Amidst the singers and songwriters and banjo pickers of the thriving Somerville/Cambridge music scene, we can say one thing for sure: Though each musician hailing from Davis to Union to Central possesses a noteworthy trait setting them apart from other artists in the community, not one of them employs the jawbone of a donkey in their percussion section like the David Wax Museum.   Hell, the David Wax Museum is the ONLY band that can be seen whacking the bones of a burro in 4/4 time in these parts.  David, a man raised in the foothills of the  Ozarks who wound up at Harvard after traveling throughout the country over the course of a year, has spent a sizable portion of his education and his time abroad studying Latin American literature and musical traditions.  His penchant for Mexican folk music and his homegrown appreciation for American roots rock and bluegrass comes to an innovative culmination in the music of the David Wax Museum, where he works with his band to seamlessly fuse aspects of the two styles.

The David Wax Museum will be celebrating the release of their debut of sorts tonight at Club Passim, and due to the band’s popular demand there’ll be a not one but TWO shows for the David Wax Museum CD release as the 7pm show has already sold out.  Alipio and I caught up with David at Diesel for a quick cup of coffee and to talk about Roberto Bolano, plans for his upcoming tour, and what excites him the most about writing music that reflects the places his known.

-Hilary Hughes

OPENING ACT: DAVID WAX AND THE TEAPARTY TEN

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Granola.

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles”, or Mouth from “The Goonies”?

I’d punch them both.

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

A cleaver.

You go to bed, wake up, walk into the bathroom to brush your teeth, and you look in the mirror and you realize that you’ve turned into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

Fozzie!

Say you have a crazy night, you black out, and you wake up feeling like crap the next morning and you realize… you got a tattoo.  What’d you get inked?

“”Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news”

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

Sumo wrestler.

If you were a particular style of facial hair, what would you be?

I’d be a beard.

If you were a type of cheese, which cheese would you be?

Feta!

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY SKIVVIES AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

“Chameleon” by Herbie Hancock.

What’s your favorite word?

Meander.

THE MAIN EVENT: THE DAVID WAX TPB INTERVIEW

Tell us about yourself, David!  Where are you from?

I’m from Columbus, Missouri, which is at the foothills of the Ozarks.  Born and raised.  I left when I was 18 to go to college, but definitely… that was definitely my formative experience, growing up in Missouri and growing up listening to bluegrass music and a lot of midwestern rock roots.  Uncle Tupelo had already broken up by the time I really got interested in rock and roll or country rock or alt country, whatever you want to call it-

I’ve heard the term “grass grunge” thrown around a lot, too.

I don’t really identify with that term, but I can understand it’s utility.  So, I grew up with seeing Uncle Tupelo and Wilco live a lot and they were kind of the big figures when it came to finding a group that sounded like a sound I identified with.

You said you left for college.  Where did you go?

For the first two years I went to a small school in California called Deep Springs College.  It’s an all-male very tiny college on a cattle ranch in the Sierras.  It’s just a two-year program, so everyone leaves at the end of it, and I took time off and transferred to Harvard and finished up there, where I studied history and literature with a focus on Latin America.

Did you feel to a particular draw to Boston?  I mean, obviously Harvard is… well, Harvard…

Well, yeah, I came because of school but it’s kind of complicated because I met someone when I was traveling during my year in between schools and we started dating and it happened that she was at Harvard, so it worked out well.

How long ago was this?

I started at Harvard in 2003.  I spent a semester abroad in Santiago, Chile, and then came back to finish at Harvard in ’06.  Then, I got a traveling fellowship after I graduated to return to Mexico to specifically learn how to play Mexican folk music.  I did that for a year and I moved back almost two years ago to Boston.

How has your time in Mexico and abroad impacted you musically?  Do you think it factors into your sound now?

Certainly.  I think that Missouri and Mexico are the two most important parts of what I’m doing musically, being rooted in Missouri but also having a heavy Latin influence that’s really given me a lot of inspiration with the work I’m doing now.  I didn’t really foresee that happening.  I started playing Mexican folk music, and then the natural step for me was – I still hadn’t learned the verses to the songs, and I would sing over the songs in English and I would start writing my own lyrics.  A lot of the stuff on the album is kind of new songs out of that, that are me singing over these Mexican folk songs with new lyrics written in English that have been arranged for a band with a bluegrass instrumentation.

That’s a really interesting mix.

Yeah!  My iPod, in general, is half American roots music and half Mexican folk music, so for me, I don’t make a really clear distinction between the two because I’m swimming in both all the time in my head.  It feels like a natural growth out of that and that’s how the band evolved.

