CD Review

The Sentimental Style

David Wilcox
What You Whispered
(Vanguard)

""veritably pulsates with authentic emotionalism" - (Vanguard promotional blurb)

"Authentic emotionalism" sounds like an oxymoron to me - but that's the secret of Wilcox's success. David Wilcox is one of the most popular songwriters and performers of the sentimental style of folk. With his rich, velvety voice, his clean mastery of the guitar and his extended metaphors, he's more of a singing pastor than a poet. These songs do not disturb, but shelter us. Life is good. The pain in it teaches us lessons that help us grow. And the singer-songwriter is teacher, guru, friend. It's largely - but by no means exclusively - this kind of folk music that church coffeehouses around the country have opened their doors to. In fact, Wilcox is one of several folkies who started out as a seminarian - or ended up as one.

The title track does what Wilcox does best - croon. It's a simple love song, suggestive, tender, a little smoky. In the second song, though, he starts with the messages. It's a song about a girl with a tatoo; the indelible ink and the blood it cost are a lasting reminder of her braver, younger self - "before the age of compromise." Great so far - like the first verse of his early song, "Frozen in the Snow." But in the second verse, the tatoo turns out to be just a metaphor for being indelibly marked by an experience. The song boils down to the songwriter telling us that being psychically scarred is like having a tatoo, only invisible. But of course, we only have the metaphor of being psychically "scarred" because someone already noticed this. The "poetic" metaphor of the song is just a tautology. William Carlos Williams' famous dictum is: "No ideas but in things." The poet is supposed to give us things, stories, describing the world in a way that brings out the potential meanings there, bringing it alive with significances. But by the time Wilcox is done here, there's no ink. No blood. No skin. No rebellious, youthful act for us to judge the moxy or foolishness of. It's this kind of disconnection from real things and stories that weakens Wilcox's writing, reducing it to musical moralizing.

"Deeper Still" never even tricks the listener into believing its metaphors have any abiding reality. And it's a telling thing about Wilcox's popularity that this awful poetry gets pride of place - it's the only lyric that's included in the handwritten CD booklet: In the tears you gave to me I found a river to an ocean a concrete sky and a stone cold sea I came to where the emptiness cracked open And all my fears came crashing through and met the fire of my sorrow.... There is no river here. No sea or ocean. No fire. And there is never meant to be. There is no cracking or crashing because there is nothing to crack or crash. If there were an ocean of fears finally crashing on a fire of sorrow, there'd be a lot of steam and hissing....

This is all just a way of talking about his own emotions. A poet conveys depth of feeling by the life with which he endows his subjects. The more powerfully something is evoked ("and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China" "I think I put my shirt on backwards...") the deeper it echoes in us. Here, Wilcox tries to prove that he's gotten through his fear and sadness to reach forgiveness by telling us that he's cried (these sincere tears have been a nearly constant theme in his songs - "Language of the Heart," for instance) and by claiming "I never dreamed how far my heart could go..." My understanding of real poetry is that the poet does dream, tells us the dream, and WE judge how far the heart has gone. Still, there's clearly a strong, popular appeal in this kind of writing. Maybe it's because we get to be this "I" and claim these accomplishments of the heart for ourselves, with all the hard work having been done already.

"Start With the Ending" is also typical of Wilcox's tendency to use his songs to share the wisdom he's gained from experiences that never get described. It begins: "The secret of a happy marriage / maybe you should write this down...." There's a kind of hubris here, both in the implied claim to having a happy marriage himself and the assumption that his advice is worth taking. This hubris should be undercut by the fact that the advice is humorous - the secret is to start your marriage by breaking up. But beyond the humorous premise, the song is all-too earnest in its advice.

For those fans who have enjoyed Wilcox in the past and thought he might have lost his touch in his last couple of albums, this new one stands up nicely to his previous efforts and surpasses all but the first two. The production by Jim Infantino succeeds in capturing a sense of intimacy that this kind of writing needs, and the glimpses of the humor make it breathe a little. Go ahead, pulsate with emotionalism - I won't tell.