Interview: Dave Desmelik
Dave Desmelik is a road warrior.
I’ll allow there may be in that a touch of misnomer, because you’ve likely never met someone as genuinely personable as the Penrose-based songwriter and long-time Asheville-area musical mainstay. But he’s a true troubadour who will pack his guitar on his back and PA in the trunk to get where he needs to go to play his music.
Sometimes that means he’s flying solo with his signature singer/songwriter style. Sometimes he’s shouldering up with one of the many musical friends and collaborators he’s picked up along the way. Sometimes he’s popping out an instrumental set, punching the pedal board and plucking at a plugged-in cigar box guitar. He travels light and adapts to the needs of the gig — 150 or so of them around and outside Asheville last year.
So perhaps Desmelik is a long-haul trucker: he’ll get where he’s got to go, all the while keeping it between the ditches, eyes on the destination ahead. But then again, he’s as local as it gets. When not on tour, he’s almost always onstage somewhere nearby — Doc Brown’s BBQ in Candler, the Iron Horse Station in Hot Springs, The Blue Ridge Beer Garden in Hendersonville, The Oak and Grist Distilling Company in Black Mountain. Seriously: on any given day of the week, you are at most a couple of days and perhaps 20 miles away from a Dave Desmelik show — and that includes a spot at the The Outpost side stage on Saturday, Nov. 18.
So maybe Desmelik is the delivery guy. That may not be the most romantic, rock ‘n roll metaphor I can make for someone with 20 years in the business and 17 albums under his belt — but hear me out: Desmelik delivers. He is reliable. He is tenacious, steadfast, and solid. His music is earthy and elemental, unpretentious and observational, and when he’s performing, his head is in the song he is playing for you and the rest of the audience. He doesn’t believe in half-assing it, and if he did that, he’d be the first to know.
Dave Desmelik: “I'm grateful for every gig and opportunity to play. There are some gigs that are great and some gigs that aren’t. I'm in the trenches a lot, and at those moments I gotta remind myself to close my eyes and be present and stay in the moment. If I'm just playing for myself, then I'm just playing for myself, and that's probably how I approach it anyway even if there are a whole bunch of people out there. If I can get in and play for myself and get into the songs and revisit those emotions where the songs originally came from, it's a better performance. I feel better, and it's authentic. And that's what I want it to be.”
If it seems like I’m driving at a metaphor with some mileage on it — something road-worthy — that’s because Desmelik’s latest release, There and Then (July 1992 - December 1994), has its eyes on the highway and the grand unknowns that lie along great expanses of open asphalt. Drawing from journals and memories from some 30 years ago, Desmelik is revisiting and reflecting on a time when he, like others before him and after him, lit out for parts unknown with not much in the way of a plan or prerequisite — just that it be new.
“It’s time to leave/I need to leave,” he sings on the album’s opening track “Me and Bob Marley,” and it’s such a simple yet transformative statement. It’s also a very “Desmelik” line — straightforward, steering clear of unnecessary scene dressing, and getting right to the heart of the matter.
“I was ready to get out of where I was, not because it was a horrible situation or anything, but because I knew — in my heart, in my gut, in my being, in my soul — that I was never going to be happy on that path. So I got to a point where I said, ‘Fuck this. There's a whole wide world out there, and what’s stopping me from going?’ And I think it's relatable to a lot of people who might feel that way. I was at a point where I wasn't just going to feel that way anymore.”
The great American road trip is practically canon as a rite of passage, and beyond the pull of youthful wanderlust, it also marks a leap into the unknown where the exploration takes place as much inside as it does through the windshield. With There and Then, Desmelik has put together a five-song chronology of his own long ago leap into thin air.
“Me and Bob Marley” and the tracks that follow chart a path into discovery, wildness, second-guesses, and the big question of “what now?” The songwriter’s reflection conjures not only the fascination of new territory in places like Utah, Oregon, and California, but also the untethered unsteadiness of a young man trying to find some footing in the world. Desmelik’s revisitation of those days, he says, was sparked by a family member’s more recent decision to take the leap themselves and head out for new pastures.
“[They] had decided to go off on their own and that was kind of the catalyst for me to remember when I was that age and how I felt. I dug through old journals and pulled out old photographs. It was an emotional process for me. I always put my heart and soul into every song I write, but [on] this project in particular, once I dug into it, it was draining. But in a good way — in the best way, really, because I was kind of transported back there during the writing process. I needed to revisit how I felt so that it could come across in the songs.”
Photo by Ken Volz
You can hear that shifting soil throughout the album — the dreamy discovery in “Rand McNally” that opens with the whooshing ride of a cymbal that sounds like breaking into open sky at the edge of the cloud cover; the improvised patchwork plans and easy-going mellow guitars in “Crazy Life;” the gratitude and kindness of strangers in “New Chapter.” But in each of the songs, you can hear Desmelik out there on the wind, turning over stones to try to uncover something that means something.
