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David Mallet's Inch By Inch, Row By Row

Continues To Sow at Eagle Hill Cultural Center

By: - Oct 12, 2011

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When you write songs that other musicians want to sing, and those musicians are as diverse a group as Alison Krauss, Pete Seeger, Hal Ketchum, Emmylou Harris, John Denver and the Muppets, you can be sure you are doing something right. David Mallett burst on to the folk scene in the early ‘70s with his back to the earth anthem, The Garden Song and it has been adopted and adapted by not only the artists listed above, but by a multitude of others, veterans and neophytes alike.

From that start and accompanied by a down east, down home, downright folksy ambiance, David Mallet has built a ready audience devoted to him and an extensive repertoire that he has created over the last four decades. That devotion was in full evidence as the audience at the October 8th concert at Hardwick’s Eagle Hill Cultural Center welcomed him warmly. That devotion and appreciation was further demonstrated with two standing and extended ovations at the end.

The day before the concert, I attended what had been billed as a songwriting workshop with David, but turned out to be more of a rambling narrative of his evolution as a songwriter from that first inspired bit of artistry to the accomplished craftsman he is today. I came away from his presentation though, with the notion that whereas he once wrote songs principally to express an idea, he now wrote songs to write songs. This seems to me to be both his strength and his weakness, an indication of an artist’s transition to craftsman. I don’t see any reason that the two can not co-exist.

With a sensibility somewhere between rural and rustic, David paints dramatic visual images with precise, evocative and memorable phrases.

Hoof beats on your cobblestones, footsteps on the stairs.
The thirst for young adventure and the old sword hanging there.And a trumpet in the distance far beyond the walls of time.
A step, a stance, a morris dance, three roses from the vine.
      from The Candle And The Cape

 It's the last week in June,
near the first quarter moon,
And the summer is coming down warm.

And the corn's in the ground
and the vane's turnin' round,
As it tells of an on-comin' storm.
      from Fire

His choice of words creates a framework with an inherent meter and this in turn determines the melodic form of the song though David indicated that these days he usually starts from a melodic fragment. While it is sheer speculation on my part, I suspect that David’s internal voice has become so confident, so dominant that the results these days when translated into song tend toward the formulaic.

This translates for me into a greater appreciation of David as a poet than as a songster. Of course poets do not get booked and given a stage and recompense to the degree that musicians do,

The concert in my view, and clearly I am in the minority of those who attended, provided a considerable impediment to my appreciation of David’s artistry. His expressions tend to be so intimate, so personal, so evocative that I would prefer to hear him simply recite his work, or as do many others successfully, sing to his own accompaniment.

The audio mix for the first half overwhelmed David’s vocals, but was corrected and much more effectively balanced after intermission. However, I still found the backup band of four, violin, bass, drums and guitar to distract and diffuse the impact of his constructs.

Please do not take this as a criticism of the band. If anything, their competency confounds the finished product, if that product is the content of David’s songs. Furthermore they are there only at the behest and at the direction of David himself.

All in all, this raises issues of the choices an artist must make in the way he packages and delivers his creations to the marketplace. For me, less would have been more.