The Story Behind "Ask Me Dangerous"

This Friday, “Ask Me Dangerous” releases on Spotify, and this one has had an interesting journey.

The original idea came from something I had been thinking about for a while. We live in a world of shallow talk. We scroll, nod, say “I’m good,” and move on. We know how to have entire conversations without really saying anything, and most of us have gotten pretty good at knowing which questions to ask and, maybe more importantly, which ones not to ask.

I’ve always liked the old Lynyrd Skynyrd line, “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.” It’s a great line, but there is probably more truth in it than we would like to admit. There seems to be an unspoken agreement we make with each other: don’t dig too deeply into my life, and I won’t dig too deeply into yours. Mutual Assured Destruction applied to relationships.

But when I read the Bible, God doesn’t seem to honor that agreement.

God asks questions. Not because He doesn’t know the answers, but because we often don’t.

He asks Adam, “Where are you?” He asks Elijah, “What are you doing here?” Jesus asks the woman at the well about her husband. He asks Peter, “Do you love me?” These aren’t requests for information. They are questions designed to make someone confront something they might rather avoid.

They are dangerous questions.

That was the idea behind the first version of “Ask Me Dangerous.” It was actually a pretty fun song. It had a good tempo and almost a Brad Paisley kind of country feel. I liked it. I especially liked a couple of the lines:

I’m the duke of polished lies,
A thousand faces, none are mine.

And:

Pull that question like a knife,
Cut beneath what you can see.

So I put it out there for my usual test audience and waited.

Not much happened.

People didn’t hate it. That might have been easier. It just didn’t seem to connect with anybody. I still liked the idea, but the song wasn’t resonating.

That is not exactly an unusual problem for me. I can get fascinated with an idea and forget that everyone else hasn’t been living with it inside my head for the last several weeks. Maybe the song was too cerebral. Maybe it was a little obtuse. Maybe I understood what “Ask Me Dangerous” meant because I already knew what I was trying to say.

So I went back to it.

The first change was musical. I slowed everything down and moved it into more of a Southern Gothic sound. That helped. The response was better, and the darker sound seemed to fit the subject better. But the more I listened, the more I thought the problem wasn’t really the music.

For a song called “Ask Me Dangerous,” I wasn’t actually asking many dangerous questions.

I was writing about vulnerability without being particularly vulnerable.

That realization changed the song.

Instead of talking generally about masks and truth and hiding, I started trying to write the questions I might actually prefer that someone not ask me.

Ask me why I need the room,
Why I need to come through.
Ask me who I am when no one
Needs the things I do.

That felt different.

Why do I need to be needed? How much of what I do for other people is service, and how much of it has become tangled up with my identity? Who am I when nobody needs an answer, a decision, a solution or anything else from me?

Then came:

Ask me who I’ve hurt while thinking
I was helping all along.

I don’t particularly enjoy that question either.

Neither do I especially like:

Ask me who I’d be tomorrow
If the cheering disappeared.

But that became the point. If I could answer every question in the song easily, they weren’t dangerous enough.

One line from the original survived all the rewrites: “I’m the duke of polished lies.” I still love that line, probably because I think there is a kind of dishonesty that doesn’t require saying anything factually untrue.

You can tell the truth and still hide.

I can give you an honest answer that reveals exactly as much as I want you to know. I can tell a story about a failure that makes me appear humble. I can confess something while carefully avoiding the thing underneath it. As the newer lyric says, “I can make confession sound sincere and never let you get too near.”

That was getting much closer to what I had wanted the song to say in the first place. Sometimes we don’t need someone to catch us lying. We need someone who won’t let us hide inside the truth.

There was one other idea from the original song that I knew I wanted to keep: “Don’t let me put God in the gaps.”

That one gets complicated for me because faith is supposed to take me toward truth, not protect me from it. But religious language can become another defense mechanism if I let it. There is a difference between trusting God in something I don’t understand and invoking God because I don’t want to examine something I might understand all too well.

The final version says:

And when I reach for something holy
Just to make the questions stop—
Don’t let me put God in the gaps.

Then comes the line I added afterward:

Let God be God.

I like where that landed. I don’t need God as the explanation that ends the uncomfortable conversation. I need Him to be God, even when the conversation gets more uncomfortable.

Once I finally felt good about the lyrics, the song took another strange turn.

I completely remade it as a hip-hop song.

I’m not entirely sure why, other than the fact that this whole music experiment has given me permission to try things I never would have tried before. But something happened in that version. The rhythm changed the way some of the words landed. It gave the song an edge that hadn't been there before.

Then, because apparently I can't leave anything alone, I took what I liked about that version and remixed it again as a country song.

So “Ask Me Dangerous” started as an up-tempo country song, became a slower Southern Gothic song, wandered off and became hip-hop, and eventually came back home to country carrying a few things it picked up along the way.

That may actually be my favorite part of the whole process.

The various versions have now gotten around 6,000 listens on SoundCloud, which is far more than I expected when I started playing around with this song. Friday, the final version makes the move to Spotify, and I’m curious to see what happens with it there.

But whether it connects with a larger audience or not, I think I finally found the song I was originally trying to write.

The first version essentially said, “We should ask each other deeper questions.”

The final version makes me answer them.

That is a much more uncomfortable proposition.

I still think we have an unspoken agreement with one another that keeps most relationships relatively safe: I won’t look too closely at the things you have learned to hide if you extend me the same courtesy. We can know a lot about one another without ever allowing ourselves to be truly known.

Maybe breaking that agreement requires giving a few trusted people permission to ask something dangerous.

Not everybody. But somebody.

So as “Ask Me Dangerous” comes out Friday, that is probably the question I’m left with:

Who in my life has permission to ask me the question I don’t want to answer?

And if they actually did, would I answer it?

Or would the duke of polished lies find another way out?

You can find my Spotify page here:  Jayopsis on Spotify

You can find my SoundCloud page here: Jayopsis on SoundCloud