By Matt Wardlaw (originally posted at the Addicted To Vinyl Blog)

There are quite a few good shows in town this week, but I’m  particularly excitedabout the pending Cleveland return for  singer/songwriter (and Mentor, OH native) David Wilcox.

His engaging blend of songs and stories first drew me in when I discovered his 1991 release Home Again (his third album and second major label release), an album that found  inspiration both in his own life and the experiences of others (see “Chet Baker’s Unsung Swan Song” for one particularly magnificent example of this).

Nearly 20 years later, Wilcox has 17 albums to his credit, including his brand new studio release Reverie.

With the release of Reverie, his 13th studio album overall  (available online now and in regular stores on November 22nd), Wilcox is  stripping things back to the basics.  The album was recorded live in  front of a studio audience at The Monastery, a Cincinnati recording studio owned by longtime Wilcox collaborator and producer Ric Hordinski.  For longtime fans that miss “Old David” (a term used by David himself in his new website biography), there’s a lot to love about this new album both in terms of songs and the sonics of the sound.

The recording crackles with the energy of a typical Wilcox live  performance and delivers a vibe that quite frankly has been occasionally  AWOL on some of his more recent albums.

Wilcox returns to Cleveland for a show on Saturday night at the Arts Collinwood Cafe (located near the Beachland Ballroom, order tickets here) and that seemed like a good enough excuse to spend some time with the man himself talking about Reverie in addition to his many other activities.  David was very generous with his time and we had a great chat.  Read on….

I think that each one of your albums has an interesting point  of inspiration, particularly your last few albums.  What triggered the  idea to record this one live in the studio?

I guess it was from the experience of the record before, feeling like  the performances were being heard for the first time when I rehearsed  with those musicians. We’d go through the changes and I’d talk through  dynamics and stuff but I wouldn’t sing the lyrics to them until we were  recording. So the stuff that got recorded on the record, the musicians  were the audience, they were hearing the songs for the first time and  reacting to it.  And I love what happens to me when I play for people.  There’s this connection that has been missing on some studio records in  the past and so I thought “you know, I don’t really want to do a live  record, because I love the clarity of the studio sound, but if I could  get an audience to come into the studio….”  You know, these days you  can just put something on your website and people come.

So we had about 70 people in this wonderful studio [The Monastery] that my friend Ric [Hordinski] has in Cincinnati.  It used to be an old church and it has beautiful acoustics and the audience was very willing to go  the distance to make this a great recording. During the songs they were  really quiet and there’s no applause at the end because I didn’t want  that disruption. I love when a record speaks right to the listener and  it doesn’t sound as if it’s from some place where you weren’t.

In order to make it feel like a studio record in terms of the quality  of the sound, the audience was really quiet and there was no applause  at the end.  There were two separate sets of of mics - the studio mics  went right into the control room and the other mics, my normal sort of  road mics, went to the tiny little sound system that was only in the  back of the room. So it wasn’t picked up a lot on the microphones, but  it did add an interesting kind of reverb sound. The room had this  beautiful kind of fullness to it. It was kind of the best of both worlds  - I think I finally found my way to record!

 

You alluded to it, but listening to this album, there’s  definitely a vibe that I’m familiar with hearing in your live  performances that has been missing at times with some of your more  recent recordings, so it’s cool to hear that.

Yeah, I agree and it’s fun.  When we first finished this session, I  listened back and I thought “well, it’s either got way too much room or  the room is really good!” [Laughs]  I had to make that decision.  It’s  unfixable, the sound of the room is there on the mics, so it’s either  great or it’s trash. And after listening to it about three times I  figured “well, it doesn’t sound like normal records, but it sounds  cool!” [Laughs]  I like it.

With a studio audience in front of you, were you able to get  the performances you were looking for down on tape rather quickly, or  did you have to go back and do some additional work on it after the  audience had gone?

