You’re a living compendium of American roots styles. Way back in the day, they were the hardest part. The vocals on this album were the easiest part of it. I really enjoy singing it’s no longer something I do between guitar solos. I’ve learned to sing a whole lot better than I used to. I can’t play as fast as I used to, so I place greater emphasis on rests, which are very important musical notes that are ignored a lot, and on leaving space. How do you feel your playing has evolved in the 42 years since your first album? I’m aware my playing has had to adapt to physical changes. When we caught up with Bromberg by phone at his Wilmington, Delaware, violin shop, where Texas singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz had just paid a visit, we found him sounding chipper and energized-a man on top of his game, but not consumed by it. “I can be selective and choose to have time off.” “I’ve learned I can control touring,” he explains. So as of 2007’s Grammy-nominated Try Me One More Time, he’s a recording and touring musician again. You don’t reach a point where you say, ‘I’m done now.’” “Well,” he elaborates, “you may, because part of making music is reaching that place where you feel it flowing through you. Gary Davis, Bromberg says, “doing this music thing … you never reach nirvana. Reflecting on his five-decade career, which began in earnest as a student of the Piedmont style blues guitar giant Rev. Although Bromberg plays fiddle and pedal steel, too, Only Slightly Mad’s producer, fellow roots guitar MVP Larry Campbell, handles the latter on the new disc. Bromberg continued to voraciously absorb any music that crossed his ears, keeping his chops alight, maintaining his incendiary flat-picking technique and slide approach on guitar, and re-embracing the mandolin. “Things were going very, very well business-wise, except I didn’t ever want to tour again.”ĭuring that break he became an expert in violin building and settled into living a good, relaxed life with his wife, the occasional vocal accompanist and sculptor Nancy Josephson. “At one point I was on the road for two years straight without being home two weeks,” he explains. “These days they have a category for roots music or Americana, but back then they didn’t have those terms.” And while Bromberg’s never been a household name-unless it’s in the households of the many musicians who’ve studied his picking technique and admired his taste, tone, and seemingly infallible precision blended with an unflagging and gentle sense of humor-he’s continued to grow as an artist and a man, even during the 22-year hiatus he took to escape the rat race of touring. In the subsequent decades he recorded roughly 20 more discs with his own bands and played with an enviable list of artists that includes Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, the Eagles, Jerry Jeff Walker, Tom Rush, Carly Simon, John Prine, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Link Wray, and Ringo Starr. It ranges from Johnson’s country blues “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” to Bromberg’s original preaching gospel tune “I’ll Rise Again,” to his first crack at an a cappella British Isles music hall sing-along in “The Strongest Man Alive.”īromberg has operated this way since his 1972 debut David Bromberg, which featured a duet with George Harrison. If that’s the case, the ghosts of Blind Willie Johnson, Pops Staples, and Brendan Behan may have been whispering to Bromberg as he recorded his new album Only Slightly Mad. We wanted to play the music that spoke to us.” “The difference is, me and my bands always dug a little deeper with all the stuff we approached. “I’ve always played whatever I’ve wanted to play,” says the 68-year-old éminence grise of Americana. Pyromaniacs are notorious for returning to the scenes of their crimes, but fretboard burner David Bromberg has always been content to start musical conflagrations and move along - from country to bluegrass to jazz to folk to rock and to blues, sometimes all on the same album.
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