Some people look at a glass and say it's half empty. David Wilcox looks at a glass and wonders about the people who left their fingerprints on it, the milestones they were toasting, the breakups they were mourning.

That caring curiosity has always helped Wilcox stand out from the crowded field of sensitive, guitar-toting troubadours. Over the course of three albums recorded for A&M Records between 1989 and 1994, the Mentor, Ohio native emerged as the leading male voice in the early-'90s singer-songwriter movement triggered by Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman. Dubbed "The Kevin Costner of folk music" by friend and early champion Christine Lavine, Wilcox blended good looks and good vibes with a comforting baritone reminiscent of Michael Johnson or James Taylor. His songs employed concrete imagery – a speeding motorcycle, a crack in a cup, a splatter of paint – to communicate complex emotions. Resilience and hope bubbled under his most introspective songs. Life, Wilcox believed, was wasted if you didn't follow your dreams and take risks, because even failure helps you grow.

"It's hard for me to perceive my music in terms of trends and industry," Wilcox told this writer in a 1992 interview. "My music didn't come to me as a message to the world. So for me to stay sane, I have to judge it in terms of what it does for me – it tells me stories and teaches me what I want to learn."

Wilcox's musical career started when he moved to his current home in Asheville, N.C., in 1981 and enrolled in Warren Wilson College, where he majored in humanities and religion. Sharing a communal home with other local artists, he became a regular at a local club called McDibb's in nearby Black Mountain, building his following and constructing his songs around unusual open tunings reflecting the influence of Joni Mitchell. In 1987 he released his independent debut album, The Nightshift Watchman,  on local Song of The Wood Music. Public radio stations around the country rallied around the deceptively jaunty title track (whose narrator works in a nuclear missile silo) and soon after an A&M Records talent scout spotted him at The Bluebird Café's legendary open-mike night in Nashville. A&M was launching a roots-oriented subsidiary called Americana, a short-lived haven for young artists putting contemporary spins on traditional art forms, and signed him along with Tish Hinojosa and Zachary Richard.

Wilcox's Americana/A&M debut, How Did You Find Me Here, was produced by Pat McCarthy (who also produced U2 and R.E.M.) and released in 1989. The mostly acoustic setting lent even more intimacy to his melancholy examinations of romantic yearning and stunted maturity. In "Language of the Heart," he's a shellshocked boyfriend on the receiving end of a breakup speech, reeling from having misinterpreted her emotional signals ("You're speaking an unspoken language/I thought that you knew/it's one that we all learn by heart/and our hearts think it's true"). The lonely characters in "Saturday They'll All Be Back Again" spend their weekends cruising the streets in their sports cars, looking to recapture their lost youth, while the hope-starved heroine of "Eye of the Hurricane" rides a motorcycle in search of a fleeting escape from her pain, only to be granted a permanent release.

But rays of lighthearted humor and optimism peak through the darkness. "Leave It Like It Is" starts as an offbeat tale about a spilled jar of blue paint that becomes a much-pursued worked of art, but winds up warning against lapsing into a paint-by-numbers approach to life. The irresistibly bouncy "Rusty Old American Dream" personifies a car that is well past its showroom prime but still running strong, doubling as an uplifting symbol for U.S. industry. "How Did You Find Me Here" finds Wilcox overcoming his fear of intimacy and prying himself open to love. The album closes with a marvelous cover of Nashville-based Buddy Mondlock's "The Kid", a song whose unsinkable optimism in the face of a series of disappointments meshes perfectly with Wilcox's compositions.

A video for "Eye of the Hurricane", offering an overly literal translation of its tragic story, garnered airplay on VH1 and helped many fans discover How Did You Find Me Here, which sold more than 100,000 copies. But Wilcox made his most indelible impression in concert. In between solo gigs, he joined Christine Lavin on her On A Winter's Night caravan tour with Patty Larkin and John Gorka and won over her rabid crowds with his engaging stage presence and intriguing song introductions structured as raps. It was an effective tool he developed in noisy nightclubs, best illustrated by the live version of "Daddy's Money" (originally recorded on The Nightshift Watchman). "If you're trying to reach people in small clubs and share the best you have, you've got to get their attention and let them know that you're serious," he explained in 1992. "They hear so much music from machines that they forget that music is really a vital communication. It's just a way of starting out with language that is noticeable and striking."

Sometimes those raps turned into songs.  A much-requested concert staple on his early tours was the hilarious "Johnny's Camaro", a convincing example of Wilcox's knack for crafting meaningful metaphors from the simplest of details. On the surface, "Johnny's Camaro" is about a self-centered guy who thrives on car exhaust and testosterone, but it develops into a soul-stirring saga about Johnny's girlfriend and her trip to Africa, from which she returns with a stronger sense of her own identity. "I just made that up one night when I was playing a club in my hometown," Wilcox recalled in 1992. "Somebody taped it and sent it to me, and I learned it from the tape." The song was never recorded in the studio but a later live version was issued on Wilcox's self-released 1995 compilation of rarities called East Asheville Hardware.  The rare 1991 rendition included on this collection marks the first commercial appearance of a performance originally available only on a promotional EP titled (Mostly) Live – Authorized Bootleg.

