Gil Asakawa
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This article ran in the Colorado Springs Gazette around 1995, when I was the entertainment editor for the newspaper.

WOEFUL WILCOX LIGHTENS UP
IN LIFE, SONG

David Wilcox has been accused in the past of being too much of a sensitive new age guy, wallowing in an emotional swamp with his low-key instrospective music.

On his new album, "Big Horizon," Wilcox is still sensitive, and his music is still low-key and mostly acoustic, but he's not mucking around in misery. Instead, he celebrates his 1992 marriage with peppy tributes to his days as a sensitive singe guy ("Block Dog") and hopefully paeans to the decision to get married ("Hold It up to the Light").

"What I'm singing about is good for people, it offers solutions," he days from his Asheville, N.C. home as he prepares to embark on a national tour (he plays at the Fine Arts Center tonight). "The album is a testimony, a credo. I've come to conclusions about how I live my life, and what brings me joy."

At the start of his career, joy wasn't his shtick. "When I started playing, I'd play nothing but the saddest of the sad....I wanted the emotion in my music to be like wasabe in sushi -- just BLAM! It brings tears to your eyes."

Now, he wonders if he was too glum. "The older songs, they were like, 'Gee, do you really want to hear this stuff?'"

The difference in his new material reflects his stable home life. "It's a treat, because I'm used to finding myself in relationships with equal parts love and fear. It's nice to have love mixed with trust."

That trust has allowed him to loosen up his songwriting style. He says he used to fuss over his songs and labor over every word. "Everything in a song had to be very carefully chosen, with no mixed metaphors or anything. I was always so literal, you know: Here comes the moral of the story, here's the next verse, here's the chorus again. Now, I feel I can mix up the images and still get the point across. It's a different style of writing, where you trust your intuition more."

"Block Dog" is typical of the more relaxed Wilcox. "It started out face value, as a confessional," he says. "But I realized I was having luscious schemes of staying single, and I said to myself, "You dog!" So it isn't until halfway through the song before the listener realizes that Wilcox is singing about his randy self.

The more contemplative "Hold It up to the Light" is no less positive. Inspired by a phrase he heard when he attended a Quaker summer camp as a boy, the song examines Wilcox's coming to terms with marriage. "I left it open so it can be about life decisions in general, how that nervousness about things is unnecessary. There's no Monty Hall ready to say, 'Oh, sorry, you've chosen the bucket of bolts.'"

Instead, Wilcox says, you make your decisions work out. He compares the song to another inspiration, Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken," about a man at a crossroads. "The poem is not written in the past tense," Wilcox says. "He's just chosen that fork in the road, and he knows it'll be the right decision."

Wilcox has luckily made the right decisions in his career, with this, his fifth album, getting the benefit of more widespread airplay, thanks to a new format aimed at older music fans that's catching on across the country. He hopes the increased airplay will gain him fans nationwide, instead of in certain states such as Colorado, where's he's been popular for years.

"My career's always been that multiple-reality thing," he says, good-naturedly. "I can enjoy these brief bouts of being pretty famous in places like Minnesota or Colorado, but then I'll come home and play a small room where people will go, 'Oh yes, so you have a new record?' It keeps me humble."