We didn’t do anything after the audience had gone.  We recorded two  nights and one of the songs I recorded twice on one night, just to make  sure I got it. But most everything was from the first night and that was  the surprising part because the first night, I was being videotaped, so  I was nervous about a whole other level of stuff. My perception of the  two nights was that the second night was better, but when I listened  back, most of the songs are from the first night. There’s only like  three [songs] from the second night. There was just that wonderful sort  of edge to it that..sometimes I think that I play better if I’m somehow  not thinking too much. There are some nights when you’re feeling really  rough and you think “oh man, I should have canceled this gig, but I’ve  gotta do it now.” You get out there and all you can think about is “oh  god, don’t cough in the middle of a line.” Afterwards, somebody comes up  and says “oh, you were great, you were brilliant” and you say “oh yeah  right, I was just about to die” and they say “no, that’s the best I’ve  ever heard you!”

So it’s a wild sort of thing that happens mentally where if you’re  concentrating really hard just on like, between the lines you have to  breath in, but when you’re sick, you can’t breath in too fast or you’ll  cough, just breath in slow.  So you’re spending all of your  concentration on the basics like breathing and it’s funny what that does  to a performance.  Because it takes you down to a level where you’re  not second-guessing, you’re just sort of at your most primal state,  feeling the raw emotion. It’s wild but when I had way too much to think  about, it put me in this state where the music bypassed my brain!  [Laughs]

You’re in the midst of a very prolific period of recording  with this being your third album in the past three years and with each  one, it seems like you’re stripping things further and further back to  the basics.

There were other musicians on Open Hand and I loved that, but the interesting thing about me and recording is  that there’s this joke that I have with my manager about like “yeah, I  just wrote this song and I just did this demo and I’m going to learn how  to sing it better.”  And he emails me back and says “oh no, please  don’t, I like it just the way it is.” “Yeah, but that crack in my voice,  that’s not good,” and he says “that crack in your voice is where the  song comes out.” So my normal way of recording is that I always record a  song as soon as I’m finished writing it and usually I’ll take those  recordings and listen to them a bunch and go into the studio.  And then  I’m doing an imitation of something I’ve already done where the first  time it has this sort of exploration feel to it. I don’t know where  exactly the phrasings going to go, I’m just kind of on the fly.  I think  that in the future, I’m probably going to do more recordings with the  demos, like when I’m making the demo, instead of doing it quick in  GarageBand, I’ll go ahead and do it in Pro Tools, just in case this  happens to be the moment that I sing it best. And then I’ll have those  songs available if I want to just finish those first versions.

It seems to me like you’ve become a lot more open about  sharing the stuff that you’re recording, by putting it on Youtube for  people to hear, for example.  The technology is just a lot more  immediate now.

It’s so fun.  I just did a song called “Worst Enemy” that I did just  with a quick little studio thing at home and I put it up on the web. And  one of the comments on Facebook was “oh, it would be so cool to hear  this song with horns!”  So I met this friend out at Rocky Mountain Folks Festival that said “yeah, I’ll put horns on it, just send me the track.”  So he  downloaded the tracks and recorded his horn parts and then uploaded them  back to my iDisc and the next thing you know, we’ve got a horn section.  So I put that up on Facebook and I love the fact that it used to be  that there was this limbo that happened between finishing a record and  it’s going to come out in three months or six months. And now, if you’re  finished with a song, you hit send and people hear it two minutes  later. It’s pretty cool!

It seems like you’ve been able to maintain a good amount of  independence with what you do with your website and your ability to put  music out there as you want to. And yet you also maintain a little bit  of the old business model of having a record label, with What Are Records handling the label side of things for you.  But it must be a good relationship, because you’ve put out 7 albums with them.

Yeah, they’re great people. It’s sort of the future of what record  companies are going to evolve into, even the big ones.  It will  eventually be more fair and more of a service-for-hire kind of thing  instead of the record company owning everything. You make your record,  you bring it to them, you talk about where you want to spend the money  and how you want to do promotion and they get the work done. They’re in  it for the right reasons - it’s a good match. At this stage, there’s a  small percentage of the people still buying the discs compared to the  downloads but the wild part is that the recording is so much cheaper and  everything else [that] it’s still worth doing it. I don’t know how long  it will still be worth doing. At this point, it just makes a little bit  of profit, but it’s still fun to have something you can hand to someone  or sell at shows, so it’s a good thing.

