Songwriter David Wilcox builds community through music

By Steve Wildsmith
of The Daily Times Staff

It’s easy to imagine one being impressed at that big Airstream trailer, the one with the North Carolina plates, way out on some desert highway outside of Barstow, Calif., or up near Boise, Idaho, or some other far-flung locale where the locals marvel and say things like, “You’re a long way from home!”

Singer-songwriter David Wilcox would only smile and pat the old girl and shake his head. Home, he would tell them, is right here.

“It really felt like we were at home on that thing,” Wilcox told The Daily Times this week about “Airstream,” his most recent album recorded in the aforementioned trailer during a two-year road trip across America. “Being in it didn’t feel like on-the-road time — it was very different than traveling for music. In some ways, it felt more like home than ever, because I was traveling, playing music and was still able to come home to my family.”

The trip wasn’t exactly designed around recording a new album, but as a craftsman with 13 albums under his belt, he had sort of a sixth sense that the muse might come calling while he was on the road.

“I was wondering if I was going to be recording during the trip, so I brought some recording gear to make that possible,” he said. “I knew a lot of songs would come from the travel, and I was hoping it would work to sort of have a recording with the ambient sounds of the campground, but that didn’t happen.”

When he, his wife and their son returned home to Asheville, N.C., he brought his good studio gear into the Airstream, however, and recorded all of the songs he’d written on the trip. The end result is an album that glows with the comfort and warmth of ... well, home. It’s a collection of songs that reflect the highways and hearths of America as viewed through the eyes of a man who’s made it his life’s work to chronicle the journey of the soul and the heart as much as the physical body.

Wilcox was born and raised in Ohio and was inspired to pick up the guitar when he heard a friend play Bob Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain” while attending Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C. He gradually emerged as an engaging and charismatic live performer and wound up on the major label A&M for three albums. Other albums for other labels followed, but “Airstream,” his 13th record overall, is his fourth CD on the Colorado-based What Are Records? label.

His following is a devoted one, and even for those casual fans who have never attended a show, one evening with Wilcox is enough to make anyone a believer. It’s not just his talent with a guitar, which is prodigious, or his affability on stage. It’s his sincerity as an artist who believes that music can change people — and the world — for the better.

As an example, he cites two encounters from his “Airstream” travels. Often, Wilcox and his family would be introduced to people they’d never met through mutual friends — fans would hear about his next destination and call up acquaintances in that town, telling them about Wilcox, and before he knew it, the three of them would have an invitation to crash for a few days in a stranger’s house.

Only, as his stories indicate, “stranger” is a relative term when it comes to the man and his music.

“We showed up in this little neighborhood in Cincinnati, and the whole neighborhood had come out,” Wilcox said. “We stayed with this family for four days and met everybody in the neighborhood — these were families that had known each other since college and had just decided to live together and bought houses near each other, and it kind of grew to the point where others were wanting to be a part of this community where their lives were intertwined and they were helping raise each other’s kids and were dependent on one another. That was a wonderful thing, a real vision of community, and we loved being welcomed like that.

“The other story that comes to mind — we were in Santa Barbara, also with some friends we’d never met before, and we stayed there even longer. We offered to have a night of music and conversation at this person’s house, so they invited all these neighbors, and a lot of them were people they’d never even met. So we played music and turned the songs to start conversations, and that’s the thing that I’m really loving now that we’re home — to have these evenings where the songs are there to kind of help start a conversation.

“I’ve always loved the fact that music is a way I have found my tribe and found things in common with other people,” Wilcox added. “For years, music has always been my interpreter, a way of getting to the heart of a conversation fast, but now I’m discovering that I can sometimes step out from behind that cover.”