LIVE: Daniel Caesar — Son of Spergy Tour

By Nick Campos | NJC Creative

The Experience

I had VIP early pit access for Daniel Caesar, which included getting to watch the band rehearse before the show. Even during rehearsal, I was amazed by the musicians and vocalists surrounding him. The harmonies, instrumentation, and voices worked together in a way that made everything feel incredibly full without needing to be overwhelming. And then Daniel came out. Daniel Caesar has the pen game of an angel.

There's really no other way I know how to describe it.

What his performance lacked in elaborate visuals or massive production, it made up for through the music itself. There didn't need to be something happening every second. There didn't need to be choreography or some enormous spectacle distracting you from the songs. The music was enough. I cried. There were moments where the harmonies felt like they were surrounding me rather than simply coming from the stage. Hearing songs I already loved performed with a full band and vocalists gave them a weight I hadn't completely understood through headphones. But Touching God was different.

That song touched my heart in a way I wasn't expecting. For a few minutes, surrounded by the music, the voices, the crowd, and thousands of people experiencing the same thing, I felt connected to Daniel. I felt connected to the people around me. And somehow, I felt connected tosomething bigger than all of us.

Something divine.

Son of Spergy felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But what I didn't expect was how much the album would make me question what I actually believe.

From My Experience

Son of Spergy is a complicated album for me. I've struggled with religion for most, if not all, of my life. My relationship with God has never been simple enough for me to confidently say that I believe, but it's also never been simple enough for me to confidently say that I don't. And Touching God makes me cry almost every time I hear it. Because if there is a God out there, I don't want Him to think He failed me. I don't want Him to look at my uncertainty as rejection. I don't want to be seen as bad because I struggle to believe. And I don't want to hate myself for questioning something I've spent so much of my life being told I should understand.

But I also can't force myself to believe in something that feels so complicated to me. I have questions.

How could God exist and let someone like me live?

How could He create me knowing I would spend so much of my life questioning Him? How could He watch everything that happens in this world and allow it to continue? The suffering. The loss. The cruelty. The people who beg Him for help and seemingly never receive an answer. Is this really all God's plan? And if it is, what am I supposed to do with the parts of that plan I can't understand?

Those questions don't necessarily make me reject God. Sometimes I think they mean I'm still looking for Him. That's what Touching God brings out of me. There's a difference between not believing because you don't care and struggling to believe because you desperately wish you understood enough to. I think that's where I am. I don't want to pretend I have faith that I don't have. But I also don't want my uncertainty to mean that I've closed the door on something greater than myself.

Maybe that's why the song makes me so emotional. Because underneath all of my questions, there's still this small part of me wondering:

If You are there, do You understand why I have such a hard time believing in You?

Do You understand that my questions aren't hatred? Do You understand that sometimes I want You to be real? And if I spend my entire life questioning You, does that make me bad? Or does the fact that I'm still asking mean some part of me has been searching for You this entire time? I don't know. And for once, I don't think I need to pretend that I do. That's what's so beautiful about Son of Spergy.

It makes me question myself.

It doesn't give me a clean answer about God, love, or faith. Instead, it takes those ideas and explores them from completely different directions. Then there are tracks like Have a Baby (With Me), Who Knows, and Emily's Song. Have a Baby (With Me) was a song I didn't completely understand the first time I heard it. Then I listened again. To me, it's about watching the space between you and someone you love become wider and wider, knowing there might not be anything left that can actually fix it.

You're losing them. There's nothing holding the relationship together anymore. There's no magical solution that's going to make everything return to what it once was. And then comes this almost desperate proposition: have a baby with me. Not because a child can fix a dying relationship, but because there's this desire to create something permanent from something you know might not be. Even if this love ends. Even if one day you get up and leave me.

Let's leave something here that proves we existed.

Something that proves there was a time when we loved each other. Something permanent enough to survive something temporary. There's something devastating about that idea to me because it asks what happens when you know love might not be enough, but you can't accept the possibility that everything you shared could simply disappear. There's no fixing what we have.

But please don't let it have been for nothing.

And maybe that's another kind of faith. Believing that something can still have meaning even if it doesn't last. Then there's Who Knows. That song hits me in an entirely different way. Because I know what it's like to yearn for someone while carrying that sickening doubt about whether any of it will actually work. You want them. You imagine the possibilities. You start picturing what being with them could look like. And then that thought creeps in.

Who knows?

