The day I finished and premiered my first feature documentary -a 74-minute exploration of "underground karaoke"- I realized that it had been exactly one year since the first shoot had taken place and here I was basking in the excitement of a full house at the very first screening. My thought was, "I should do this every year." It was May 2001 and I had just approached Daniel Smith, bandleader of the Danielson Famile, about doing a portrait of his art and clan. I gave him a rough cut of my movie and hoped it wouldn't be too, well, dark for his sensibilities. I'd seen Danielson play a few times around New York and was fascinated with the contradictions of an earnest group of country kids wearing their faith on their sleeves and playing to a room full of cynical, atheistic city-dwellers. What was the audience getting out of it? For that matter, what did the band get out of it? Was it just the commonality of the music -strange, untrained, and original- that got both sides together? My suspicion was that everyone would like to believe there's something more than the material world and even for those who find that proposition difficult, it's comforting to see others embrace the invisible like most of us embrace a strong drink on a Friday after work. Looking back, my theory may have been a bit lofty or simplistic. What I found while surveying audience members outside of shows throughout North America and Europe over a roughly four year period was that, as the French filmmaker Andre Bresson said in explaining human behavior, "everyone has their reasons."

In the end (and really, at the beginning, too) I decided to take the audience and Daniel Smith at their word. Daniel didn't know any more than the audience did why non-Christians would be drawn to someone singing about a Christian life but he was adamant about one thing: his songs were not "Christian music" in that they weren't made for a certain audience in mind (the words "Jesus" and "Christ" had never appeared separately or together anywhere in the Danielson oeuvre) and perhaps more significantly, they didn't adhere to any trends in the Christian music world. Many people I spoke with over the course of making this film pointed out that there were plenty of actual 'Christian-rock' bands that would love to be embraced by the mainstream press as Danielson has, let alone a mainstream audience. But underlying Danielson's awkward, iffy and indie success is a major predicament. Much of Danielson's audience would only ever appreciate the whole package as a curiosity, worse even: a novelty. Even if the core fans (many of them music intelligentsia) fully appreciated the music for all its vision and inventiveness, a broader audience in the secular world would be hard won. And as for the Christian music community -the people who try to only listen to artists with the "Christian" brand seal of approval- Danielson was just too weird.

This would be the central tension of my movie, coupled with the additional pressure on Daniel to make music work as a real profession even as he had to strike out on his own and a fickle audience balked. Sufjan Stevens, originally my appointed stand-in as an outsider learning more about this eccentric family, came to be almost a metaphor for the ways in which people consume music: what attracts them? What makes them uneasy? Why do some artists get relegated to the underground bin while others break through? At the same time, Sufjan is a bit of an enigma, having avoided many of the compromises artists are forced to make in developing a career such as signing to a label and relinquishing a certain amount of creative control. But the relationship between these two musicians -their mutual respect, support and loyalty- says as much or more about them as individuals than about the music industry.

Ultimately, I felt it would be unfair to provide easy answers to the myriad complex questions arising from a subject I once thought I could tackle in under a year. Attacking any artist's specific and even private beliefs is just as fraught with pitfalls as drawing comparisons with others' music or even asking them to list influences. It only serves to reduce the music being made and the circumstances in which the musician finds himself. But one thing that drew me to Danielson as an admirer in the first place, and something I never lost sight of, was the feeling that this was not a proselytizing machine with a plan to convert. This was a group of people singing their insight into what makes life good: love, compassion, family, community, and creativity. Though the mode of expression can accurately be described as praise, it lacks the judgment and banality that many of us expect from Anglo-American worship music. In fact, in my opinion, it rocks.

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