IF ANYONE DOUBTS MUSIC’S POWER to spur remembrance—and somehow to wound and heal at once—we refer you to David’s story of being retained to musically knit together a torn relationship. And it worked…for a while. That says pretty much everything you need to know about this guy.
“Ode to a Grecian Urn” seems particularly inspiring for you as a songwriter. Why do you like it so much?
My sense of that Keats poem is that it’s about this love experience, a love story frozen in time on this urn. It evokes a sense of the passage of time. You think you want to live in this blissful moment of longing or youth forever, but actually that’s a frightening and sterile and impossible thing to hold onto. Because beauty comes in the change, and that’s also where the pain lies.
And that’s the paradox, too…that Keats’s characters are never going to consummate. So much of your music is about that longing, the passing of time, and relationships.
Songs, my songs anyway, have this temporal component. You have to make a choice. “Am I going to write a song that’s going to be a static moment, despite the fact that it’s a temporal medium, or am I going to bring you through something that changes.” I prefer the ones that change. There’s an arc in a song—the third verse or fourth verse is not the same as the first. We land in a different place; I think that’s what the experience of living is.
On the subject of love, it struck us as a reader disservice not to ask you about a gig in which you were hired to reconcile a couple?
Oh yes! I guess it’s important to note first that my career has been marked in
part by being approached by fans asking me to become involved in their lives. Sometimes that means writing a song for a marriage proposal, or for a kid who’s been born, or for someone who’s passed. But this one was the weirdest; a guy asked me to help him win this girl back. I didn’t know him, but at that time in my life was up for pretty much anything. Maybe I still am. [Laughs] He had planned out a whole evening involving them going to dinner and coming back to his apartment, then I would show up and knock on the door, produce a guitar, and sing a concert for them. He thought this was going to be the crowning moment, but I showed up and it was immediately clear that she was not happy about my being there. I think that whatever had happened at dinner had not gone well, and she was embarrassed that I was seeing them in this moment. What proceeded was this incredibly awkward concert where I had to fulfill the contract, because he paid me a lot of money…actually flew me across the country. But the crazy part of the story is that it actually sort of worked. Two, three, four songs in and they were close on the couch, holding hands. Well, eventually they broke up again, so it didn’t really work, but, at least temporarily, the music had its power.
You wrote an album during the pandemic, Oh Quiet World, in which you seemed both melancholy and optimistic in telling yourself—and your family, presumably—what might lie ahead.
We were temporarily in a house in Rhode Island given to us by some friends. I started writing songs there, at this moment of great world reflection and personal reflection. We were surrounded by sickness, but none of us were sick, so incredibly fortunately. I felt like there were things to say, and I wrote very quickly. I had this old second-hand Spanish guitar that I got in Madrid, and a little bit of recording gear, and set up a studio in the attic.
I wasn’t thinking about recording a record. I was thinking about just writing songs. Every couple of days I’d have a new one and post it. Most of them are messages of hope…trying to find light spots in this time. We’re at a weird, sort of, end of that now—or beginning of an end, anyway—so it’s strange to still sing them. They mean different things now, because they were written in April and May of 2020. I’m really glad that I have those songs, because that was a time, I hope, we will never live through again.
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Photo Andy Johnson