We’ve talked about how place factors into the development of the sound of David Wax Museum, but who are some of the artists from whom you’ve drawn inspiration?

Townes Van Sant, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Tom Waits, Paul Simon, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen… At a certain age, when I was in high school, Whiskey Town and The Old 97s, Jay Hawkes.  For one period in my life all I was listening to were songs by Chris Whitley and his album Dirt Floor, which is one of my favorite albums.

How would you put your creative process into words?

I feel like I’ve developed a good method and routine for song writing.  When I first got back to Boston two years ago I had a little bit of money left over from the fellowship to get me through the first couple of months, so I was just doing music full time.  It was a real luxury, now that I look back on it while I’m scrambling with part-time jobs.  I’m spending a lot of time doing the music business side of things.  At that stage, it was more about getting bands together, and spending a couple of hours of every day writing.  So, a lot of the songs on the new album came out of that first year back and having all that time to write and rewrite.  A lot of those songs are songs that the band was learning at the time.  It’s been harder to find that time every day to write, but I still do it everyday.  It’s easy for other demands in your life to take precedence.  I feel like giving myself an assignment has been really helpful.  I’ve been in school for so long and I love being in school, so it was easy to make myself work and have a deadline.  That first year I would make myself finish a song by Friday afternoon every week.  I’ve written a lot of awful songs as well, but I feel like you have to get those songs out of the way because you have ideas and I get an idea and a vision for what the idea of the song is or what I’m trying to do with it, and it might not be a good idea but I don’t know until the song’s been written.  Sometimes I just have to do it so that it’s not on my list of songs to get to or songs to flesh out.  Some of those have been looming on that list for years.

In terms of fleshing out the musicality of your songs, do you collaborate with anyone or is it just you writing and you bring it to the other members of the David Wax Museum for arrangements and that’s just it?

With David Wax Museum, there’s a lot of feedback from the band, but I’m usually bringing songs that are already complete in terms of the lyrics, melody and chords are all written.  The real work of the band is in the arrangement and often there’s a lot of other feedback that they get.  Often, I’ll have different verses and they’re the first people who will listen to what I’m working on and give me feedback as to what they think, whether they think it doesn’t work or they like certain parts of the song.  They generate a lot of the musical ideas that end up being what people hear.  They contribute an awful lot to the end product, but a lot of that is more in the arrangement of the song.

Are there songs in the David Wax Museum catalog that you feel particularly connected to, or are there any songs you’re especially excited to share at your CD release?

There’s a song that I don’t play as often as I used to because I think it’s more of a one guy and his guitar singer/songwriter sort of song, and it’s called “The Road to Puerto Encino.”  I wrote it when I was first living in Mexico, and I was in an old village and working there.  I think it was a big step for me as a songwriter in terms of writing a song on a different level of maturity in comparison with the stuff I wrote in high school.  The song sticks out and I’ll play it when I play gigs by myself, but it’s not really a part of the David Wax Museum repertoire anymore.  For a while, that was kind of my song: If I had to play one song for someone that was the song that I played.  That’s not the case anymore, although there’s a song from the last album called “The Great Unawakening” and I feel like that song has kind of taken the place of “The Road to Puerto Encino” in that it’s the one song that if I had to do one song that one is my go-to.  It’s not necessarily an emotional experience.  A friend of mine recently described the song as “relentlessly buoyant”, but it’s a really different side of me and there’s a certain type of persona one falls into when you’re writing in that folk tradition.  The singer/songwriter folk tradition, specifically, it gets a little morose or it has this “poor me!” kind of – my cousin called it the “sad bastard” song.  Mexican folk music has allowed me to get out of that “sad bastard” kind of song and write a song that was a lot more joyful and exuberant, so those songs have a different kind of energy and a different underlying sentiment.

Do you have any crazy stories for us from your time on tour with David Wax Museum?

