David Ford 'Songs For The Road' album

David Ford has released his album, Songs For The Road, last April 2008 on Original Signal Recordings, his first for the artist development company. Songs For The Road comes two years after his acclaimed debut, I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I’ve Caused (Columbia, 2006). Heralded by Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, and Elle, among others, the first album even moved The New York Times to write, “Like Damien Rice and Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, Mr. Ford builds stately, inexorable crescendos...”

“When I started making records,” David Ford grins, “I said I wanted them to be emotionally fraught processes, like I’d survived a war. Now I can safely say, I want to make a really easy one!” And he grins again. Or was that a grimace?

Nobody said it was going to be easy but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Songs For The Road (out April 2008 on Original Signal Recordings), Ford’s successor to his 2006 debut I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I’ve Caused (Columbia), is so good it’s worth all the pain. It’s another deftly contained nine-song package, short in time (running at 37 minutes) but epic in content. All human emotions are here – fear and loathing, love and loneliness, anxiety and release – creating a record radiating resilience and hope even if it ends with “probably the saddest song I’ve ever written.”

“Shit happens but if it doesn’t kill you, get up and keep moving forward.” That’s how Ford sees it, and this struggle informs both his ongoing troubadour-style existence and the process of knocking Songs For The Road into shape. He sculpted I Sincerely Apologise… in the cellar of his Sussex flat over a period of 18 months. Upon its release, the album was critically lauded across the board for its utterly persuasive tunes, searing honesty, politico-social protest (“State Of The Union”), and generous dose of self-lacerating wit: “Cheer Up (You Miserable Fuck)” wasn’t just a contender for song title of the year, but an emotion we can all identify with – but may not like to admit.

Following the release of I Sincerely Apologise…, Ford toured Britain, Australia, Canada, and America for most of 2005 and 2006. He ventured forth with tour-de-force performances of defiant melodies and words, equipped only with guitars and a loop-generating machine to build up layers beneath him as if a whole charged band was backing him, unseen in the wings.

His experience of playing American shows was especially poignant. He played SXSW four times in March 2006, during which he was asked by Elliot Roberts (Neil Young’s long-standing manager) for another copy of the album “for Neil;” after his NYC debut, Ford was invited by Springsteen’s manager to the Boss’ own rehearsal room; and, following an East coast tour with KT Tunstall, he was invited by Robert de Niro to play the Tribeca Film Festival launch party alongside Elvis Costello and New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint.

After a four-week stint with Gomez, Ford made his television debut on NBC’s nationwide show Last Call with Carson Daly and taped a two-song performance. More sold out shows and an appearance at the prestigious Bonnaroo Festival followed, as did dates in Australia and again in North America. At Canada’s first V Festival, the Toronto Star described Ford as, “sounding like a hurricane in a nursery…we witnessed the greatest performance of the whole weekend.” After tours with Aimee Mann and Ray Lamontagne, Ford’s second song aired on an episode of Carson Daly, debuting a tune called “Song For the Road” to immediate acclaim from the viewers.

The song epitomizes the troubadour’s dilemma: acclaim and reward followed by an empty hotel room. “Travelling around and singing songs,” Ford declares, “I absolutely love it with all my being, and in many ways I wouldn’t have it any other way. But you can get lonesome and melancholic. I got married a couple of years ago, and almost instantly had to spend so much time away from home. I’m prone to bouts of homesickness, missing home and my loved ones.”

Coming back to Eastbourne with the task of making a second album, Ford worked alone again in his cellar, but slowly realized that some of his new songs required more than DIY magic. So he brought in highly regarded record maker James Brown (Nine Inch Nails, The Killers, Ash) to co-produce five of the tracks. After Brown went back to the States, Ford recruited the production team of Kevin Bacon and Jonathan Quarmby (Plan B, Get Cape, Ian Brown) to bring their mixing skills to the final four tracks.

“My first album was basically bedroom demos with ideas way above their station,” he says. “This one sounds more like a record.”

Songs For The Road broadens the sound of I Sincerely Apologise… without diluting the grit and character that shaped that first album. “I don’t like long records,” says Ford. “It’s the same with live shows, I don’t like anyone playing for over an hour. I always want my records to be looked at as a complete body of work, with a beginning and an end and movement between, like you’ve experienced a journey.”

Though he is never less than forthright about his views and his feelings, Songs For The Road is by no means a catalogue of confessionals: Ford is a storyteller too. “A lot of the time, I get accused of writing very personal songs and laying my heart bare, when in actual fact, it’s not always me. I’d hate to think I was as whiny as the character of these songs! If I only wrote about me, I’d probably end up with a massive spew of clichés, which would be massively uninteresting, so sometimes you have to empathize, to put yourself in another’s position.”

