In the early days in David Wilcox’s journey toward being a self-sufficient artist and songwriter, as he remembers it, a booking agent told him with excitement about a gig at a spot in Asheville, NC where he lived. Every weekend. Steady pay. So he visited the bar. And it was an easy no. “At the end of the night, music would be less believable,” he told the uncomprehending agent. “I want music to continue to surprise me and fill me with this sense of something that's so beautiful and so sacred. And if I played here, I would wind up thinking music is to sell beer. It would cost more to play there, even though the pay was good.”
This isn’t the only time that Wilcox, now at 67 a seasoned yet still uncynical veteran of the folk music journey, gets metaphysical and metamusical in Episode 350 of The String. He speaks of his career as akin to the practice of sustainable agriculture, “where you’re trying to make the soil better for your grandkids” and an adventure, a compass, and a wonder drug. “I've always used music in a very off-label way,” he says. “It's not music that I'm after, it's just that my heart happens to feel music so intensely that I can learn, through this microcosm of music, how to make my whole life feel as good as a good song.”
I first heard Wilcox as one of the outstanding voices in the early 1990s new acoustic folk movement, the pre-Americana time of John Gorka and Eliza Gilkyson, of Pierce Pettis and Patty Larkin. I was somewhat into the scene, especially those who could really play the hell out of the fingerstyle acoustic guitar, and David Wilcox was one of those guys. The picking on his breakout album How Did You Find Me Here, released in 1989, really hit me with its percussive heft, its complex and pianistic voicings, and its gingerbread-warm tone. The songs, about love and loss and cars that were more than cars, were delivered with a friendly, knowing aura.
Wilcox was raised in Ohio but discovered western North Carolina on a bike trip and loved it so much he transferred college to Warren Wilson in Swannanoa. By the time he graduated in 1985 he was performing regionally and developing his signature approach to the guitar - one that achieves harmonic surprise with non-standard tunings and those clamps called capos, including capos that he customized by cutting out notches for certain strings.
As for writing, he tells us that he came at it obliquely. “What I thought was, here's a song by somebody else that I love, and it moves me. But there’s something in the second verse that doesn't feel true to me. So let me just change this part. I'll change these two lines that'll make it more true for me. And then somebody was saying to me, David, this is like graffitiing a painting. What are you doing? And I said, Well, you know it's not true. I can't sing it if it's not true. And they said, well, it's not yours. Write your own damn song. I said, Oh, okay!”
He found a home away from home at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe in its early days, and in a story I had no idea about, he tells us that owner founder Amy Kurland became his manager for a time, including helping him land a record deal on A&M. He cut How Did You Find Me Here in Nashville at Cowboy Jack Clement’s studio. And it became one of the best selling records of the singer-songwriter new wave. It set him up to tour and record steadily for these next forty years, and he has some lovely things to say about longevity and inspiration over the long haul.
The newest album, The Way I Tell The Story, shows what decades more experience can do for a songwriter, with more layered allusions, subtly sculpted language, and the resilience that comes with age. Opener “My Own Mind” deftly weaves neuroscience into a scene of frustration-verging-on-anger that becomes a rumination on equanimity. “The Beautiful,” which Wilcox calls his favorite song on the album, is about the power of art to occupy and own a small space, sometimes a literal frame, keeping the wider and uglier world at bay. And my favorite is the searingly honest picture of his wife’s advancing Parkinson’s disease, “The Next Right Thing.” It’s testimony to how a song can put us in someone’s headspace when love, compassion, grief and anger are all careening around during one of life’s most extreme trials.
In this hour, Wilcox talks about taking comfort in community after Asheville’s recent historic storm damage, about finding the marriage of voice and guitar that’s sustained him, and about maintaining a “visionary attitude” that happens to take the form of music: “What I was after was not playing music. What I was after was a life that felt alive.”