Returning to the studio in 1991 to record his second A&M album, Home Again, Wilcox teamed with producer Ben Wisch (fresh off his success with Marc Cohn) and exhibited a joyful new attitude. His lyrics dug deeper and  the band-oriented arrangements – boasting contributions from Mary-Chapin Carpenter, John Leventhal, Marc Egan and Randy Brecker – added tasteful textures that fleshed out the songs without overwhelming him.   Wilcox had fallen in love with singer-songwriter Nance Pettit and tunes like the downright giddy "Farther to Fall," which celebrated taking a romantic leap of faith, reflected their soon-to-be-wedded bliss. Wilcox even turned his trepidation about turning 30 into a finger-snapping anthem called "Top Of The Roller Coaster," in which "it's all downhill from here" was given a deliciously positive spin.

This uplifting perspective also stemmed from mustering the courage to confront his fears and demons, whether seeking closure at a high school reunion in "Last Chance Waltz" or coming to terms with the painful childhood memories of running interference between his feuding parents in the riveting "Covert War" ("I used to run those battlelines trying to smooth over what got said / trying to get a medal, trying to get some shrapnel in my head / I thought it was my duty to plead and to implore / but I caught too much crossfire in your covert war").

"With the first album, I thought I could run away and create a kind of new life and kind of disappear from my past," Wilcox told National Public Radio in 1994. "And when I found that the past followed me, I had to go back and deal with some of those issues, and that was a harrowing experience."

Surprisingly, the songs that struck the most resonant chords with fans and critics were more observational than personal: "Chet Baker's Unsung Swan Song", a tortured-soul ballad covered by k.d.lang as "My Old Addiction" on 1997's Drag, imagines the herion-addicted jazz trumpeter's final thoughts as he plummeted from a hotel window in Amsterdam; and "Advertising Man" minced no words in its sardonic skewering of Big Tobacco and the agencies who hawk it ("Crack will kill you quickly / that's why it has to go / they'll get more of your money / if they kill you nice and slow").

Reviews for [i]Home Again[/i] were glowing and his concerts were sellouts. But the CD didn't carry him beyond his loyal following, partly because his mix of folk, pop, country, and jazz elements was difficult to categorize  - which suited Wilcox just fine. "I just listen to how people react when I play for them," Wilcox said after the album came out. "That's how I judge my success. People just want to feel things. I think all these kinds of music, all these distinctions, are like the kinds of religions that isolate us. We have wars, and we think one is great and the rest are terrible. People are just trying to stir their heart and find something that's real."

With Suzanne Vega's crossover success as a model, A&M was primed to break Wilcox with his next album. Reteamed with Wisch in 1993, he finished an album titled Up To the Light. Tapes were circulated among his inner circle of fellow folksingers and sleeve notes were issued to the press before the label decided to send him back to the studio with producers Richard Gottehrer and Jeffrey Lesser to re-record the material with a more radio-friendly feel. Released in 1994 and retitled Big Horizon, the album – which included tracks from both sessions – reflected his growth as a songwriter and a man, balancing the life-affirming outlook of a devoted husband and new father with the vivid viewpoint of a battle-scarred survivor  who sees that the walls he put up around himself didn't protect so much as isolate him.

In between such inspiring, sun-basking hymns to contentment as "New World" and "Farthest Shore", Wilcox dissected his lifetime of longing in "That's What The Lonely Is For" and deteriorating soulmates in the chilling "Break In The Cup" who realize they are draining, rather than fulfilling, each other. But the most moving metaphor cropped up in the bluesy "Strong Chemistry", in which Wilcox examined how sex can be reduced to just another drug to numb the pain of loneliness ("Our bodies fit together desperately / Like a needle against a vein"). "It's about the lowering of the flag of the sexual revolution," Wilcox elaborated.  "It's taking 'Language Of The Heart' to the next level, looking at how we take a good thing and wind up using it in a dehumanizing way."

Despite the depth of the subject matter, Big Horizonfailed to catapult Wilcox to a higher level of  stardom and he parted ways with A&M. True to his nurturing nature, he does not look back in anger. "It was fascinating being able to have a company pay for my education, basically," he told The Dallas Morning News in 1997. "It was like four years of college. It probably cost that much, too, maybe more. I'm grateful for the experience."

On his recent albums for Koch and Vanguard Records, Wilcox continues to explore ways of reaching his listeners on an emotional, rather than a strictly musical level. The glass may look half empty to fans who feel he deserves bigger commercial success, but Wilcox has no complaints about the way his career has turned out. As he once sang: Leave it like it is – it's fine.   – David Okamoto, August 2001