On Sunday, November 22, smack dab in the middle of a grueling East Coast stint on a national tour, David Wax Museum will return home to play the Southern. Fronted by husband and wife duo David Wax (guitar/vocals) and Suz Slezak (violin/vocals), the band will play songs from its new album, Guest House.
As a departure from their previous folk style—a blend of Wax’s Mexo-American and Slezak’s Appalachian and Americana fiddle music—with its driving synthesizers, explosive percussive beats and psychedelic vocal filters, Guest House has been generating quite a stir.
“When I was living in Boston, the term Americana or folk was just this catch-all to describe what everyone was doing,” says Wax, describing the new album. “It was helpful to use that [term] to talk about our music at first, but we’ve found that our hearts feel most shaken, and the band fires on all cylinders, when we’re putting on a rock show.”
The difference between this material—described in a review that appeared in Paste Magazine as “their most adventurous to date,” and by the New York Times as being uncharacteristically replete with “full-bodied arrangements, distortion, and woozy grooves”—and that of the band’s prior outings is tantamount.
Wax, who studied music at Harvard University, was awarded a fellowship in 2006 to travel to Mexico to study with masters of regional forms like son calentano, son huasteco and son jarocho, giving the band leader roots steeped in folk tradition. Combine that with the fact that Slezak—whom Wax met post-fellowship while gigging around Boston—grew up in Virginia Blue Ridge’s bluegrass and old-time fiddle scene, and you have a somewhat strange cross-cultural mix based around the theme of traditionalism.
“What we’ve tried to retain about our folk origins is the warm sound of people playing acoustic instruments together in a room,” says Wax. “But, by embracing more of an indie rock approach, we’ve colored this record with synthesizers, layers of percussion and adventurous sonic processing.”
David Wax Museum rocketed to national acclaim after a brilliant performance at the 2010 Newport Folk Festival (described by NPR as “pure irresistible joy”).
“The mental shift that came with making Guest House helped us feel like we could do anything we wanted,” says Wax. “There were no rules that we had to follow in terms of what was authentic.”
In both instances the idea was to cast off the suffocating constraints of a medium that had been, in a sense, pushed as far as it could go.
Musically speaking, the band was assisted in this metamorphosis by guitarist and producer Josh Kaufman, who sat in a few times on the tour, adding new sounds and textures that they’d never experimented with before. Blown away by the results, Wax was inspired to enlist Kaufman in the effort to create what would eventually become Guest House.
“The songs entered this Technicolor, 3-D world with Josh,” says Wax. “It was just amazing what he brought to the table.”
Beyond assisting in the arrangements, Kaufman suggested that the band focus on capturing the kind of energy it had live, insisting everyone play in the same room in real time, and adding percussions to centralize and strengthen the groove.
“There was a real focus on having as much percussion happening at the same time as possible,” says Wax.
Which, due to the Mexican influences—that stupendous complexity of syncopation, those grooving 6/8 dance rhythms—not only felt extremely natural, but boosted the song’s energy levels monumentally.
Beyond the instrumentation, there are the lyrics, where the notion of growth branches out to encompass both Wax’s and Slezak’s personal and spiritual transformation as well. Namely, the game-changing birth of their first child.
“Suz and I started this band as friends,” says Wax. “But now we’re married and have a child and have our family on the road with us. The stakes are different.”
With Guest House, Wax explores the changes from being, in effect, a free-rambling gypsy musician to a free-rambling gypsy musician faced with the responsibility of raising a child with his bandmate wife. “It’s about being a parent and coming to terms with what your ambition is,” says Wax. “What part of that is essential to who you are, and what part can you let go of? We have to check in with ourselves and ask what we’re doing and why we’re doing it more often now, because we’re not just us putting ourselves through the mental and physical sacrifices of touring anymore.”
In short, by writing and singing about the experience of raising their child on the road —one that, certainly, the majority of people would find very alien—Wax and Slezak seek to capture the joy of their personal journey, and in doing so infuse the music with an irresistible sincerity set against a backdrop of smoldering groove.
–Eric J. Wallace