the pain inside won't be satisfied?

David 36:08

What if I already live the best days of my life? Would it change the way I feel? What if the pain inside won't be satisfied? Be still being hard.

Randy 36:33

And then you say, what if I already wrote the best song of my life? Should I still try to create? What if the wonder and the dread always collide?

David 36:42

What if I already wrote the best song of my life? Should I still try to create What if the wonder and the dread always collide? I want to learn to just let it be.

Randy 37:01

Listen to this song over and over again and just letting those questions sit and be and all the goodness. Um, tell me where where do these themes come from? Is this I'm I'm like familiar with the brilliance, but not super familiar. So was this a was this a different uh turn creatively and poetically? And just tell us about the song. I'd love to hear it.

David 37:25

Yeah, so thank you for that. That was very kind of you. Um most of our music was around creating art and empathy for others, and it I think that it's very easy to as a parent and as just a dad, you living into an archaeotype of like you're trying to be certain things, and then you feel like you don't live up to that archaeotype, and you you you know get down on yourself, and it's hard. There's there's an idea of it's hard to love others if you don't love yourself as well. Um and so a lot of the art I was creating was always for others. And I during the pandemic started experiencing some uh like health issues that I had, you know, in your 30s, you start your body starts dealing with things in a different way with stress, and so I had a series of different medical events, including having to get like my gallbladder removed. I got a really bad uh case of COVID right in the beginning where I was like it was like a couple weeks where I was knocked out and totally away from my family. It just was um I started having these anxiety attacks. And I remember thinking um I I had in my senior year of high school three different friends whose dads committed suicide in my senior year. And I remember thinking like then just like that, I would never do that to my family. Right. And so I am now fast forward, I'm in New York, I have four children, I'm having these anxiety attacks, and I'm having these thoughts creep in. That's like a bus would be going by and be like, I should step in front of the bus, that would be better for my family. And it scared the hell out of me because it was like, Why? I like I I don't want to have those intrusive thoughts, I will not ever do that to my kids. But even though that's my intention, that I will not ever do that to my kids, and I'm not in a place where I'm in any danger of self-harm, I'm still having like, what do you do with intrusive thoughts? Um and I I told some friends, and I my wife was like, I really want you to talk to a uh, you know, a doctor about this. So I did, and they put me on some medication, and like, dude, I just I hate being on the medication because I feel like I'm more short-tempered on it. I feel like uh there are different like little side effects that I don't love. Um, but did therapy? The other thing about like one of the stressful things about therapy is like where we live in New York. Um, like it's just so expensive. And I can be making the most money I've ever made in my life in New York, and yet be the poorest I've ever been in my life. And when you start to get around 40, you start just feeling like a loser with that, where you're like, We're we're doing all that we can. I'm working multiple jobs, I'm doing multiple things, and just it just feels like uh overwhelming of like, we're not doing enough, we're not doing enough, we're not doing enough, I'm doing all we can, and so um I started um through that process writing some songs as kind of a way of therapy, and I would share those songs with Kate, my wife, and John, my best friend who I grew up with in Wisconsin, the other guy in my band, as just like a way of like, here's really where I'm at. And so for most of those songs that are on the album, they were songs that would be birthed out of I gave myself enough time to slow down, and usually would write them in like the most beautiful places that I've like been. So like one of them is like written while on well, a few of them are written on vacation with my kids at a lake house, and like it's beautiful, and my kids are having fun, and like while they're having fun, I'm like waking up in the morning and like, oh my gosh, I'm feeling this, you know, I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'm feeling this stuff, and so what's weird is like they would come out when I would slow down and give myself enough time to like express what was really going on. And so all will be happy. I remember I wrote that um I wrote that in the morning uh at my parents' lake house in the Lake of the Ozarks while my kids were asleep. We we stayed up super late that night before playing Fortnite, and just it was so fun. And then I woke up and feeling like all the different overwhelming feelings, and I had I told you this a little bit earlier. One of the like mantras that I use uh for my own spirituality is learning to be, learning to just be to be okay and wherever I'm at, just be. Some of the different like uh therapy that I had gone through to kind of deal with anxiety. One of the big themes was I can feel one of those big uh waves of anxiety, and like you are not the wave. There could be a 50-foot wave, you're not the wave, you're the ocean. A hundred feet deep on the ocean floor, that wave is nothing. There's calm. Now, there might be a lot of sea creatures down there, there might be a lot of shadow work you gotta do, but essentially there is also like stillness. Yeah, and I need to learn to find a place to get to that place of stillness, and so all will be happy is actually kind of a a take on a Buddhist idea of like learning how to be like happy in the face of your suffering, in the face of pain. In the face of those things. And it also has deep roots within the Christian tradition of like Paul talking about his joy in the midst of struggle, in the midst of that pain. And so knowing that my kids' happiness, knowing that my own happiness, my things that like the world's happiness, even though that sounds crazy because at the time it's it feels like the world is going to shit. Like all will be happy. There is just something about that. And so sharing all of my existential dread and those waves, and then getting to this place of the choruses of, but all will be happy. And then you get to the bridge. Um, and it goes to this place of like, I'm trying my best.

