INTERVIEW // DAVID BRONSON
“You always hope that as you move forward you become better, and better, and touch more people along the way...”
as anyone could. He really gave so much of himself to this. It would never sound the way it sounds without both of us... without anyone of us in there, but he was my teammate, my partner doing this record. I saw your performance on New York Natives’ Rooftop Series, where you were playing “Songbird”. It was amazing to see how powerful it was even with the bare minimum of instrumentation and sound elements. It was really powerful and I think it has to do with the power of the lyrics. Thank you! That really makes me very, very happy. A funny story about that [laughs]: that was the only and first take that we did. We got on that rooftop and they were sort of just doing a run through – it was me and Lautaro [Burgos], and it was like three cool guys shooting that. They had their cameras, they set them up and then they said “We think it’s cool, let us do a run through.” We did it, as you can see in the video, and we were thinking to do it like maybe one or two more times, because they always like to do for video and you never know,
something can go wrong or whatever. But after the run through this woman comes up, out of nowhere, and just starts screaming at us, “Who told you that you could do this here? Do you have a permit? People are working right downstairs, I have my home office. This is bullshit!” That woman was really, really, really angry. I was kind of shocked. [laughs] Wait, she was angry for three minutes of music? Yeah, three minutes of an acoustic guitar and some percussion. She was furious. [laughs] I don’t know if her office was right down below or something... I don’t know but she went apeshit. Dude, it was in the middle of the fuckin’ daytime, it’s not like it was late at night. But wait, she kept screaming, “You better get the fuck out of here. I’m calling the cops.” He had to basically stop because she was out of her mind. [laughs]
of not overthink things and just live life. Absolutely! 100%! That has a lot to do with why that song is a very central one to the record. It’s the first song on the record and it’s the first single we’ve put out. The artwork of the album is, in my mind, heavily linked to that song, and the feeling of that song, and to the notion of kind of moving forward. In that photo [cover of the album] that’s me driving in the car. The background, the kind of fuzzy background... It’s seems to be mountains or something, in the background… Trees... Yes! There are probably mountains over there. That photo was actually taken during one of my tours. It’s basically a picture of me driving and to me is like a metaphor to what I talk on the record, like moving through. I actually wrote “Songbird” in the car. That’s the only song I’ve ever written while driving.
That song has a line that says something like this “But outside I hear a songbird and I think she has it right, she is just singing, she’s not asking why.” Seems that is an indication of your need www.facebook.com/MUSICandRIOTS.Magazine
Questions is out now via Big Arc Records 37