Daughn Gi b s o n Two albums in, rumbling-voiced singer Daughn Gibson is here to save bad instruments from a life on the scrapheap. Even the bagpipes... Words JJ D unning Portraits T om O ldham
What do you know about Daughn Gibson? That he’s tall? That he’s handsome? That he used to be a truck driver and had a job in an adult book shop? The bottom-line facts that were reeled off and redistributed from interviews around the Pennsylvanian singer’s first album, ‘All Hell’, were told and re-told. Understandably, people were seduced by a romantic notion indebted to the fizzing prose of Kerouac: these were baritone tales, conjured in solitude upon the endless tarmac of the American road. Or, in other words... “People just love the trucking shit,” he laughs. “I get that it’s a somewhat romantic profession, but saying, ‘He wrote a whole album on the road’ is a little bit more romanticised than the reality of a dude driving a truck and spending ten hours a day by
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himself, wishing he had another life.” So the reality was quite, quite different? “Really, the time you spend on the road is spent waxing nostalgic,” says Daughn. “You find yourself slipping into memories. That nostalgia, I think, is the pit that a lot of humans fall in. They wax nostalgic about jobs, or periods of their life that actually sucked, but they want them back because they think they felt alive or felt like something kinetic was happening. You never look at the moment you’re in and think you’re happy, you just look back. I was by myself, seeing landscapes and eating bullshit at truck stops. Maybe Jack Kerouac had similar experiences, but what makes the story worth telling is the fraction of moments where something actually happens.” If ‘All Hell’ was about uncovering cherishable memories during hours of tedium, the-fly.co.uk
