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Meet this amazing individual who spreads contagious positivity and who is an inspiration to all. He is one of Pepperdine’s great talents and is sweetly humble despite all his gifts. Let’s take an in-depth look into who he is and why he has captured so many hearts with a simple song.
Name: Caleb Wright
Year: Senior
Major: Creative Writing
Age: 22
Hometown: Escondido, CA
Relationship Status: Single
What are your talents?
I can do lots of vocal impressions of people and well, I guess they’re not really impressions, just weird noises. I have a lot of those. I also love doing things with arts so music, Songfest, writing, and I tried out for Dance in Flight this year, which was an incredible experience.
How did you come to write “Light On the Horizon”?
It’s actually a song that I wrote in high school and was how I got involved with DIF in the first place. I played it and my friend used it to audition for her choreographer and then later asked me if I would play it in the show and I said yes and that I’d be honored. From there I decided that maybe DIF was something I could try out for.
You were in almost every DIF number. How did that feel?
Humbling. Absolutely humbling. I was honored to work with all the different choreographers. They all had different styles, but they created such amazing pieces. That’s why anytime that told me they wanted me to be in their number, it was just so humbling.
What are your dreams for the future?
I want to write. I’m not afraid of pulling the J.K. Rowling life by going and living out of my car and living at the bare minimum to make it happen, but I do realize that there are student loans that must be paid. The goal right now would actually be to get involved with Disney if I could. And if I could get involved with Kingdom Hearts – it’s a video game that they produced that I loved so much and changed my life.
What’s something that’s made a significant impact on your life? Something that made you who you are today?
This actually goes back to the song I wrote. It came out of a place where I was very used to using music and the piano to help me process emotions back in high school and still today, but especially back then with all the angst, emotions, and drama of high school. I came home from a particularly crumby day and just really felt the weight of life for the first time. I was seventeen and I just remember thinking how I could possibly keep doing life. You live to roughly eighty, ninety – if God is gracious and lets you go that long – so how do you do seventeen years of life that have been so heavy over and over again. That just seemed absolutely daunting and dark, so I just sat down by the piano and expected to play something very foreboding and sinister but what ended up coming out was just this very simple two-chord melody. I knew that that did not come from me at all. It was something that was fully from God as a way of saying that the things that I found unforgiveable in myself were already not only forgiven in Christ but redeemed or becoming something better without me being fully aware of what that better thing was yet. It was a promise that things would get better. So it’s absolutely amazing to be able to share “Light On the Horizon” with Pepperdine and with my friends and the cast of DIF this year.
You’re super talented, so the question everyone wants to ask is this: What can you not do?
Math. Wow, give me any math problem and there it is. I’m also not incredibly gifted in the sports so there’s that. However, the thing I’m most terrible at is texting. I’m so bad at responding promptly. It’s nothing personal. I just can’t handle phones. One time, I got so many text messages all at once that I actually just threw my phone across the room. Just chucked it. I am getting better though. My friends are rehabilitating my ability to text, so with their patient help, I am getting better at it. There are a lot of things I can’t do, but I think of texting as the top.
Tell Pepperdine something that they don’t know about you.
This is something I’d hope they would know about me, but I think sometimes people forget this and it’s good to remind them that people are excellent and they often forget that. It’s easy at Pepperdine to see the beauty all around us and to praise God for that and to really appreciate that. It’s really easy to see it in our friends or in the people that we are jealous of and to resent that or to treasure that. But it’s not incredibly often that we see that in ourselves, which is ironic and sad. I think that’s the most important thing that if people remembered me at all, I’d want them to remember or be mindful of the fact that people are excellent and that means that they are as well. I think everyone is excellent.
Describe your dream girl?
There are so many things I treasure that I feel like if I tried to make a list, I would automatically and accidentally start excluding all the things that I find are really important. In a dream girl, I would say what I hope anyone would be looking for in a significant other, and that is someone who inspires you just by being who they are. Not in a negative way, not someone you feel you have to constantly impress because that’s exhausting and it’s not fair for either of you. But if you find someone who really inspires you to be a better person and to try hard and to make mistakes and fail and still know that that’s okay and they love you, then that’s the person to hold on to.