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David Dondero
David Dondero is one of a dying breed: the wandering troubadour, hitting the open road with a clunky vehicle, the wind in his face, and acoustic guitar in hand. He's got the required protest anthems and laments about current events but to call him a folk singer would be to belittle his work. Mr. Dondero calls himself the anti-folk singer: "I can't think of anything worse than watching a guy get up there with his guitar who just wants to spew his guts out," he says. "It's painful for everybody."
Dondero has lived in more states than you have fingers, and turned away from the punk rock of his old band, Sunbrain, to his acoustic guitar after his first love died in a house fire. Which is not to say that he feels sorry for himself, no, not at all, otherwise why would one of his albums have the tongue-in-cheek name The Pity Party? He sings "I play the skinny indie white-boy blues" in "The Living and the Dead" and then goes on about our lost Tina Turners, murder-suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge, women who can only mean trouble, his parents' divorce, and people who cannot pronounce his name correctly, navigating the fine line between too much earnestness and laughability.
A consummate storyteller, David Dondero pairs his cutting, emotive, sometimes warbly voice with sparse country fingerpicking, straight out of the Appalachian mountains, the words practically spilling out of his mouth. He's bounced from label to label like he rambles from state to state, but I hear he's finally decided to call San Francisco his home.
(Future Farmer Records recently released Live at the Hemlock, a testament to how affecting his live performances are, and rumor has it that his next album also found a permanent home on a record label run by one of his biggest fans; in April, it will be released on Conor Oberst's Team Love.)
The first time I met David Dondero he was dragging his guitar and amp to down the street in Tribeca, after being the opener on a bill of umpteen bands, looking for a place to sleep for the night. That place turned out to be: the bed of his truck, a beat up Nissan that looked like it had seen one too many miles of highway. David was a little wild-eyed, a little worse for the wear, perhaps hopped up on too much shitty weed and cheap whiskey, and he was entirely flattered that someone even knew who he was, shaking my hand for just a little bit too long. But it didn't matter, because he was looking for what we all end up looking for in the end: a little recognition and a little kindness.
David Dondero - Outbound Sound
David Dondero - If You Break My Heart
David Dondero - Pre-Invasion Jitters
David Dondero - The Living and the Dead
Buy Live at the Hemlock from Future Farmer Records, Amazon, iTunes Music Store.
Posted by Queen of the Front Row at 03.01.05 at 3:41 PM
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