Randy 44:46

Yeah.

David 44:46

Do I need my best to be here now? Like, do I to be here with my kids right now? Do I need to be my best? Or do I just need to be here now? I'm trying my best. Do I need my best to be here now? And it was just that theme of like, just be here, man. Just enjoy this. And it moves into it later on in the song. You start hearing these voices of all these different people I asked uh in my life. Hey, just send me a voice note of you saying, All will be happy. So I got like a hundred different friends and family members just going, all will be happy. And then at the end of it, it gets to this place of a um, there's a response, and for the record, one of the themes was I'm gonna share a letter to you. And then the conversation back was John um being able to share back to me his response. And sometimes there's a there's a song that he sings called Don't Hurt Yourself. That's my favorite brilliant song of all time by far.

Randy 46:22

Really?

David 46:22

Yeah, but then every song on that, there's usually a a musical ending, and I'm letting John just respond. And it would be John comes from a jazz world, so it was all improv. And then from that improv, I then would build. So it'd be like we played the song, John responds, and then from that I would then kind of orchestrate around his response. And so every song in the album has a response, a communal response to that pain.

Randy 46:53

As

Sports As Healing Within Boundaries

Randy 46:54

Kyle was uh hinting, we could uh we could just take one of these these questions or topics and just dig down for an hour and a half. But I do because I'm a sports fanatic as well, I do want to get you on sports just because you you hinted at it a little little bit, David. But it's been a big time for sports in your city in New York. Um, as we were trying to schedule this conversation, uh, we wanted to do it tomorrow night, but you're like, sorry, I'm going to the World Cup. And I'm like, oh, you bastard. Um and the Knicks just won the championship. Um, the Packers are forever the greatest team in the world.

Kyle 47:29

Yes.

Randy 47:29

Um, but I'm gonna read this thing for our listeners that you texted me in some thoughts because I asked you what you're thinking about, and here's something you were thinking about. So let me just read this, and then I just want to hear you elaborate a little bit. Power and domination carry deep cultural shame today. It feels evil to control someone's agency or take it away. Yet when we deny the healthy expression of excellence, aggression, or even violence in play, that energy does not disappear. It turns inward. It becomes a quiet rage that eventually leaks out and harms others. Emotions like anger, frustration, grief, need channels for release. The question becomes: how do we let out that energy within boundaries and within community? And this is where sports reveal their spiritual power. You say they become a form of communal anger, violence, and healing, a shared exorcism of pain through structured play. In competition, the quote-unquote enemy can paradoxically become a friend through mutual respect and sportsmanship. The play itself becomes sacred. For the masculine heart, sports often serve as the most accessible spiritual expression of this kind of play. Within the boundaries of the game, you enter a battle that heals you. Now, most of us don't watch a Knicks game or a Bucks game or a Packers game and think such thoughts. And most people judge sports and who hate sports bowl and love to make fun of it because they think it's just a bunch of crude, you know. I don't want to, I don't want, I don't want to think for those folks. But tell us your thoughts behind the beauty and the the stories that are interwoven into sports and the worlds that we kind of inhabit and give ourselves to and and lose ourselves to in many ways.

