“The broad outlines of the story are by now familiar. How a certain young man from Clarksboro, NJ, one Daniel Smith, having for a time turned his back on the culture and musical milieu in which he was raised up, which is to say having (temporarily, to go off to school) turned his back on impeccable folk and gospel bona fides in the person of his father, and having left behind the aggregation of his family, a large, singing musical brood, headed out into the world to see a few things. And yet in the course of doing so this Daniel Smith realized, with the kind of suddenness that we might associate with insight or revelation, that his family was a blessing, and that he needed to sing about this family. And not only did he need to sing about his family and the faith that sustained it, he needed, again, to sing and play with his family. The year of this revelation was 1994.

Not such an unusual tale, really. It’s one that goes all the way back to St. Augustine. And yet in this case, the young man was no ordinary musician. On the one hand, in his not-really-missing years, Daniel Smith, had drunk deep of the dark fringes of indie rock and outsider art, including and not limited to the likes of Sonic Youth, Captain Beefheart, Yoko Ono, Pere Ubu, Andy Warhol, Howard Finster, et al. And on the other hand he was not kidding about the purity and complexity and seriousness of his faith. He wrote (and writes) fearlessly about spiritual experience, in a way that ought to be the envy of all these gauzy and simulated gospel artists you hear out there. This Smith was loaded down with paradoxes. He was alpha and omega, he was light and dark, he was sacred and entertaining, he was folk/gospel and he was indie/prog/punk.