15: Fresh Wind Session No. 32: Dave Spalding

FRESH WIND SESSION No. 32

Dave Spalding

Recording Date: 5 August 2024

KNCE 93.5 FM Premiere: 11 August 2024

Substack Premiere: 22 August 2024

There’s a sense of dissatisfaction that runs through the songwriting of Dave Spalding. In his lyrics, laconic put-downs often follow quickly on the heels of what seem like exhalations of hope. For example, in his song, “Never Gave”, he sings: 

“Time heals all wounds”

Quickly following that up with: 

“Or say they say/

I’m not so sure/

I guess I’ll have to wait” 

In another song, “Out For A Pack”, he sings:

“I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes/

And I’m never coming back”

At 67, Spalding has lived through many eras of the music industry. He’s most well known for his work with the group Pell Mell, and the three records he made with that band were released on SST, Geffen, and Matador respectively. An outlier in the 90s alternative scene, the music of Pell Mell is predominantly instrumental. As he told me, most of the reviews of their 1995 album, “Interstate”, marveled at the fact that such a strange album was released by a major label. When the group played a private concert for executives of the Geffen label in LA at the end of the release year, the executives came to the same conclusion and the group was swiftly dropped.

Here is a link to an excellent set of videos capturing the group playing at Rhino Records in Los Angeles around the time of the album’s release. As someone unfamiliar with the group, they provided a great entry-point for me into their sound - and opened up a portal into appreciating their recorded work more deeply.

I originally encountered Spalding in his current guise as a folky singer-songwriter in Taos, playing either solo or with his group Dave Spalding’s Complex. So, I was intrigued to discover that this project of presenting himself as a songwriter, and developing his voice as a singer, was something that he only came to in his 40s. After the dissolution of Pell Mell in the late nineties, he found himself living in NYC for the first time after a stint in New Haven. The cache he carried from his time with Pell Mell was his ticket to entry as part of the burgeoning post-9/11 music scene. It was in that melting pot of songwriters and ambition that he became devoted to developing his lyrical skills and singing voice for the first time.

The first three songs that Spalding plays in his Fresh Wind Session - “The Train Song”, “Channels”, and “Murder” - all date back to that era. During his time in New York, he made a full-length record called “Where I Want To Be”. Though it was never officially released, fragments of it can be heard on his current website. After a few years in New York, he found himself aging out of the cresting indie scene. When his father passed away in the late 2000s, he found himself gravitating back to New Mexico for the first time. As he told me: 

“The main thing that really brought me back [to New Mexico] was that my father passed away. But, I was starting to feel like New York was changing. I would be in Brooklyn, and the L train would pull into the station, and everyone gettin’ off was the same demographic, and I was gettin’ to be a little older than that demographic. And, I started to feel a little weird about it, I guess. And, then my father passed away, and I moved back here to deal with a bunch of stuff, and it sort of dawned on me: what am I doing in New York? I mean, I grew up here. The landscape, it’s in my DNA. And, I’ve still got a lot of friends that I knew from high school and stuff that never left. For somebody who’s been drifting around a lot, I realized: I actually have roots here.”

Currently splitting his time between Taos and Los Angeles, where he plays in the instrumental group Or, Spalding continues to devote himself to his songwriting practice. In the emerging post-lockdown scene in Taos, he’s returned to regularly performing for the first time in almost 20 years. Just this month, he started a weekly gig at the Sagebrush Inn, playing a solo set every Tuesday night with occasional drop-ins from his Complex bandmembers.

I never quite know what to expect when an artist comes to my Heartbreak Hotel Studios to record a Fresh Wind Session. I usually tell them to bring whatever gear they’re currently using in performance, as my sonic goal is to try and capture their current sound in an unvarnished way. In a first, Spalding arrived with both a vocal and guitar pedal board. He currently accompanies himself on an acoustic electric guitar that runs through a Fender amp. So, we put a mic on that, ran my Neumann U67 through his vocal pedal board, and set ourselves up to record. There’s a hunger to play and explore that belies Spalding’s more presentationally droll nature. In the time that I would normally record 5 or 6 songs with an artist, we managed to record 9 of his compositions. Afterwards, he told me that we hadn’t even recorded most of the songs he had planned on performing that afternoon.

Of the six songs that make up the latter part of Spalding’s Fresh Wind session - “Gravity”, “Never Gave”, “Out For A Pack”, “Lucky”, “You Stole My Idea”, and Rain” - it’s the final one that offers the most unvarnished glimpse into Spalding’s POV. It more or less tells a version of his life story up until the time that he wrote in New York City:

I left outta my hometown all tanked up on hope/

Imagination, runaway, clouds mixed up with goals/

You know, I never really felt at home/

I couldn’t say the reasons why, but I felt them in bones

I drifted in that golden state looking for my place/

I met a girl from Ohio and tried to settle down/

You know, I never really felt at home/

I couldn’t say the reasons why, but I left that girl alone

Anymore, I don’t feel much pain/

I’m just a little colder, it’s rollin’ off like rain/

Yeah, well, it’s rollin’ off like rain/

I’m just a little colder, it’s rollin’ off like a rain/

Yeah, we’ll it’s rollin’ off like rain

It may not come through just reading the words, but a sense of hopefulness in the midst of great pain is really felt when you hear Spalding sing the song. Having seen him play a handful of times in town, it’s always the song that’s stayed with me the longest afterwards. I’m so glad I was able to convince him to close out his Fresh Wind session with it.