Despite the upbeat jangle of Daveband’s “Might Be Alright,” fusing the infinitely effervescent influences of Shotgun Jimmie, Ashtray Rock-era Joel Plaskett, and Jonathan Richman, songwriter David Archibald explains that the song is really the first cautiously optimistic moment at the tail end of a long period of depression.
In the Fall of 2016, Archibald was experiencing a few setbacks. At the age of 28, he had lost his job, a few of his good friends had moved away, he wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do for a living and, to top it off, the future of Daveband was unclear. It was enough to throw him into a debilitation depression.
“A number of things in my life weren’t going well,” says Archibald. “It all piled up and beat me down and I spent a few months sleeping the days away on the couch. It was rough.
“My partner helped me through the whole thing and I eventually made it to the other side. I wasn’t sleeping through the night and I remember sitting on my back deck alone in the middle of the night. I was looking up at the stars and had a strong feeling of peace and calm come over me.
“I won’t say it was like flipping a switch, but it felt like stepping out of a fog and things seemed to pivot and slowly improve from that point forward. So the song is about that period and that moment.”
Archibald says that going through that period led to big changes for him in the Summer of 2017. He had a new job teaching kids how to play frisbee, with plenty of free time to invest in getting Daveband rocking again. For Archibald, it seemed like things were finally clicking again.
“We played the song for a while without the second verse,” says Archibald. “I hadn’t written it yet, but I found a real catharsis in talking openly about my struggles and actually using the word ‘depression’ as opposed to skirting around it.”
The act of addressing his depression, and the ridiculous idea that holding onto that pain would benefit anyone, became the foundation for the song’s second version:
“In the past/Nobody asked/So I never told/Now that story’s getting old/Cause now/I see how/Not being bold/Is like holding a white coal.”
“If you hold onto white-hot coal,” explains Archibald, “you’re only hurting yourself, which is a riff on a fake-Buddha quote about holding onto anger.”
Putting that pain into the new context of a song, particularly a song so deceptively positive, it’s possible to believe that everything might just be alright.
“Might Be Alright” is the first single off of Daveband’s debut album, This Was Your Dad At 28, recorded and mixed by Thomas Stajcer at Plaskett’s New Scotland Yard studio in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The album is set to be released on September 22, 2020.