What Happens if You Write an "I Want" Song About Your Enemy?

Tomorrow, here in Cardston, we’re starting something different – a weekend workshop to write a mini-musical that aims to bridge a divide. The goal is not to convince people that one side of the argument is right and the other is wrong. Rather, it’s to build a connection that allows people to step across the abyss between them and look at the problem from another perspective. I’m hoping this will inspire us to want to sit down together and look for solutions that serve us all.

I’ve written before about the Braver Angels Common Ground songwriting workshop, where participants with different views co-write a song across a divide. This is inspired by and based on that, and John Carroll, one of the Braver Angels Music co-leads has flown in from Nashville to help facilitate it. For this version, we’re adding the additional elements of a unifying story supported by two additional songs. And not just any kind of songs; two “I Want” songs.

That part’s important because the whole point of an “I Want” song is to introduce a protagonist, connect with them, and start rooting for them to get the thing they’re longing for. My hope is that writing (or being drawn in by) an “I Want” song for a character who represents someone we’ve seen as an opponent in real life, will help us to connect with them and take their concerns seriously. And that becomes the foundation for collaborating together to build a kinder, brighter world, or in other words, to build the Beloved Community.

The divide we’re addressing is a perplexing one for my town. It’s about a twice-weekly drop in for the unhoused and food-insecure that’s hosted by an event venue on Main Street. The Drop In’s goal is to nurture a spirit of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members, while offering belonging, friendship, and warm food for some of the most vulnerable among us. But this is happening in a town where vagrancy on Main Street threatens townspeople’s sense of safety and maybe even their livelihoods. The number of Main Street businesses that have failed in the last decade is sobering. So, what can we do to resolve what seem to be competing priorities? Well, nothing productive until we can talk about it in good faith.

Talking across differences can feel perilous in a town this size, where there’s pretty much no such thing as anonymity. How perilous I didn’t know until I started trying to gather perspectives for this project and saw the expressions on people’s faces when I asked them to participate. We’ve had to make a bunch of adaptations to the process, such as collecting people’s stories through an anonymous form and having actors serve as proxies for the people who’ve shared personal perspectives. I still think it’s going to be powerful. Our cast meeting today went places I could have only hoped for. So I’m feeling optimistic, if a little overwhelmed.

I want to finish by sharing something I discovered today, while listening to a review of Top 20 “I Want” songs so I can share some of them with our workshop participants. It’s “Dust and Ashes” from the electropop opera Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” It’s not the song that introduces Pierre’s character. But it’s the one that makes us fall in love with him, as it takes us on a journey out of the despair of a disconnected life into the determination to learn to live by love. I found it deeply moving. I hope it touches you too.