By: Dave Frisco
Rock music has always had a complicated relationship with heroism. It celebrates outsiders, elevates rebels, and turns ordinary musicians into larger-than-life figures under the transformative pressure of volume and light. Harry Kappen’s “Good Samaritans,” from his album After the Crossing, takes that mythology apart. His heroes are not standing on stages or dominating screens. They are waiting in the rain, helping people whose pain cannot be fixed with a filter.
The song opens inside the fluorescent marketplace of modern identity. Kappen sees “superheroes” and hears “flashy words for every soul,” followed by the promise beneath nearly every advertisement and motivational campaign: “Buy this dream and you’ll be whole.” That line is the trapdoor under the entire song. It identifies the machinery that converts insecurity into commerce, then sells the customer a temporary cure.
Kappen extends the critique through a series of sharply recognizable images. There are no bad angles. Pain is filtered. Tears become champagne. Smiles turn plastic, sunsets become golden on command, and skies are sculpted into submission. This is not simply a denunciation of social media. It is a song about the culture that social media perfected: an economy in which attention is currency and every person is pressured to become a brand.
“There’s a war for every smile,” Kappen sings. It may be the record’s most unsettling line. A smile once suggested pleasure, welcome, or human recognition. In Kappen’s world, it has become contested territory, a pose to be perfected, displayed and compared against the apparent happiness of strangers. Joy becomes another form of labor.
“Good Samaritans” answers that artificial brightness with the direct force of an energetic rock song. Kappen has described it, like the preceding single “Distant Shore,” as a musical nod to David Bowie. The connection is meaningful without becoming imitation. Bowie spent a career demonstrating that identity could be theatrical, fluid, and deliberately constructed. Kappen considers what happens after those liberating possibilities are absorbed by consumer culture and transformed into relentless self-promotion.
The people celebrated in the chorus refuse that transaction. They stop in the rain, offer help, and share another person’s pain. They are “unseen” and “never trending,” phrases that sound almost like credentials in the world Kappen describes. Their goodness is not validated by recognition. It exists in the action itself.
Mexican singer Danna Gomez appears in the choruses, expanding the refrain beyond Kappen’s individual perspective. Her voice gives the song a communal dimension appropriate to its argument. Compassion cannot remain an abstract belief held privately by one person. It must travel outward and become contact, responsibility, and assistance.
Gomez’s contribution also reflects Kappen’s current chapter. After the Crossing is the first album he recorded following his move from the Netherlands to Mexico. Its ten songs were performed, sung, and produced by Kappen himself, making the record an intensely personal expression of transition. Yet “Good Samaritans” looks beyond autobiography toward a larger question: What kind of society are people constructing through their smallest daily choices?
Kappen brings unusual authority to that question. Before relocating to Mexico City, he spent more than 20 years working as a music therapist in youth care and also served as a lecturer in an international master’s program in music therapy. He understands that listening is not a passive courtesy. In therapeutic work, attention can become an instrument, one that creates trust, allows pain to be expressed, and reminds isolated people that they still belong to a human community.
That history gives weight to the lyric “Simple hearts choose to stay / When the rest walk away.” Kappen is not describing sentiment as a substitute for action. Staying is the action. It means refusing the easy exit when another person’s suffering becomes awkward, inconvenient, or frightening.
The song finally disposes of its opening superhero fantasy with the declaration, “These saints don’t wear capes.” The line could have been merely cute, but Kappen’s argument earns it. Capes belong to spectacle. The people he admires operate without costumes, mythology, or an audience. They recognize need and respond.
“Good Samaritans” is not subtle about its moral position, but subtlety would serve little purpose here. The song’s clarity is part of its strength. Kappen does not claim that individual kindness can repair every institution or eliminate the systems that profit from insecurity and division. He insists, instead, that humanity begins with presence.
In an era of elaborately staged authenticity, “Good Samaritans” celebrates those who do not require witnesses. It is an ode to the invisible work of compassion, delivered with rock energy and an artist’s distrust of manufactured images. Kappen’s message is plain but urgent: when the lights go out and the performance ends, the people who stay are the ones who matter.
