David Wilcox Music

Ah, the comfort of a strange hotel.   After all these years, it is a meditative state.  It’s early morning and Tom is still sleeping since he is on west coast time.  I haven’t pulled the curtain yet, so this room could be anywhere, but it happens to be Pittsburgh.  

The midwest in the fall affects me with that blissful combination of the sweet ache of mortality (the leaves) along with the humbling flatness of feeling earthbound  (the close gray sky).  The midwest knows me better than anywhere.  It is still home.  

On the flight up, I watched the move “I (heart) Huckabees” again.  I haven’t seen it in a bunch of years, and I love that movie.  It has lots to think about, but always with a sense of humor.  The film is full of profound lessons about the choices we have, every moment, about how to not fall into the traps we set in our own thinking, and it also explains the way out of those traps.  It is a distillation of useful transcendent philosophy served up with laughter by some memorable characters.

That’s what I want my music to be, and what I feel each CD is getting closer to.  Each time I step up to bat (to write another song),  I take a swing at what life throws at me.  I try to connect with the issues, but I’m just trying to get home.  On REVERIE, my new CD, there are songs about the injustices and the heartlessness that piss me off, but there are also songs about not getting dragged down and losing heart myself.  That’s a tricky balance.  A sense of humor makes the big perspective easier to keep.

There is so much that could make us lose heart about this world.  In the long run, humankind could gradually become more humane, but only if we can keep our hearts from turning bitter while we deal with the cruel crap we are doing to each other right now.  So the song REVERIE is the heart of the record.  It opens up instrumentally so just the sound of it says that you suddenly have company along this journey.  It has a different sense of time, with the complex time signature surprising our expectations.  And the lyric marks a path back to a hopeful heart no matter where we are coming from. Like the sound of a waterfall that keeps us from getting lost in the forest. 

The view that it opens to is a place where hope comes not just from this week’s news, but from a much bigger story.
That’s all for now, but join me here in coming days as I will be writing about many more songs on the REVERIE CD in future posts.