Well this upcoming tour for us is our first serious tour and our first big push.  We have a couple of shows right before the CD release, but September 18^th is our official release and our tour kickoff.  We’ll be on the road for a month and that’s the first time that this band will be on a lengthy tour.  We did a week on tour opening for the Avett Brothers, and then we put in a couple of extra shows on nights we weren’t playing with them, and it went really smoothly and really well.  This upcoming tour isn’t going to be really comparable with that: We were opening for them and we were in these beautiful theaters and the best places you can imagine playing if you’re playing in a large place at all these gorgeous venues.  The sold out shows had nothing to do with us, but their success is built on a lot of years of relentless touring and hard work, and when you see someone who’s really worked for that and kind of what- and that’s not the case for a lot of people who’ve worked really hard, but it was really exciting for us to get a glimpse of artists who appreciate that kind of an opportunity.  You don’t know what’s going on when a band explodes, and it’s hard to know about all the trials and tribulations that they’ve been to to get where they are.  Even if it looks like an instant success story, it’s hard for me to believe that that’s all it was, you know?  There’s power, luck and talent.  A former bandmate described musician’s purgatory, which was specifically about what happens when you get concerned about other people’s success and you’re thinking about the success of the other people doing what you’re doing and comparing yourself to them instead of just being appreciative and excited for them, and also feeling like it’s a good thing, if they’re writing good music and making a living… I don’t know.  On my better days, I try to be encouraged by that.

I think that’s healthy!  In terms of this album coming out, how do you feel that this material is a departure from other songs you’ve written before?

This album is a continuation of the mix of Mexican and American folk music.  The last album was done in three days in a home studio with my best friend and a very good friend of ours and it was kind of a spontaneous creation that happened.  A lot of things came together in the right way in a short span of time, but it was also done with the people I had grown up playing music with, but not with the people I play music with now.  This CD is really the first CD for this band.  It’s recorded a lot more meticulously for better or worse.  You lose something in that because we spent so much time deliberating so many parts of it and overdubbing with horn sections or adding accordion and piano, which we don’t normally have in the band, but it’s the people who have been playing with David Wax Museum for the past two years – the CD represents this band that people have come out to see in town for the past two years.  A lot of people, really, it’ll be the first CD of David Wax Museum.  These people have really been a part of the creation of all these songs.  The last album was a lot sparser: we would arrange a couple of the songs and add some instruments, but there’s a good number of stuff that’s just very, you know, just two guitars and a voice.  This one’s a lot more built up, like a full production.

Let’s talk about the band for a second.  Can you tell me how you came to play with the other members of the David Wax Museum?

Sure!  I started to play- the person I first connected with that’s still in the band is a guy named Jiro Kokubu who’s a Japanese dobro and mandolin player from Osaka.  He’s an active member of the bluegrass scene and he plays at the Cantab Lounge every Tuesday night, so that’s where I first heard him.  Then, I got his contact information from the guy who runs the open mics at the Cantab, so I shot him an email asking what he was up to and if he’d be interested in playing together, and he said it sounded good to him, so he was just finishing up at Berklee.  He’s been playing bluegrass for over twenty years, I think.  Shortly after I started playing with Jiro, through a mutual friend of mine I met Suz, the fiddle player, and a mutual friend of ours had gone to school with me, so when I moved back to town I started asking if people knew other musicians in town for me to play with and that’s how I met her.  I met her within a couple of months of moving back.  She was in an old time group called the Mill Pond Nine, and Greg Glassman was playing guitar and singing in Mill Pond Nine.  We became friends and I later learned that he was a drummer, and he sat in with us at a gig once and was great.  He’s got a wonderful voice, so it’s great to be able to do these wonderful two-part harmonies.  I think a lot of people who come out to see the band regularly, that’s what really jumps out and grabs people, those harmonies, and that’s really all the work of Susan and Greg.  I have no talent for that sort of thing, and they have wonderful voices.  We recorded the album with an old friend of mine, Jack McGrath; he plays bass on the album and plays at a few of our shows, but he’s now in New York, and our drummer just moved to New York as well.

Let’s launch into the discussion about your fans and friends in Boston.  Are there any Boston bands that you’re currently following?

I’m really good friends with and really like the music of Avi and Celia.  We’ve done a number of shows with them.  I really like the music of a singer/songwriter named Jenee Halstead.  She’s a recent arrival as well; I think she’s been here for about three years.  I really like her music a lot.  I really like The Sacred Shakers.  Our drummer plays with that band as well. I really like Dave Godowsky.  Those are the ones that come off the top of my head of Boston musicians I love in town.  I also love Miss Tess and the bands that she’s in.  Alex Spiegelman plays clarinet with The Sweet and Lowdown, and he plays sax with us as well.

In terms of Boston venues you like, are there any that stick out amongst the spots you’ve played?  You’re having your CD release at Club Passim.  Why did you choose it as the place for your release party?