Getting back to the new record, on the night of the recording  the audience was prepped to expect nothing but new material and none of  the old favorites. Although you played old favorites, I remember seeing  a similar show in Mentor prior to the release of Turning Point where you played nearly all of the songs on the album, even though I  didn’t know at the time that a new album was on the way.  Have you  always been so open about sharing the new material prior to it being  officially out there?

It is my downfall and it’s definitely my weakness, I play new stuff.  It’s something that if you do it in balance, it’s good, it gives some  spice to the show. I’ve always done it way too much, I’ve always played  just what I want to play and usually that means the stuff that is brand  new. It’s kind of frustrating when people come back to the CD table and  they say “oh, that song about the blah blah blah, which album is that  on?” And [my manager] Tom says “well, that’s not out yet.”  And then  they say “oh, so is that on the new one just coming out” and Tom says  “no, actually it’s on the next one after that” and they look at him  “well, where am I going to get that?” It’s always been a weakness of  mine to just play new stuff.  As a matter of fact at one show, D.C. I  think, I was an hour into the set and someone calls out a request from  the crowd and they say “Dave, can you play something from ONE of your  records?”  [Laughs]

Marc Cohn just put out a new covers album and the gist of the  record is that it is all songs from 1970. When I saw him last year, he  talked about how much the songs that he heard on WMMS [here in  Cleveland] growing up inspired his career in music and inspired him as  an artist.  In the lyrics to “Ireland” on the new CD, you reference  Cleveland and how the music got you through. On the surface, the lyric  indicates that things might have been tough for you growing up here in  Cleveland. Where did music come into the picture for you?

Well, even before ‘MMS, I was listening to WNCR and there were so  many great songs that were completely different genres. I have  recordings from my dad’s reel-to-reel tape recorder, I would record  hours and hours of that, because the personality behind the song choice,  there was real continuity of subject matter and juxtaposition of ideas.  You could tell that there was heart and soul behind who was playing the  music. DJs like Jimmy Perdue, I should Google him, I don’t know if he  ever did anything after WNCR, but it was fascinating to me to hear  somebody who was playful and broke all of the rules. It was fascinating.   All of that stuff that I heard back then is now still being played on  classic rock stations and it feels to me like nowadays you walk into  most radio stations and there isn’t anybody there.  Music was a huge  deal for me and it did give me a lot of hope that there was a way of  living where I felt like sort of belonged in my skin. This life could  feel like I was home and the first place that I got a hint of that  possibility was music. So it was definitely life support back then, I  wouldn’t have lasted without it.

In concert, your storytelling prior to the beginning of each  song often reveals an interesting tidbit of information that otherwise  might be very subliminal and difficult to pick up.  Hearing that  Springsteen’s Devils and Dust album was a source of inspiration  behind “We Call It Freedom” is probably something that I wouldn’t have  figured out without hearing that story prior to the song on the album.

That’s why that one story remains, just because I think that’s an  interesting compliment to that. Most of the irony in the songs, I  figured was obvious enough, but that one, I figured there could be a few  who just absolutely wouldn’t get the sarcasm. So I decided to do it  that way because it wasn’t offensive to people that disagree with it. It  has this compassion at some level about “okay, really they’re just  trying to protect their country and yet, what’s left of their country  after they protect it in that way?”  I figured that story needed to stay  there but all of the other intros went away out of the live recording.

On the Live Songs and Stories album there’s another  Bruce story prior to “Spin,” and it would be easy to say “oh yeah, he’s a  storyteller, of course he likes Bruce,” but I think that what you do is  different. Besides Bruce, if we were looking at your record collection  when you were growing up, what were some of the key albums for you?

