Coffee and Honey: An Interview With Danny Piper
By Isaac Bloomstone
"Coffee is my weakness. My kryptonite. I love it, but my system is very sensitive to caffeine, and one day it'll probably kill me. My heart will just give out. So don't be surprised when you hear it one day: Breaking News, Danny Piper Drops Dead. Just remember I told you beforehand. Will you remember?"
Danny asks me as he fills my cup from the french-press. He sets it down, then drizzles honey into my coffee with a wooden dipper that looks like a beehive. Honey in coffee, I ask? "Honey in almost everything," he responds without a thought. "The good stuff though, none of that store-bought nonsense. Honey and coffee, I basically live on them. If one day they suddenly disappeared from my life, I wouldn't know what to do with myself. I'd have to rethink who I am."
Is that so, I ask? And who is Danny Piper?
With the death of his father and the dawn of a new millenium, Danny Piper joined a cult. He was 20 years old.
"We quit our jobs, sold everything and renounced ourselves," he explains, "until finally we decided to go off and live in the wilderness."
The wilderness? Danny watches my brow rise, doubtful. I decide to humor him: For what, may I ask? What did you hope to find?
"Hard to say," he responds. "Enlightenment, maybe. Or self-destruction. Or maybe God, revelation. For sure, we at least got a little of each."
Immediately my mind imagines a bunch of bare-footed fools chanting in the trees. Danny laughs, then bites back, "No, not quite like that. Sure, there were a lot of us, but we hardly ever saw each other. We each lived isolated, as if in our own solitary little desert."
I listen straight-faced, then can't help but to smirk. But Danny, I say, none of this makes any sense to me. He laughs and looks off out the window. "Yeah," he says, "I imagine it doesn't..." His words trail off as if in a pause, but he settles staring back at me in silence.
Then how does one end up doing what you now do, I ask him? Dance music? I'd have expected solemn chants, drones that hypnotize and attempt to elevate. "For sure," he says, "I've done a bit of that. I don't know. I guess you might say that my revelation was different..."
Again he suddenly pauses, then stops. Not this time, I say to myself, and I prod him on with a wave of my hand. He smiles and takes a breath. "Well," he begins, "I guess it has a lot to do with what became of us. We were out there for fifteen years, and even though we were solitary, we still communicated, we still tried to figure things out. And at the end of all that searching, I guess you could say we came to a conclusion."
Which was?
"The world is going to end."
I hear his words, and as he delivers them I can feel his eyes pursuing mine, watching for the slightest inclination to laugh and walk out. I smother the urge. His eyes relax, and he gives me a friendly smile. "The only question at that point," he continues, "is what the hell to do with yourself in the meantime. Right?"
I suppose that's true, I say.
"Well, I thought and thought on it," he continues, "we all did. Some of them resigned themselves, and died of despair. Some of them dove head-long into pleasure, and some sought positions of power. Others sought spiritual knowledge, trying to find a way to free themselves, while others sought simply to understand why it all was so. And me..."
Again that wretched pause. I get the distinct impression that he is enjoying my anticipation. But I'm intrigued, and I ask with genuine interest, And you?
"Don't ask me to explain it," he said, his voice tinged with annoyance, or maybe cynicism, "but in those dark moments, it seemed to me that there was nothing at all in the whole world worth doing—except dancing."
Silence lingers between us. I let it linger.
A very strange story, I say at length, though it makes sense with an album title like Daddy Was A Dancer. Tell me, why did you settle on that?
Danny stares into his cup. It's as if it is burdensome for him to change subjects. "There are three reasons," he begins, "it is true to me in three ways. The first concerns my own children—that their daddy is, indeed, a dancer. I love the idea of making choreographed dance videos for my music. It's pie-in-the-sky at this point, but I'm not too old to dream.
"The second way it is true is that my own father was, at one time, a dancer. During the seventies, he taught disco at a dance school. By the time I came around his dancing days were well behind him, but he'd talk about them once in awhile. For some reason, in his early 20s, he developed a deep need to dance. He signed up for a class, but was so nervous when he got there that he had to sit in his car and drink a beer. It worked out for him though: my mother tells me he was the one on the dance floor that everyone revolved around.
"And the last reason I think you'll find strange, but I'll tell you anyway. Somewhere along the road of life I developed the idea that whatever created this world we inhabit, is itself a dancer. All of nature, all of physics, is nothing but one big dance. The world is a dance-floor, and how well we move in it is a big part of it. Living is itself a form of dancing. God is a dancer."
Daddy was a dancer, I say. I see.
As we part and shake hands I laugh and ask, What are the chances any of that was true, Danny? I can't help but feel like I've been swindled, or stung by a stingray.
He laughs, then playfully raises his eyes in thought before looking back at me squarely, saying, "Not good."
As I walk down the driveway to my car I hear the door close behind me. But hardly a moment passes before I hear it open again, and he calls out to me from the doorway, "Isaac!”
Yes, Danny?
“Even if it is not—it is at least trying to be!"
Isaac Bloomstone for Bloomstone Radio.