A Conversation with David Wilcox   (continued)

PM: For the sake of your fans who would like to know you even better, why don't you tell us something about you that only a friend of yours might know.

DW: [laughs] I ride unicycles with my son. He rides a 20-inch one that I got two Christmases ago, and I ride a 36-inch wheel. And that's a really big wheel. So we ride hand-in-hand down the street through the neighborhood, and it's really fun.

PM: A thirty-six-inch wheel! [laughs]

DW: Yeah.

PM: So it looks other-worldly.

DW: It's very strange. And I love the whole balance aspect of it. It's such a huge metaphor for me, you know, because a life in balance is my goal.

Right now I'm out on the back deck, looking at these big trees, hundreds of years old. I love living sort of at the edge of the woods, and you can walk for miles into the woods. And I feel very blessed. And there are times when I really think I've got just the best of everything. Every once in a while -- like I was at a photo shoot the other day, and somebody was telling me that to do music at my level is really the best. She was comparing it to other acts that she knows who are so stressed out over all the company involvement in their life, and they don't have a lot of choices, and they're under it.

PM: Yeah.

DW: And she said that to do it at my level is so much better, because I can be the most connected with the audiences, the most connected with my family, the most connected with reality. What I write about has some truth to it because I'm not up in that rarified air, with the fame and all, disconnected from real life. And also, the huge part to her is that I don't have the distraction of being recognized all over, where I'd have to start insulating myself. She said, "I hope you appreciate that you really have it the best that there is."

PM: I really think that's right.

DW: [laughs] And that's so wild for me to hear, because a lot of times I'm frustrated, thinking "What did I do wrong?" I mean, most people that I've played for who've never heard me before say, "My God, why haven't I heard this music?" And I understand about how the music industry works according to fashion and all that stuff. And yet, on a sort of objective level, when I back up and look not so much at the How It Works, but more at the Why Is It This Way, I can say to myself, "It seems to me that this music would serve a lot more people, and I'm just curious why that never happened." In frustration I can sometimes say, "This record is going nowhere, blah, blah, blah." You know? And so it's really fun to hear the other side of the argument, which is that if I were any more distracted by attention, it would not serve me at all.

PM: It would compromise your family and compromise your freedom.

DW: Yeah. That's really wild, isn't it.

PM: Because I'm sure it's a solid and a good living now, and yet you really get to be yourself. It's beautiful.

DW: I've noticed that. I played last night, and I did two sets. The first set was an hour and fifteen, the second set was an hour and forty-five, with a couple encores. And as I looked through what I played and what I didn't, I realized I didn't play any of the hits, and I played probably half stuff that hasn't even been recorded. And the crowd was right there. I realized that somebody who's famous could never do that. [laughing] The crowd would riot. They would say, "Play the hit or we'll kill you." [laughs] And it was just such a treat, because it was like a conversation. It was like, you know, "Instead of talking about what we talked about last time, let's talk about what's happening now" -- all these current songs. And it just felt great. continue

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