Songs in the key of change
A musician and Rotary Peace Fellow wants us to listen more closely to the stories we’re telling
David LaMotte understands the power of a good story. Need proof? Look no further than the opening chapter of his book, You Are Changing the World: Whether You Like It or Not. There you will find the gripping account of a sudden illness that, in 2001, seemed like a stroke and left the 32-year-old LaMotte incapable of speaking and feeling sensation in his extremities. The things taken from him, as he explains in the book, were his words and his hands, a catastrophic loss for a man who made his living, and found spiritual sustenance, as a guitarist, singer, and songwriter.
In 2009, David LaMotte stepped away from a successful career as a musician, singer, and songwriter to accept a Rotary Peace Fellowship at Australia’s University of Queensland.
Image credit: Juan Diego Reyes
Spoiler alert: LaMotte survived the ordeal, though that should be evident given that, 23 years later, he’s still around to discuss what happened. “As a professional musician, it’s easy to get self-absorbed,” the Rotary Peace Fellow says today. “What happened to me in 2001 made me reevaluate where I was putting my energy. I resolved to turn my focus outward.”
But if LaMotte understands the power of a good story, he also recognizes the importance of closely examining the stories we tell, what we hope to accomplish with them, and the truths they contain or perhaps, unintentionally, conceal. To ensure that people make good decisions, he says, it’s important to be cognizant of the stories we’re telling and the stories we’re hearing.
David LaMotte
- Rotary Peace Fellow, University of Queensland, Australia, 2009-10
- You Are Changing the World: Whether You Like It or Not, 2023 (2nd edition)
- “Why Heroes Don’t Change the World,” TEDx Talk, 2024
Divergent passions
But before delving into all that, here’s a quick look at LaMotte’s own story. The youngest of four children, he grew up in Sarasota, Florida. “We lived in the manse across the street from the church where my father was the Presbyterian minister. I was introduced to lots of different kinds of people at dinner.” Those meals, he says, imbued him with a “desire for connection across the lines that divide us.”
LaMotte also grew up listening to the music his older siblings liked, especially the singer-songwriters Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Carole King. He began playing guitar in his teens, confining his playing to his bedroom. Finally, in college at James Madison University in Virginia, he began appearing at open mic nights. “I moved from performing covers to playing songs that I had made up,” he recalls. “It meant a lot to me that people were touched by my songs.”
He graduated from college with two deep but divergent passions: music and mediation, an effective method of conflict resolution. Torn between the two, LaMotte gave himself two years to make it as a musician, which, against all odds (to hear him tell it), he succeeded in doing. Today he has 13 albums to his credit and has performed more than 3,500 concerts around the world, some with the trio Abraham Jam, a musical collaboration between a Jew (Billy Jonas), a Muslim (Dawud Wharnsby), and a Christian (LaMotte). Today he identifies as a “Quakertyrian.” “I’m a passionate amateur theologian, and my spirituality is pretty broad,” he says. “I have a foot planted in both religious traditions”: the Presbyterian teachings of his youth and the Quaker precepts that have informed his adulthood.
And then, having succeeded as a musician, LaMotte set his career aside to study at Australia’s University of Queensland as a Rotary Peace Fellow. Accompanied by his wife, Deanna LaMotte, and their infant son, Mason, he spent a year and a half earning a master’s in international studies with a focus on peace and conflict resolution. “I was keenly aware of the privilege that the fellowship was,” says LaMotte, who praises the Rotary members of District 7670 (North Carolina) for making his fellowship possible and the members of his Queensland cohort for enriching the experience. “They were all extraordinary people, in midcareer and with a track record. They already had a lot to contribute, and I learned much from them.”
Puncturing the hero myth
Today, LaMotte continues to work with Senderos Guatemala (which translates to Guatemala Pathways), the arts, education, and mentoring program that he and Deanna founded after honeymooning in Guatemala. He also devotes time to public speaking engagements, including a recent TEDx Talk in Asheville, North Carolina (near his home in Black Mountain), that has accumulated more than 50,000 views online.
In his recent TEDx Talk, David LaMotte contends that movements, not individual heroes acting on their own, solve large-scale challenges.
Courtesy of David LaMotte
Called “Why Heroes Don’t Change the World,” the 18-minute speech, in addition to confirming LaMotte’s mesmerizing storytelling skills, allows him to challenge a predominant storyline that he fears undercuts our ability to accomplish effective change. (LaMotte considers the same topic in his book, which has been used in some college courses.) Too often, he says, we rely on the hero narrative, where “somebody really special” comes forward to “do something dramatic in a moment of crisis and then the problem is fixed.” Not only does that type of narrative absolve the rest of us from having to do anything other than wait, watch, and applaud, it doesn’t accurately reflect the way things really work. “I have yet to find one single example of this actually happening in the whole history of the world, not one where some extraordinary person ... effectively addressed a large-scale problem by themselves,” he says. “It has simply never happened.”
Returning to the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, nearly 70 years ago, LaMotte recounts lesser-known details about the network of support behind the boycott, unfolding a more complex tale that relies on what he calls the movement narrative. The upshot is that the boycott succeeded because of ongoing efforts by a group of well-prepared and well-organized people. “They did not wait until the fire broke out to build the fire station,” he says, speaking metaphorically. “They had been doing the work for years. They were ready to go.”
LaMotte finishes by offering some words of wisdom and posing a question. “The truth is it’s not naive to think you can change the world,” he says. “It’s naive to think you can possibly be in the world and not change it. Everything you do changes the world whether you like it or not. We need you. So which changes will you make?”
This story originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.