In terms of storytelling, Gamble Rogers,  who was a storyteller/guitar player.  He created a world just like  Garrison Keillor did, he created a whole world where the characters, you  met them one at a time, but they all related to each other. The way I  came up playing in a pretty tough room meant that if I just started into  a song, people would keep talking, but if I spoke to them, they would  look around like “oh my god, is he talking to me?” And I had this  opportunity to get their attention with compelling stories. And then if  the songs were the soundtrack to the story, then I could keep their  attention, but I had to go right into a story again to hold that. It was  what I used to call a “water ski gig,” because if you slow down, you  sink.

So I would just keep it coming with continuity and it was the  continuity that held their attention. I never let them feel like I was  just creating a background, I left them with the impression that if they  stopped listening, I would stop talking. I was only there to speak  right to them. Since we hear most of our music out of machines, people  really have to be reminded, minute to minute that yes, I really mean  this, I’m speaking to you. This is not just a collection of sounds, this  is communication. So yeah, Gamble was huge in that regard because he  was really good at keeping the crowd present and changing up stuff in  order to make it feel really present tense.

This is embarrassing, but there’s one song that I remember making a  huge difference in my life when I was probably 11 years old, maybe 10.  And it was the guy who did “Abraham, Martin and John,” Dion. He did a song called “Sit Down Old Friend” and I never would have heard it except that it was on a sampler that my brother had called Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies,  it was a Warner Brothers double album sampler and there was that one  song that was unlike anything else that I’d ever heard. It was a song  that was speaking with the kind of intensity as if your best friend is  dying and you’ve got to say something that matters, you’ve got to make  the time count. I loved the honesty and the sincerity and yet the  complex guitar and the intriguing melody.

It’s a song that I remember coming to when I was alone and I got this  sense that life is going to get better, because there’s access to a  more soulful real kind of [music]. People dare to be really alive, not  just wasting their time on distractions. To me it was just proof that  existed, and that vibrancy of life was possible. That was a song that I  probably wouldn’t be a musician if it wasn’t for that song. That was a  song that really absolutely woke me up.

Another one that made a huge difference was the Blood on the Tracks [album] by Bob Dylan. That was the stuff that I first started to play,  that and Joni Mitchell, that whole record’s in Open D and I started to  learn open tunings first [with] Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and a bunch of  other stuff. The fact that it combined the simplicity and the  accessibility of the guitar, it doesn’t take a lot of hand tricks to  make the guitar really powerful and moving. To me it was the people’s  guitar, it was accessible and it was something that you could use, not  to show what you can do with the instrument, not to prove your prowess,  but to feel how the instrument affects you. You could take that one  oasis of life and acclimate to your heart feeling that good and come to  the rest of your life with that standard set and say “this is how I want  to feel in my work, in my relationship, in my kids and in my  community.”  Because if you don’t have that standard to go by, you  wouldn’t know how much to ask for, you wouldn’t know what’s possible.   It would be like “my cup runneth over,” but you’ve got a symbol, so next  time bring a bigger cup! [Laughs]

Jumping back a bit, you mentioned that there was a video  recording of the sessions for the new album, is there a good chance that  we’ll see a DVD released from that?

There is! It was a five camera shoot and it came out really  interesting and there’s one of them on the web, the “Little Fish” song.  Most of the songs on the new album were recorded.

You recently played an orchestral gig in Idaho. For somebody  who usually plays solo, what was it like to be surrounded by so many  musicians?

That was a big mother!  It was really fun. I don’t know if you have  had friends that have ridiculous old sports cars, but there’s a friend  of mine who has a Jaguar XK-E that has this 12 cylinder engine, which is  really hard to keep running. On a good day when you’ve just had it  tuned up, it’s an amazing thrill and the rest of the time it’s like  “yeah, I gotta get some work done on that, it’s not running right.” So  the orchestra was just like that, it was a bitch to tune and it was just  a thrill to ride!

Let’s talk about the Wilcox Weekend that you did this year.  In these times when many artists do the cruise  thing and invite a bunch of their friends to come play, it seems like  you wanted to do something a little bit different. And for the people  that came out, it seems like the experience went far beyond what they  were expecting. What were you looking to get out of the experience?

