‘THE MUSICIAN IN ME I GUESS DIDN’T DIE’
Film about Sandy Hook guitarist who rediscovered music after son’s death debuts
NEWTOWN — The morning Daniel Barden died, the Sandy Hook first grader wanted to learn how to play the piano.
His dad, Mark Barden, a Nashville-trained guitarist, was only too happy to oblige. It was December, Mark Barden remembers, so he taught his redhead with the missing front tooth the chorus to “Jingle Bells.”
“He played it beautifully, and I said, ‘This kid really has it …he has this natural ability,’” Mark Barden remembers thinking to himself on that day 11 years ago. “He’s going to be an amazing musician.”
So begins the story of how the music died inside Mark Barden that day in December, when his son and so many others were slain in Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“I could not find comfort and healing in music. (The 2012 tragedy) not only changed everything for us as a family, but it rewired me as a person,” Barden says in a new 90-minute documentary, “A Father’s Promise,” directed by Rick Korn and produced by musician Sheryl Crow, which debuts Friday in New York City.
A concert with Barden, Crow, and headliners Peter Frampton and Kevin Bacon will be held on Thursday at Manhattan’s 850-seat NYU Skirball to benefit Sandy Hook Promise, the homegrown nonprofit founded by Barden and Nicole Hockley after the 2012 massacre of 20 first graders and six educators.
“A Father’s Promise,” which follows the ups and downs of Barden and his family, of Sandy Hook Promise and other leaders in the gun violence prevention movement, and of other musicians who’ve tried to make change, began filming in 2013 and presented a challenge for the filmmaker about when to stop filming.
“The difficult part is deciding when it’s done,” Korn said during an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media this week. “What we kept on running into is the diffi
culty that unfortunately this is an ongoing story.”
Something about 2022 felt like a moment had been reached. In the summer, Congress passed the Safer Communities Act, a gun reform package. In the fall a Connecticut jury returned a record $965 million award for Barden, Hockley, six other Sandy Hook families and an FBI agent defamed by extremist Alex Jones. And in the winter of last year, Newtown marked the 10th anniversary of the Sandy Hook tragedy with the opening of a new Sandy Hook Memorial.
“We felt we had reached that turning point,” Korn said.
The heart of the film is Barden’s story. There are clips from his beginnings in Yonkers, N.Y., with shoulder-length hair, falling asleep next to his guitar. There are images of his move to Sandy Hook in 2007 to live the good life with his wife, Jackie, and their three kids. But the the soul of the film is the music that’s always been inside Barden that he was certain had died, until he started connecting through his pain with other activists across the country who were trying to make change out of loss.
An example that the film spotlights is the 2018 meeting in Newtown of student activists from the Parkland, Fla., school shooting who rallied with survivors from Sandy Hook for four hours under a great tent at the Fairfield Hills campus. A highlight of that event was when Barden’s daughter, Natalie, then 16, took the stage with him to sing a Tim McGraw song,
“Humble and Kind.”
Slowly, something was happening inside Barden that was kindling a fire he thought was out.
“(Music) is who I am and how I identify myself. This (tragedy) definitely interrupted that. In addition to losing Daniel, I lost that part of myself,” Barden said during an interview with Hearst Connecticut media this week. “But the musician in me I guess didn’t die. That wonderful part of me didn’t die.”
Barden noted that in addition to the documentary coming out he is doing more performances with a coalition he founded with Korn and others called Artist for Action.
“I’m in cross over mode,” Barden told Hearst Connecticut Media. “With the timing of all this I am truly on my way.” How does that feel?
“It feels good.”