Who knows if they feel the same? Who knows if I'm enough for them? Who knows if they'll stay? Who knows if this becomes something beautiful or another person I eventually have to teach myself how to live without? There's something almost cruel about uncertainty when you're someone who wants reassurance.

I want to know. I want to know if I'm wasting my time. I want to know whether I should let myself fall. I want to know whether I'm going to become another memory. I want to know whether the person I'm imagining a future with is imagining one with me. But you don't get to know any ofthat when you're falling in love.

You just have to decide whether they're worth believing in anyway.

And that's where I think Who Knows quietly connects back to Touching God for me. They're obviously about different relationships, but they leave me sitting with a similar discomfort. How do you have faith in something you cannot prove? How do I believe in God when I don't know He's there? How do I believe in another person when I don't know they'll stay? How do I surrender myself to either without knowing what waits for me on the other side?

Who knows?

And maybe that's the point. Then there's Emily's Song. That song brings me back to a weird state of mind. There was a point in my life when I lost a lot of my self-respect by putting someone else on a pedestal. I monitored their every move. Their presence became part of my routine. They were incorporated into practically every part of my day, and there wasn't a day where I didn't speak to them.

Until one day there was. And suddenly I had to relearn how to live without someone I had built so much of my life around. I had to learn how to wake up without expecting their name on my phone. How to go through my day without wondering what they were doing. How to listen to music again without immediately thinking about the memories I had attached to each song. I had to learn how to exist without waiting for them. Someone can become so deeply integrated into your life that losing them doesn't only feel like losing a person. It feels like losing pieces of your routine, your identity, and sometimes even yourself. But eventually, I realized something.

It's okay.

It's okay that it happened. It did happen. What we had was real at one point, and accepting that it ended doesn't require me to rewrite it as something that never mattered. So, thank you. You showed me parts of myself that other people didn't. You taught me what I was capable of feeling. You gave me memories that I don't need to hate simply because I can't make any more of them with you.

But you also showed me what happens when I place another person above myself. If I hadn't let go when I did, I think I would still be there. Still waiting. Still monitoring. Still making you part of every decision. Still wondering when you were going to choose me.

Still lacking myself because I was too busy having you.

And that's something I never want to return to. It was a blessing to know you. And that's an interesting word for me to use considering everything I've said about my relationship with religion. A blessing. Because if there is a God, maybe meeting you was part of His will.

Maybe you weren't placed in my life to stay forever. Maybe some people enter our lives to show us something about ourselves that we couldn't have discovered alone. And if that's true, then maybe losing you wasn't God taking something away from me. Maybe there was simply nothing left for me to learn by staying. I don't know. I still don't know if I believe everything happens for a reason. I don't know if every person we meet is part of some divine plan. I don't know if God chose for our paths to cross or if two people simply found eachother at the right time. But I know I'm grateful that they did.

It was a blessing to know you.

And I can call something a blessing without asking for it back. I can appreciate what you gave me without forgetting what knowing you eventually took from me. I can love the memories without wanting to recreate them. I can thank you for helping me become who I am without allowing you to determine who I become next. Maybe that's one of the things Son of Spergy makes me question.

Maybe faith isn't always about knowing. Maybe sometimes it's allowing yourself to believe that something meant something, even when you can't prove why it happened. You happened. You mattered. You changed me. And maybe somewhere in all of that, there was something bigger than either of us. But regardless of whether it was God, coincidence, love, or simply life, I know one thing with certainty.

I will never go back.

With all that being said, Son of Spergy touched something in my soul. A spark I think I lost a long time ago to humanity. I don't know exactly what that spark was. Faith, maybe. Hope.

The ability to believe that there's something greater than what I can see in front of me. For a moment, listening to Daniel, I felt it again. I still have questions. I still struggle to understand how God could exist alongside everything I've seen in this world. I still don't know whether everything happens according to some greater plan, or whether sometimes things simply happen and we're left to find meaning in them ourselves. I don't know if meeting the people I've loved was God's will.I don't know if losing them was too.

I don't know if the moments I've called blessings actually came from Him. And I don't know if the feeling I had standing there listening to Daniel was God, music, love, grief, or simply being human. But I felt something. And maybe, for now, that's enough. If there is a God out there, I hope He knows that my questions were never hatred.

I hope He knows that even when I couldn't believe, some part of me still wondered about Him. And if there is a God,

I pray He understands I tried.