In 2003 Tony Barilla, the music director for this production, approached Daniel to see if he was interested in creating a rock opera. Daniel said he’d been waiting more than 20 years for someone to ask him that. For about a year and a half they met weekly at Daniel’s house in Waller to flesh out ideas. As I had been a longtime fan of Daniel’s and had worked on plays with Tony for years, I followed their progress with interest. As it turned out, things were not progressing as well as they’d both hoped and Tony brought me in to talk with Daniel. The meeting went well but as the deadline approached Daniel got sick and was unable to write the show, so I was brought in again to pick up where he’d left off. In listening again to Daniel’s songs I realized that he had already written the show. In fact, he had written it many times over. All that was left to me was to put it in order. The story, which appears in one way or another in more than 100 of Daniel’s songs, is this: A boy loves a girl but she already has a boyfriend – an undertaker. She marries the undertaker and has his baby and goes to work in the funeral home with him, but the boy never gets over her. And he realizes that the only way he can ever be with her again is to die, as she will be the one to prepare his body for burial. So he does die and she does prepare his body.  The story of the boy, the girl and the undertaker is largely a true one. Daniel did love a girl named Laurie and she did marry an undertaker.

But this isn’t the story of Daniel and Laurie. That story played out in private many years ago in West Virginia. This is the story of Joe the Boxer, a character that often appears in Daniel’s songs and artwork as an alter ego of sorts. It’s not the story of what happened; it’s the story of how it felt. And it’s a story that’s about all of us because it’s about love and loneliness and happiness and sadness and the struggle to hope. And every one of us knows those feelings.

Speeding Motorcycle is, perhaps, not especially easy to follow as a narrative; neither are Daniel’s songs or drawings. The ‘logic’ of it, in as much as there is any, is akin to the logic of dreams. The events are not chronological – they exist at all times, as memories of lost love always seem to do. Joe is played by three different actors, though at some point almost everyone in the show plays him. This decision was made to underline the universality of the character – he is not an otherly being to be observed and commented upon; he is all of us. And we are him. And his pain and loneliness is such that sometimes he has only himself to talk to and only his own thoughts and inventions to comfort him.