Born in 2004 out of the thriving music scene in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, The Daredevil Christopher Wright unites brothers Jon and Jason Sunde with the percussion and vocals of friend Jesse Edgington. Their first full length album In Deference to a Broken Back, an expansive and collaborative effort, was released through Amble Down Records. Their sophomore album, 2012‘s The Nature of Things, is a result of asking what can be created by three men at ease with their instruments; storytellers at heart.
Where In Deference enlisted the help of a large group of friends and fellow musicians, The Nature of Things scales back. Recorded by Patrick Stolley, founding engineer for the celebrated music blog Daytrotter, the album reflects simplicity. “With The Nature Of Things, we made an intentional effort to focus and tighten the writing. To try to confine the arrangements to elements that the three of us could perform,” says Jon. Their classical voice training and pleasing, sometimes unexpected harmonies are evident throughout the album in pieces such as “Church” and “Ames, IA,” where we we are allowed to glimpse, in eavesdropped conversations—a couple divorcing, a meth addict begging for freedom and church bells tolling for no other reason but that the dead rest below. Like the Wanderer who returns home only to find what’s already “written on the spine of every holy lowly man, woman, creature, and child,” the experience of seeing something in its stripped away form is “a love letter in kind” (“Andrew the Wanderer”), a gift to those who “keep hobbled hopes under lock and key” (“We Fold Inside of Us”). “The world is full of many things to be loved and despised, but also simply seen,” says Jason. “What is the nature of things? You’re looking at it, however it may be, right now.”
