David Wilcox is an extraordinary artist with a thirty-year career, more than twenty albums, and literally hundreds of thousands of them sold, back when folks bought albums. I bought some of them myself, on vinyl, and on many CDs since. 

An early '80s move to Warren Wilson College in North Carolina set his wheels in motion, as he started playing guitar and writing songs, soon packing the legendary Black Mountain music room, McDibb's, with sold out crowds for multiple shows in a weekend.  Within a couple of years of graduating, Wilcox had released his first independent album, The Nightshift Watchman. A year later, he won the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk Award and, in 1989, he signed with A&M Records, selling more than 100,000 copies of his A&M debut, How Did You Find Me Here.

In the 30 years and more than 20 records since — whether with a major label, an indie company, or his own imprint — David has continued to hone his craft.

He's also kept up a brisk and thorough tour itinerary, performing 80 to 100 shows a year throughout the U.S., and regularly deploying his talents by improvising a “Musical Medicine” song for an audience member in need. In recent years he’s taken that process a step further, carefully writing and recording dozens of his “Custom Songs” for long-time fans who seek his help in commemorating and explaining the key milestones in their lives.

His wonderful song “We Make the Way By Walking" also won him the Grand Prize in the 2018 USA Songwriting Contest.

Rolling Stone has written that his “ongoing musical journey is compelling and richly deserving of a listen.” It's also why Blue Ridge Public Radio has noted that, “The connection people feel with David’s music is also the connection they feel with each other.”

We're going to talk about that amazing capacity that music has to reveal our connectedness, as well as writing process, emotional resilience, the early days of the Asheville music scene,  we'll nerd out about guitars and amplifying them, and I'm sure we'll cover a dozen other topics, too.

As we continue to explore the intersection between art and resilience in a challenging time, I'm particularly struck by this quotation I found from David: “I'm grateful to music,” he says. “I have a life that feels deeply good, but when I started playing music, nothing in my life felt that good. I started to write songs because I wanted to find a way to make my life feel as good as I felt when I heard a great song. I don't think I'd be alive now if it had not been for music.”

Sustaining Our Spirits #14 - David Wilcox, singer/songwriter