I really love playing at Club Passim, just because it’s the one place that’s a true listening room.  I think it suits what we’re doing really well.  Also, it’s the place that’s been the most supportive of the David Wax Museum, whether that’s, you know, initially including is in the Camp Fire thing that they do.  Passim’s been a great venue for us.  It’s a place where I also like to go hear music.  I don’t know, I think it also serves its role as a community of people.  I feel like more than any other Boston venue, it serves a special role in the folk community.  We also really love playing at Toad and that’s become a really wonderful venue for us as well.  We’ve made a lot of friends and fans there just because it’s free, so it’s got a built in audience and people just end up at Toad because of its intimacy.  It gets loud in there at times, but never that loud.  We love playing Lizard Lounge, too. We play at Johnny D’s and the Plough and Stars and we really enjoy those venues as well.  Those are the main ones.  I haven’t played Atwood’s or Precinct, but those are both places that would be fun to play.

In terms of your fans in Boston, I mean, you’ve been here awhile.  Let’s talk about the rapport you’ve built with your Boston fans.

The nice thing having lived here before I started playing music here is that we had a lot of friends to rely on when we were first getting started, which is really crucial when it comes to getting people out to a show when you’re a band that’s not very good when you’re first starting out (laughs).  We started at a point where most of the people who were coming out to our shows were friends and they’d bring their friends, which is a really comfortable way to start out.  You don’t have to win every single person in the beginning.  Most people are already on your side.  Over time, I think we’ve made a lot of fans by paying at Camp Fire, it was great to have a new audience hear us; the Sunday night gigs at Toad were great for the last six months, they were really great for us.  Any time we play an outdoor musical in town it’s always a good time.  We’ve met a lot of really great people who consistently come out to the shows, and the ones who come out on a regular basis are friends of ours and people I’ll go see shows with.  It doesn’t feel like there’s a line between who’s a performer and who’s a fan.  I think that the line should be crossed.  That seems pretty silly to me.  I think there are enough good venues where – I think especially at Toad, it’s always hard to hang out and talk to people on a night I’m playing there, but often I’ll go on another night and the same people will be there so then I’ll have a chance to meet them.  Boston has been really good to us.  I think we’ve felt like we fill a niche in terms of what we’re doing.  There are a lot of groups that are playing great Americana, but having something that’s a little different, with our Latin elements in our music, I think it’s something people have connected with and it’s something – our fiddle player also plays the donkey jaw bone, or the quijada, and that’s something people really like a lot.  The music’s fun, and I think it’s easy for people to instantly hear and get into.  I heard a very experimental jazz/punk group last night, and that was music that really challenges you.  It’s almost daring you to not like it.  It’s confronting you, you know?  We’re not trying to make music that confronts anybody.  We’re about this idea that music is appreciative and can also be joyful.

So, what’s next for the David Wax Museum after the CD release?  Where do you see the David Wax Museum in the not-so-distant future?

I have the songs – this album almost took a whole year to do, and part of it was there were financial constraints and we didn’t really have the money to do it right all at once.  So, the ideal for me would be for me to get back in the studio with the songs I’ve written over the last year and I still have some songs that I wrote when I was back in Mexico six months ago, so it’d be great to get together and record those new songs and just record it all over a week or a few days.  Of course, it’s kind of not really financially feasible to imagine that right now, so I’ll have to kind of assess where things are for the tour and how CD sales are going and if anyone is interested in financing a project like that.  I don’t really know.  I feel like I’m at a point where things could go in a lot of different directions, and I could kind of do as much work as possible to get the promotion ready for the album and to send the CD out to as many people as I can think of and to work as hard as I can to book the tour and play the shows as well as I can every night.  At some point, it’s out of my hands when it comes to how people will receive the album, but the side of people that make more of the decision to have the money and the labels, I cant worry about it too much because we only put out what we put out and we want to be happy with that.  I’m at that stage right now, and I don’t know.  I think sometimes it’s stressful and it feels like this huge, overwhelming void, and often it’s exciting.  Anything could happen, and the ideal – I think I felt like a little bit like I’ve reached a plateau in terms of the amount of money I could make doing what I’m doing in Boston playing as often as I’m playing, and the next step for the band is to be touring more, so hopefully we’ll kind of be getting more serious about touring more frequently.  It’s kind of a real trial run for us, this month-long tour.  You can fantasize about touring and all the romantic ideas you can have about it, but then to be on the road for a month and actually do it for a month away from the people you love and just living out of a car and sleeping in a different place every night, we’re just like, we’ll see how it goes and build an ideal tour for a band at the stage we’re at, so it’s hard to see what six months from now will look like.  It might be a point where it’s not sustainable, but I’ll figure out what that means for me.  Every month, it’s gotten a little easier and I’m hopeful that I’ll figure out a way to make it work.