David Brown
Agoura Hills, California  USA
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A Fine Day Indeed
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Not Ready To Fold
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Thunder In My Heart
After over three decades of behind-the-scene engineering and or producing for other artists such as Ray Charles, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks and hundreds of other artists from Barbara Streisand to Guns and Roses, David Brown has finally decided to showcase his own career front-and-center before audiences, leveraging the epic range of his musical talents – singing, songwriting, producing – to focus on Not Ready to Fold, his newly released (2012) CD. This album bears an artistic signature so unique that categorizing it according to ordinary genre niches would be ascribing to the songs far less than their full due. While David’s influences are too numerous to cite, the effect that scores of prominent and lesser known artists have had on his own creative output is one best described as producing a whole that’s uniquely greater than the sum of its parts. David Brown’s work is skillfully and beautifully unorthodox,provocative, vibrant with passion and intensity.
Like so many other artists, David’s love for music surfaced early as a result of the landscape of his environment. At the age of three, he was exposed to music by an uncle who, for a time, played piano for both Frank Sinatra and Frank Sinatra Jr. Although David would soon discover that the discipline required by music lessons didn’t appeal to his more spontaneous nature, his talent for the less academic and more improvisational aspects of making music became aggressively apparent. He was a child who lost himself for hours at a time in a musical universe of his own creating.
Playing and writing songs became David’s safe haven when he found himself wandering through those isolating labyrinths of adolescence that many talented and sensitive youths often confront. His gift for finding a therapeutic sense of wholeness through the expression of music solidified when his father’s job made it necessary for the family to relocate from Los Angeles to Italy. Music enabled David to more easily adapt to this new, intimidating environment that resounded with bewildering cultural dissonances. The only thing that softened his old tendency to retreat more deeply into the sense of separateness that had plagued him back home in the United States was writing songs. As would happen many times in the future as he negotiated the darker twists and turns of his journeys, his life was saved by music.
Back in the United States, David started a popular band in the Seventies called Release, assuming high visibility on the Southern California music scene, playing all original songs, performing a grueling five sets a night. The group acquired a large and devoted following and David was able to hone his singing and other performance skills. It was a tumultuous decade of excess, and drug and alcohol use was the backdrop against which the popular culture shimmered and pulsed with a fatal allure. For many years, David would struggle with cocaine and alcohol issues that held him in a stranglehold – ironically, this ugly struggle forms the point of departure for a number of songs on Not Ready To Fold that strike a pitch of startling, raw-edged beauty. Eventually, the pressure to play cover songs that were blandly recognizable and predictably commercial contributed, along with financial pressures, to the band’s demise.
The money he had earned in Release was less than enough to sustain himself, and he managed to make a steady living by exploiting a background in electronics and landing jobs in recording studios as a technician. From technician he segued to engineering and producing artists.
When David details this period in his life, he expresses gratitude for having had the opportunity to reliably support himself financially while remaining connected the world of music, even if that connection was more peripheral than he might have wished. Yet as the years paved the road forward, it was almost inevitable that he would begin to lose sight of his deepest dreams, since he was no longer actively and directly engaged in their pursuit. Nevertheless, David always kept writing original songs and compositions, punctuated by occasional heartening trips to the recording studio. And in this way, the years passed.
Sometimes it happens that a realization catalyzes change and brings about a sort of now-or-never sense of urgency that is a paradigm shifter for an individual. In David’s case, he saw with crystalline clarity that for years he had been intimidated by the looming Goliath of the record labels, and that he had allowed that intimidation to spawn a host of self-limiting fears, beliefs and ideas. The realization was this: that if he did not reach out and grab his dream now, he never would.
Early in 2011 David decided to embark on a new journey. That journey – writing, arranging, producing, singing, performing and recording new material that summed up his unique perspective and hard-won experience – resulted in the album called Not Ready to Fold.
David Brown
Not Ready To Fold
© 2012 David Brown
     
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