David Wilcox

David Wilcox is a father, a husband, a citizen and a songwriter. He is also a traveler - an adventurer at his core, always on his way somewhere. So how appropriate is it that the career of David Wilcox, celebrated songwriter and creator of more than 18 albums, began with a bike ride through North Carolina when he was just a teenager? "As my friend and I bicycled the full length of the Blue Ridge Parkway we were asking people that we met, 'Where can we find musicians?' because we were traveling light and didn't have our instruments, and they told us about this a hippie school, Warren Wilson College," he says. He spent a week in Asheville, and decided to attend. "There was this cute little music venue, like 150 people max, and that was the perfect size for me. I was playing there every Tuesday and really learned how to make it fresh, not to just play the same set, but how to respond to the crowd and be spontaneous." It's been that way ever since. Wilcox and his wife Nance Pettit briefly moved away, “but Asheville had its tractor beam on us - it had its gravity. We had to go back." He’s called Asheville home ever since, and from his 1987 debut The Nightshift Watchman through his new album blaze, from his years on A&M through running his own show, Wilcox has primarily sought to find a way to stay always in the moment, to never let his art feel like a routine, to never be afraid to take a chance.