“One of the best singer/songwriters I’ve ever heard.” – NPR All Things Considered host, Bob Bollen.
Nothing could be more of a kiss of success than an endorsement such as this one; there are circles, after all, corners of the coffee shop/guitar store universe where NPR’s kind word is akin to papal blessing. Laid in this instance on troubadour David Dondero for his album Simple Love, the acclaim isn’t a light, pithy statement, but rather, sourced in a vastly creative man whose catalog is as random as his record is sweet. A bedroom 4-track engineer, late of alt-rock obscuria acts such as Sunbrain, hand-picked by Bright Eyed darling Conor Oberst, Dondero is favorably compared to standards like Townes Van Sandt and Woodie Guthrie.
In places, the likeness is striking.
On Simple Love, his newest venture from Oberst’s Team Love Records, Dondero waxes like a street corner storyteller from an American fable. He drives the listener across the landscape from sunny, bay-area Oakland (“Stuck On The Moon”) to arcane, dark southland like Mississippi (aptly, “Mighty Mississippi”) on to the last frontier of Alaska (“Prince William Sound”). Dondero’s ability to weave stories so far flung and onerously vast is held in by the penchant for humanization, sadly drawn characters and personalized landscapes. In summary, it might be best to say that David Dondero is a cinematic folk rock act, something that is seemingly at first consideration, at cross purposes with itself. He is quite capable of stemming the often wide gulf between the personal gravity of his story and the bigger picture symbol he holds out. Travelers unfamiliar with his physical vistas need only recognize their own tale in his.
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