In “Risking,” Desmelik finds himself back where he started, wondering if it was all worth it to begin with, and possibly the realization that you can’t outrun discontent — no matter how fast or far you drive. In an album full of folk and Americana flavor, the song is a bold one: moody and brooding, the persistent pulse of a Hammond M3 marking time and popping like the restless synapses of someone trying hard to make the puzzle pieces fit, and Desmelik uses layered vocal tracks to sing over himself, as if to contend with conflicting voices.
“Quite honestly, that was the emotion that I felt. I was confused and scared to a degree that ‘Oh my gosh! I went and did this awesome thing and now I'm back where I started.’ [Now] I'm supposed to find a job, you know, save money. I gotta be a productive member of society, so to speak, and so those spaces in that song correlate to how I was feeling at that point. The space is very intentional.”
In "Risking" Desmelik doesn't avoid discomfort. Instead, he confronts it, and even gives it space to linger. He's not trying to blow smoke or paint a pretty picture he says would be deceptive.
“I think it's necessary as a songwriter to give credence to every emotion that you feel. It's not all milk and honey. It ain't all roses. There are a lot of dark places that a lot of people go through in their lives, and I think conveying that through song is important. You gotta go to those minor keys, those dark places. If you're gonna be a truth teller, you gotta be a truth teller.”
Throughout his collection of albums, Desmalik has refined his way of getting to authenticity. He writes and sings declaratively and doesn’t tend toward cramming in a bunch of embellishment or setting up a punch-line when the simple truth will do. His words are incisive; his lines taught as a telegraph wire.
When he opens “Bob Marley and Me” with the words “I thought I might try growing a beard/That would be something a little bit different for me,” it’s both economical and sturdy enough to hold up the entire conundrum of dissatisfaction he’s chronicling. In that line, he’s not talking about facial hair style any more than Neil Young was talking about housekeeping when he sang “I was thinking maybe I’d get a maid.”
“I'm not up there to sugarcoat anything or bullshit anyone. I'm just up there to do my thing and I hope that comes across. And if it does, great. And if it doesn't, that's OK, too, because in the end I gotta do it for myself. It's my therapy. I need it. Would I survive without it? Yes. Would I be better without it? Probably not.”
Waxing autobiographical in songwriting is a tried-and-true technique, and, in fact, it’s hard to imagine a folk song that doesn’t have some sense of self in there. But with There and Then, Desmelik’s look back is more memoir than that. Some of it is universal, some of it is specific to time and circumstance. When he sings on “Crazy Life” that he “slept in a cemetery behind campus/where it felt safest when it got dark,” or “ran around with no clothes on” at Cougar Hot Springs “just to see how it felt,” these are singular, personal, and real memories, yet it is easy to feel the associated thrill of freedom.
But one of Desmelik’s most effective devices on the album is framing “Me and Bob Marley” with name-drops from the music he surrounded himself with back then: Jerry Garcia, Jane’s Addiction, Cowboy Junkies, Edie Brickell, Pink Floyd, Paul Simon, and the song’s namesake reggae singer. The inclusions are a strong endorsement of the importance of music and its impact on memory and emotion, and, frankly, keeping us company in lonely times. The soundtrack also cleanly pegs Desmelik’s rumination to an early ‘90’s playlist — especially with nods to The Samples and the Atlanta-based deep-cut Follow for Now.
“All of those were bands that influenced me in one way or another, even if I didn't realize it at the time. And that was just a fraction of what I listened to, but I think they all have the common thread of [being] authentic. And that's what drew me to music in the first place.”
Thirty years on, Desmelik has opened that window of time for examination. If you were there then — or if you ever hit the highway westward with nothing but a beat up used car and some gas money — it’ll ring some bells and maybe call up a memory or two that got paved over when it got to be time to hunker down into adulthood. If you weren’t or didn’t, There and Then still reveals the humanist truth that we’re all going to make moves that work out and moves that don’t. The idea is not to be so frightened that you never move at all.
“There comes that time where you realize I don't know shit. You really don't, and at that moment I think you become open — you really become a sponge for information, for learning. You're open to everything and you're willing. You're gonna win some, you’re gonna lose some. You're gonna get hurt. You're gonna find success. You're going to find failure. You're going to trust people you shouldn't trust. And you're going to find love and comfort in places you thought you might never ever find.”
IF YOU GO
Who: Dave Desmelik
When: Saturday, Nov. 18, 7 p.m.
Where: The Outpost sidestage, ashevilleoutpost.com
Tickets: Free
(Photo by Vickie Burick)