Soon Ford will be hitting the road again, either solo or with a band made up of his local friends The Late Greats, with whom he’s played before. Either way, he’ll be taking himself and his characters for another walk along the line between elation and despair, pain and gain. But if anyone is going to sing about these truisms, let it be David Ford.

track by track
“Go To Hell”
“It’s good to hit the ground running! I always wanted this to be the first track because of the way it starts, with a long string part. Thematically, it refers to the first album too, about apology and regret, and a little smattering of retribution, so it seemed like a conduit from that album to this one, to ease you in gently. It’s about some arrogant prick who thinks he can turn up out of the blue and behave as he likes, and then gets told to go to hell. It’s a bit of a girl-power thing, but from a man’s perspective.”
“And with that smile that says ‘yeah well I knew you’d wait for me’ / I can hear you say the day I fall down at your feet / go to hell.”

“Decimate”
“I write pop songs occasionally. I can’t remember much of where that song came from apart from I was on tour. It’s a positive song about inviting someone to lay all their problems on you, to take their hardships and lighten their load, wanting everything to be OK. It’s kind of like a love song.”
“Let’s take a walk out on the broken glass”

“I’m Alright Now”
“It’s about surviving hardship and finding happiness at the end of it, once you’ve ridden the storm. It’s like you don’t really appreciate the good times until you’ve had the awful times first. I like to write hopeful songs. It’s more in the voice of somebody else, but I can relate to the character, though I never had the drug problem alluded to in the song.”
“And every scar sits like a marker / every line on the face is a small souvenir.”

“Nobody Tells Me What To Do”
“The character is some sad figure in a bar, going on about how great it is to be footloose and fancy free, with no one telling him what to do, but actually he’s deeply sad, lonely and deluded. Musically, it’s not in that vein, but I listen to lots of Tom Waits, and I love that ‘sad barfly propping up the bar’ vibe from his work in the ‘70s. It’s certainly not about me. Occasionally I get drunk but I’m quite a merry drunk, and then an unconscious drunk!”
“Well I’ve got nothing to explain / so will you give me the same again?”

“… And So You Fell”
“I intended to end the album with the title track, but I understand why it should come up earlier on the album, and this was the other obvious choice to go last. You have to leave the listener with something utterly poignant, and though this song isn’t massively positive - in fact it’s out-and-out sad – it’s my favorite song on record, partly because it never gave me any trouble recording it! It’s written for a barmaid at the only nightclub in Lewes, who everyone liked, who had a lot going for her, and then out of the blue, she took her life. She was the least likely person to do so.”
“And friends all stand around and shake their heads and ask how it could be / that nothing broke your fall and so you fell.”

“St. Peter”
“I was in Louisville, Kentucky, me and my best friend on tour around America. This guy from Columbia came out to bring me CDs and make sure we were OK, so we went out with him for several drinks after the show. He seemed like a pretty regular fellow, but when the subject turned to religion - he was a Baptist and me, coming from a line of easy-going atheists – he was adamant I would burn in hell unless I gave my life to Jesus. I said, ‘You know what, I’ll take my chance on the big day when I arrive at heaven’s gate’, and he was livid! Well, when I meet Saint Peter, I can say ‘sorry, I didn’t believe in you but your PR was awful; I did alright anyway, so will you let me in?’”
“I’ve embraced imperfection it’s alright not to win / but I won’t scream down Saint Peter when he don’t let me in.”

“Train”
“It’s like those American folk songs about a guy who got into trouble who’s in with the wrong crowd and goes to jail, when he wants to go home and see his gal. This is that away-from-home feeling but I didn’t want it to be a simple ‘I miss you’ song, so I invented a character who for some reason has gone off seeking adventure but ends up being a bit of a deadbeat and wants to come home again. That’s in some way true of a touring musician.”
“Freedom it’s just some word / I don’t believe has a meaning / so on this train I am leaving”

“Requiem”
“It’s a requiem for the modern age, for all those things that we’re supposed to believe in...like progress. We’re supposed to think ‘you’ve never had it so good’…The lyric makes me think of whining student leftie anthems. It’s so easy to take that view, to get on your high horse, to be upset about the environment but not to do anything about it. I travel by car and plane, and occasionally can’t be arsed to vote in elections, and I make no claim to be anything approaching being part of the solution. But sometimes you just look at things and think ‘this is fucked up.’ With ‘State Of The Union’ and now this song, I’m saying we don’t have a clue as to what the truth of things is. It’s like the message is more important than the truth. Like going to war – as much as we the public like to think we’re politically aware, we’re never going to know. The lyric put me in mind of ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding,’ which I absolutely love. I don’t want to rip Dylan off but if you have a song format that seems to work, it’s nice to give a nod in that direction.”
“Every administration blames the one from last year / so when consequence calls there will be nobody here.”

“Song For The Road”
“I had it before the first album came out, and I’ve been playing it every live show for the last year or so, so I always knew it would be a key song on this record. I’ve done a horrific amount of travelling and touring in support of the first album, so though I sometimes don’t like to take the obvious choice for the title track of a record, sometimes it’s the right thing to do.”
“Now I know someday this all will be over and it’s hard to say what most will I miss / Just give me one way to spend my last moments alive I choose this I choose this I choose this.”

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David Ford - Songs For The Road