Down in the Deep End

Today was the first really warm day of the year. Hitting 80 degrees on April 1st is not a great development, but for one brief moment, it felt perfect. After the bitter cold and snowier-than-normal winter, the feeling of driving with the window all the way down and the sun on my skin was perfect. 

The third ingredient in that recipe for a fleeting moment of happiness was, of course, rock and roll turned up loud. Today’s song of choice was an old favorite, “Wishing Well” by the great Trapper Schoepp. 

The fourth track off the album “Run, Engine, Run”, sandwiched between “Cold Deck” and “Tracks”, it is a wonderful slice of country-tinged rock. It begins with a great little repeated lick that Trapper sings over before a snare shot and then a full blast of giddy-up guitars. It flips back and forth between a head-bobbing guitar-and-drum-shot rhythm and the full guitar attack, particularly after Trapper shouts, with punk rock-esque aplomb, mid-song “1, 2, 3,4” like he’s counting off a firing squad. Throughout, it never settles and never really lets you go. Even the old guys with their arms crossed in the back of the show would be hard-pressed to not bob their heads while it was playing. 

The lyrics tell a universally relatable story about growing up and lessons learned in the process. He tells a tale of sitting in the back row at school, and knowing he wanted to perform in some capacity. Interwoven is the story of relationships gone wrong and believing things he should not have, while also failing to lie about true feelings. 

It’s got two of my favorite lyrics in his entire canon. The first comes early, in the portion about growing up. 

“Wasted my days, down in the deep end, hoping you would notice me.”

I loved it from the first time I heard it because it’s such a universal notion, especially among people who grew up shy. The idea of doing something stupid in hopes of catching the eye of a crush is something that’s deeply relatable, and also easy to spot as kind of dumb when you look back on it. I have a core memory of being on a metal playground merry-go-round during recess in elementary school, doing increasingly dumb things, trying to catch the eye of a sandy-haired beauty that I was enamored of. To the best of my knowledge, it didn’t work, but I guess I will never really know. It also speaks to increasing performative behavior, as I was growing up trying to impress people instead of just being myself. Trapper summing all of that up in 13 words is a microcosm of why I love him as a songwriter (and you should too!)

The other line I especially love is kind of a two-fer. It’s the last line of a verse and the beginning of the chorus.

“I got nervous when you said I’d forgotten the one I used to be.

I’d tell you sorry, but you know that I’m not.” 

Forgetting who we are when we’re deep into trying to be someone else, and failing completely in the act, is another thing I find deeply relatable. 

We all contain multitudes. We’re all different people depending on who is in front of us. We have a person we are with our parents that is different from who we are with our friends. Work me is a lot different from sitting-at-my-desk-writing-about-a-song me. The person folks meet at cons when I’m manning a table is not the same person I am when I’m with my wife in a park in Japan. It’s easy to forget who we really are and get lost in the different roles, but as Trapper says in the song, people can tell if they care. Somewhere in all of that is the truth, or maybe they all are and that’s what the song “Wishing Well” really feels like it’s about. 

Deep down, I think we all want to be the carefree person we imagined when we were young to some degree. There’s a line in the Kevin Costner classic Field of Dreams that I think speaks to this notion pretty well, too: “I only saw him years later when he was worn down by life.” There’s some truth to that for all of us, especially now as the world seems to get harder on a minute-to-minute basis. 

“Wishing Well” by Trapper Schoepp is an ode to looking back on our younger days with an eye towards the truth of who we are and where we come from.  It’s a perfect song for a warm spring day when the sun is sloughing the winter burden from your shoulders.