Well, we had done a cruise before and this time I loved the community  aspect of it. The cruise has the escape kind of thing and the whole  image of it is “let’s get away from our lives and be with this person.”  The community aspect [of Wilcox Weekend] is more “let me show  you where I live and let me show you what you guys have in common and  let me help you guys stay in touch and let’s remember that we support  each other.” I come to them with my gratitude of making it possible for  me to work at what I love for a lifetime, which is the longest  relationship a musician has, it’s with his audience.

Their response was “isn’t it great to meet all of these people who  have this music in common.” [And they] find out that in some ways it’s  kind of this pre-sort so that the people that show up for that event  find that there are friends and then there’s friends they haven’t met  yet. It’s a pretty radical sorting to have this music in common, you get  people from the edges of the bell shaped curve, so to speak, so they  wind up being a really interesting crowd of people. So I loved listening  to them and as we’re organizing the next one, we’re in touch with them  saying “so what do you want for next year.” It’s really fun to get their  input and realize that the thing that they take away is mostly being  with each other and that’s a fun thing.

The “Musical Medicine” section on your website is really cool. I think you’ve always done a  really good job of categorizing your songs during your live  performances, but it’s interesting to see so much of your catalog broken  down into specific sections.

I think what’s interesting about that is that there are a lot of  songs, songs that we all love, that if you asked “what is that song  really about, could you paraphrase it?”  You might get some theories but  you wouldn’t get any consistent consensus about “oh, well that song’s  about this.” There’s a lot of songs that are just like a dream or  something that you have to interpret. There’s a lot of my songs that are  really accurate depictions of a particular emotional state, a  particular place that I got caught and a particular way that I got free.  So they’re tools that if your toolbox is well organized, you can reach  for that tool again when you need it and I love that about music.  Because so many of these songs have been milestones of my gradually  becoming a really satisfied person. And as I said when I started music,  that wasn’t the case at all. I had one little glimpse of how good my  heart could feel and I thought that nothing felt as good as a good song.  And little by little, I’ve found a way to apply that to a lot of  things.

Your new website bio references songs on the new CD that speak “straight from the heart,  just like the old David Wilcox always used to do.” In your mind, what  happened to the old David?

I think the level of trust that I had with my audience has grown and  they’re ready for some storytelling that comes from interesting  characters. It’s not like it’s new, I mean, Randy Newman, Richard  Thompson and all kinds of the really great writers have been doing it  for years and years.  I love the theatrical sort of element because  there are characters on this record that frighten me. And yet, what  better way to bring up a topic than to do it like homeopathic medicine  where it pushes you in a way that gets you to push back.

Related to that, what’s your reaction to the people that  perceive that the “storytelling David” in their eyes has been replaced  by a David that’s a little bit more preachy than what they were used to  in the past?

Now that’s difficult, yeah, I know.  I love the songs that have room  to say “here’s where I’ve found some of my joy,” but not say so much  “you have to do it the way I do it” or stuff like that. I think I’ve  lightened up a lot on that. I know that’s a lesson I wish I had learned  six records ago and yet I feel like it’s just something I had to go  through for my own sort of sanity and those songs taught me things I  needed to know. If I had known those lessons better I could have  reflected them in song with a lighter touch but I was just learning  them. And I think most people who are just learning something, the way  they learn is to try to teach it and that sometimes comes off way too  heavy handed.  So yeah, I agree and I think I’m learning a better  balance now but I’m grateful for what music has done for my life and I  wouldn’t want to trade that.

Your wife Nance shot the photography for the new album, including the cover shot - where was that picture taken?

It’s this place that we go every summer, this beautiful lake [called]  Lake Santeetlah, which is in western North Carolina and it’s a place we  go camping for a week or so, take the Airstream and it’s just a  gorgeous, quiet lake.

David Wilcox performs on Saturday night at the Arts Collinwood  Cafe at 8pm. Doors are at 7pm and tickets are $18.00 (purchase your  tickets here)

Wanna learn more about what David Wilcox is all about? Watch this video!