David 49:19

So one, I think sports the thing that you said, the important thing is narrative and story. And what story can like we're story creatures, it brings meaning. Um and for everyone that is that enjoys art, one of the things that we enjoy about um art is we enjoy a good story, but we also really enjoy when someone masters a craft. And we're like, look at how hard this, like they've put in their 10,000 hours, if you would, whatever they've done, they've done something that brought beauty that you're like, that is such hard work. There's something to that, and we we can understand that very easily with music because we see when someone does something that is so hard, and it's like, man, they put in so much time and effort to create beauty. We can see that with writing, with with with the same thing where you like you read a novel or something, and you're like, This is this is hard to do. One of the fun things about sports is like because we grow up playing it, we think, well, I could do that on one end, right? But there's like there's something to that that's kind of fun. But um there is a there is a craftsmanship side of the art that is undeniable and crazy when you start talking about the amount of hard work and effort that's put into it. Um, now in art, I would say that there is kind of two sides of the coin to art for a lot of times when you look at uh amazing artists, you have craftspeople who put in the 10,000 hours and they're like when you critique their work, it's very hard for them because you're critiquing their hard work. So they're shyer about putting out their work. And then you have people who are taste makers who just they woke up from a dream and they have like this supernova of inspiration and they put out something and you're like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. That's amazing. Now, the the shadow of that is if they run out of inspiration, they're gone. And a lot of times they're actually not that good at their craft. Yeah. So they might not be the best guitar player or the best uh singer or the best, whatever you want to say. They're they're they're just like a supernova of talent. Now, when you when you can see as an artist, if I come from a craftsperson background, I need to develop the other side of the coin. I need to get involved with tastemakers, I need to learn good taste, I need to get more inspiration, I need to take more risks, you start to see growth. And on the other side of the coin, if you have someone that's just super such a supernova of like inspirational talent, but they don't have a lot of education in it, or they don't have a lot of uh like hours in whatever craft that they have, yeah, do that. And when you get a supernova of talent, is when those things can meld together, right? And you you see that. So on the same side of sports, you can say, Well, well, they play basketball because they're seven foot, whatever, right? They're just naturally this this talent, or you see the person that has put in hours and hours and hours of work. Either way, it's cool. But when you can start to meld with like real amazing sports, is like when you meld the two stories together. But then what's really cool is especially with like with sports, is the meta-narrative of you know, if I see a great play, I love to go like see a good book ending, uh, read a good book, a good movie. There's an ending to it that was written, and I'm experiencing something that is like it's a closed thing, it's not happening in real time. I'm not experiencing the writer write it in real time. The amazing thing about sports and art is that it's we're experiencing it in real time. Uh let's just take movies because I love movies, yeah, and I love going to a movie where it's like a shared experience of going to a movie. You know, movies are are meaningless, it's entertainment. You're like, oh, well, what is entertainment? Well, it's nice in the moment, but what's also fun is like the shared entertainment of like I'm able to escape, I'm able to have this thing, and then also like have my imagination opened up to where like of different possibilities and different forms of creation and different things, and there's there's something about we need we need to have places where when we get stuck as a community, our imaginations can be broken into new possibilities. And I love that it's like, oh, you know, it's like the Knicks are always the loser. The Knicks are the same, and you're like, no, you break that. It's the same thing with like um whatever, and it doesn't, it can be anything, but to have something that goes, hey, in and of itself, it's meaningless, but when we all share this together, there's some meaning it, there's some shared experience and love, and also so much of our shared experience is usually sad that when you can get that goodness, it's like, dude, it's so sweet, it's so good. It's like, oh my gosh. So I there's just there's I I feel like with sports, and I mean, I this is like James K. Smith would, you know, have a field day with this, but it'd be like there's also just something so uh humanly liturgical about it that we need just for like psychologically that I'm not saying that we it it should replace or do anything like that, but it is just something that um I do I do find that like, yeah, that there's a part of it that like can really become beautiful and sacred, just like anything, it's meaningless of it itself, and there's shadow to it, and it can be abused and all those things. Um, but there's also so much beauty there that's what I like.

Randy 55:25

Absolutely.

New Records And Where To Listen

Randy 55:26

Uh David Gunger, we have loved this conversation. I I appreciate the way you see the world so much, and the way you share that perspective makes the world better. Um, what are you working on right now? Are you moving towards another record? I don't know how that happened.

David 55:41

So I always um I'm releasing two Good Shepherd albums this summer.

Kyle 55:45

Okay.

David 55:46

Now, one is a uh a collection of songs that we do for our digital church at Good Shepherd, and it's around um joyful music, like soul music. So um it comes out at the end of June, and then I'm releasing kind of an Americana collection of songs um that comes out the very first week of September. And then for Brilliance, we are uh playing a couple festivals this going to the UK this summer and then going to uh Australia, and I'm working on I have an album that I don't know if it's gonna be Brilliance, I don't know if it's gonna be a new project. It's a set of kind of spiritual church songs. I'll share it with you. Um they're not really church songs, they are. I wrote them for my community, but it's hard because uh Brilliance has been doing different music, so I don't know what to release it under. So I might just give it a different name. I don't know. That's almost done, and then I have a Brilliance Christmas album that I've been working on since last year. That um, so yeah, I'm always I'm always working on stuff.

Randy 56:51

Yep, yep. Just for listeners who want to find your music that isn't the Brilliance, is it just David Gunger on Spotify or where you can check out Good Shepherd Music Collective.

David 57:00

You can also go to uh digitalchurch.nyc, and that's our church that does uh online digital church, and we have a lot of music that we share for that digital church, and then you can find that music streaming online wherever you stream music for Good Shepherd Music Collective. The band is the brilliance.

Randy 57:18

David Gunger of The Brilliance, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

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Randy 57:28

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Kyle 57:44

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Randy 57:52

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Kyle 58:00

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Randy 58:08

See you next time.

Kyle 58:09

Cheers.