Musician builds connections in songs, travels

Singer-songwriter David Wilcox often is compared to James Taylor. This puzzles him.

“I think our writing is very different,” he says.

Maybe so. But it’s not just the gentle, acoustic path his songs follow that’s reminiscent of Taylor. There’s also something familiar about Wilcox’s sincere, seemingly indefatigable sunniness. In anticipation of his show Tuesday at Pikes Peak Center’s Studio Bee, he spoke with The Gazette about death, middle school and homemade chocolate.

Gazette: I’ve been listening to your new album, “Vista.” I really like the title track. Was it inspired by a particular mountain vista — say, from Pikes Peak?

Wilcox: No. It’s about my experience being by somebody who was dying.

G: It doesn’t sound like a sad song to me.

W: Not at all. It wasn’t a sad experience. It was a sacred experience. It was like getting a glimpse into this thing we take for granted — being alive.

G: The album has a really laidback, intimate feel. I read that most of the songs are first takes. How were you able to do that?

W: Having a home studio makes it so there’s a lot of time to record. I can wait a day until I’m really feeling that song and I have a good voice . . . The weirdest time was really early in the morning, I woke up and recorded “Let It Go” . . . I carried the mikes outside and finished it. I listened back to it and thought, ‘It’s good, it’s really good.’ If you listen closely, you can hear bird sounds in there.

G: Your family just settled down in Asheville, N.C., after finishing a two-year road trip. What was it like sharing a 28-foot Airstream trailer with a 13-year-old (his son, Nathan, now 14)?

W: Really wonderful. He is such a great kid. I think that the time together really helped us as a family. We had conversations that we wouldn’t have had if we were tucked into our separate bedrooms in our house. When we left, he was 12 years old, and he already had more of that shell, that coolness kids take on. They’re meanest in middle school. But when we were traveling for two or three months, we saw that shell melt away.

G: Where did the trip take you?

W: We did a couple of different routes across the country. We were going north and south with the seasons . . . We stayed with a lot of friends and met a lot of friends. Nance (my wife) was teaching people how to make organic raw chocolate.

G: Organic raw chocolate?

W: It was a phase for us. I could e-mail you the recipe. The difference is that the cacao beans are never heated. They keep all the wonderful enzymes. It tastes better actually. It doesn’t have the bitterness, and it doesn’t make you edgy. You sweeten it with agave and coconut oil and cocoa butter.

G: Let’s talk about religion. In our new album, a few of the songs deal pretty explicitly with religious hypocrisy, like “Good Man.”

W: Yeah, “a good man in the worst sense of the word.” I love singing about the joy that comes with knowing our connection to one another. I think maybe religion in the world as we know it today is not very good at that. Religion is sort of dividing people, like you have your own theological gated community. But even the word “religion” is about connecting — like “ligament,” the root word. It should be about the joy of being a part of a larger organism.

G: You recently made a trip to the Sudan.

W: I had about two hours to make a decision whether or not to go . . . There was a big meeting in the city of Khartum in the Sudan. It was a room that probably held 3,000 people — representatives from all the different tribes and different religions. You know how they have those headphones at the United Nations that translate different languages? They had those, so people could listen to translations of my songs . . . To be in that setting where there was so much tension . . . The love is real. But the fear is real, too. When you’re in the fear, man, the love can’t reach you.

G: I was reading your blog. You recently wrote: “I think that it’s pretty obvious that so many of us are already living in an internal cyber-punk post apocalyptic world, starving at the heart level.” What does that mean?

W: Ha! I wrote that? Sometimes I think I just get going. Well, let’s see, “cyber-punk, post apocalyptic.” I think I’m talking about this thing that happened during my lifetime. Instead of thinking about the future as a place where humanity improves things, people see it as a time when things fall apart . . . We used to have big ideas about what’s possible for humanity. Now it’s like we’re driving a car that’s too old to fix. There are so many people in this world who are like, “We’ll ride it out till it quits.”

G: That’s depressing.

W: I did a funny song called “Reaper Sweepstakes” about the million ways we could die.

G: What’s the worst way?

W: Oh, they’re all good. details

David Wilcox in concert When: 8 p.m. Tuesday Where: Studio Bee, Pikes Peak Center, 190 S. Cascade Ave. Tickets: $27 at ticketswest .com.