Sunday Music: Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Devil Town: Daniel Johnston's Anthem For Friday Night Lights

Daniel Johnston showed up in my life because Kurt Cobain wore his t-shirt and, yeah. Before social media. The ways we discovered things, you know? But then he kept coming back. The place that shook me most was in the show Friday Night Lights.

As for his music, it was all low-fi. It was all unsettling. It was also so - pure? The rumors were that he was crazy and in and out of mental hospitals (at the time, pre-internet here, remember?). It made sense. It felt and sounded like the musings of a 2001 Space Odyssey man-baby. The lyrics wouldn’t mean anything until “Oh, holy crap, wow.”

I’ve mentioned it a few times now, but my wife and I are on a re-watch binge of Friday Night Lights. Johnston’s song “Devil Town” (or, a cover version of it) shows up a handful of times throughout the series. I don’t think I realized just how exceptionally perfect it fits into small town Texas football culture metaphorically until this watching.

The song, for all of its two verses, tells a story.

A guy realizes he’s living in a devil town (eek). He realizes it after he’s already living there and acknowledges he didn’t know it before (double-eek). It’s depressing and he tells god about it. Then, he figures out that all his friends are vampires (triple-eek). To make matters worse, he didn’t know that either (quadruple-eek).

But, all is either completely lost or not lost at all with what comes next. Our singer realizes he’s a vampire too (eek, wait, oh?). He’s always been one, living in the devil town, and it - back to god he goes, because it still brings him down, to know he’s one of them.

Devils are still spiritual figures in their own right. And, who says one spiritual figure can’t call out to another? Does a bad guy have to always and only be bad? The vampires want to know. And those blood suckers are metaphors too.

Spend any time in any small town, even watching a quasi-fictitious one like Dillon, Texas on TV, and you’ll find out what their religions are. Yes, the literal religions they go to church about, but also the other ones they follow all the same church like rituals in celebrating as a community.

There are even the religions that work against our humanity. There are even the calls out to more favorable gods, or greener pastures, or, cries out for hope. And they surround the awareness that we too are just occupants of this town, just like everybody else, stuck in the church of belief structures so long as we are in that environment.

Friday Night Lights, over and over again, is a show about transformation. It’s a show that struggles with the process of saying, “Turns out I was a vampire myself,” and admitting it to a higher, more benevolent, power. Because inside of that complex mess, where we’re realizing we’re part of something we both fear and judge, there’s salvation in knowing what we are.

It doesn’t get us out of the devil town. It doesn’t get us into a heaven town or whatever the opposite is. But it reminds us where we have a place and maybe even where we belong.

The most haunting part of Daniel Johnston’s “Devil Town” is that its in a major key. It sounds forlorn. It sounds, somehow, nostalgic for something, if nothing else maybe the pre-realization period. But it’s not a sad song. It’s an admission of being a vampire too, of how it brings a person down, but that, hey, I’m here, I’m in this.

For the non music theory nerds, major keys = “happy” and minor keys= “sad". The choice to put the dark subject matter against an otherwise happy backdrop is part of the bittersweet beauty of its construction. It works extra for a show about relationships and family set against the backdrop of a sports saga.

If I play this song, I start to hear it in all of the characters too. I wonder if a writer brought it up because, it’s almost too perfect. I can see it in Coach Taylor when he realizes he’s corrupted in the recruiting process, or in Tami when she tries to fight against the boosters and embraces them. I can see it in Tyra and Tim’s entire relationship arc, or even why Lyla and Tim’s own romantic moment falls apart the way it does, sputtering it out, in and around a church before Lyla leaves town.

That’s just what great art does. It’s nuanced. It requires we ask, to paraphrase Jerry Colonna, “How am I complicit in creating the things I say I don’t want?” Nobody wants to live in a devil town. Nobody wants to be a vampire. But, once you realize you are, what’s left to do about it?

Reflect. Appeal to a more hopeful deity. And maybe, just maybe, learn to love what makes you you, and what makes this place this place.

Did you watch Friday Night Lights? Do you know this song? How do you think they go together? Oh, and what’s your favorite version of “Devil Town”? I’ll put the show version, the Bright Eyes version, and the original version below.