'Experiencing something with a community': David Wax Museum music duo happy to be back on tour
Touring is a family affair for Suz Slezak and David Wax, the wife-and-husband duo that headline the indie folk band David Wax Museum.
On the eve of their latest tour — one that features a Saturday, Oct. 1 stop at the Payomet Performing Arts Center in North Truro — Slezak is cleaning out the van they travel in with their two children. She’s getting rid of old kids’ toys from the previous tour and loading in new merchandise, records and gear for the road ahead.
“When the kids were babies and toddlers and I was pregnant and nursing on the road, I described it as like an Iron Man marathon — touring is hard and parenting is hard and when you put them together it’s like an incredible feat of willpower and determination,” says Slezak. “But now that they’re older, it has become what I always envisioned it would be, which is this kind of seamless interaction and interconnectedness of my creative life, my partnership and family, and work.”
Between the easier family touring and being able to play live shows again in front of an audience after the pandemic shutdown, Slezak says she has a newfound love for getting on stage — one that will carry over to David Wax Museum’s Cape show.
A meshing of music makes for an interesting sound
Although now based in Slezak’s hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, David Wax Museum got its start in Boston, where both Slezak and Wax were attending college and met through a mutual friend. Wax, who was a student at Harvard University, returned from studying music in Mexico for a year when he started playing in the band with Slezak, a Wellesley College student with a background in bluegrass.
Ironically, neither one of them went to school for music. Slezak studied anthropology and Wax majored in history and literature.
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They played their first show in 2007 at The Burren in Somerville under the current band moniker, which started out as a joke that a friend of Wax’s came up with.
“One of David’s friends was riffing off his last name and the name has just stuck,” explains Slezak.
She plays mostly violin and fiddle, with some accordion, piano and the lap harp mixed in. Wax is primarily on acoustic guitar.
Wax’s experience studying music in Mexico combined with Slezak’s bluegrass-playing makes for an interesting concoction that Selzak says is hard to define and is sometimes referred to as “Mexo-Americana.”
“I feel we have our own strange sound that we’ve come to,” Slezak says. “Maybe strange is the wrong word, but I feel like it’s hard to pin a genre on what we’re doing. It’s in the folk realm, it’s in the Americana realm, the indie folk realm, and I think there’s less pressure to decipher what we do now. We’ve been doing it for 16 years. Whatever people want to call us is fine with us. It’s so hard to put us into a box.”
You may have already seen or heard David Wax Museum perform over the course of the past few years: The group made its TV debut on “CBS This Morning: Saturday” and was featured on NPR’s “World Café.” Not ones to sit around — especially after being used to touring so much — Selzak and Wax also remained busy during the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks in part to a new addition to their backyard.
A ‘renaissance’ at home
In what Slezak describes as a “fateful twist,” the time mandated to stay at home during the pandemic proved to be productive.
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“It happened right before the pandemic, when we met someone who wanted to help us in a big way, and he offered to do a matching fund with fan support to help us build a studio in our backyard,” says Slezak. “I’m sitting here looking at it now and it’s magnificent. It’s very tall, almost like a tiny cathedral made of wood.”
Over the course of the pandemic, Slezak and Wax produced a handful of different albums, one of which was a solo record for Slezak entitled “Our Wings May Be Featherless.” Two others, “Euphoric Ouroboric” and “Remember My Future,” have also been released, marking the band’s first experimentation with DYI home recording. A fourth album is finished and they plan to release it in 2023.
Slezak describes being able to record at home without the thought of the rented-studio clock ticking as “a renaissance” that led to a “light, experimental quality full of passion.”
Slezak and Wax have also doubled the purpose of their new at-home studio by using it as a venue where they can host live performances. One is what they call “Golden Hour,” in which they blindfold the audience members and seat them in the middle of the room and walk around them playing music to give them a “surround-sound experience.”
“It’s a blissful moment when we’re able to walk outside and have people come to us,” says Slezak.
David Wax Museum back on the road
After spending so much time away from touring, Slezak says she was afraid she might never want to go back out on the road again — especially with the home studio/venue now just steps outside their door.
“I had this fear after the pandemic of ‘What if I don’t want to tour anymore?’ I just love being at home, I love my garden and with the new studio I thought ‘Oh, no, I may never want to leave home’ but that wasn’t true,” she says. “When we did our first tour (back) it felt like this reinvigoration of what live music can be and how special it is to be in a room experiencing something with a community.”
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When it comes to the Cape show, those in the audience can expect to hear David Wax Museum’s new and older material, as well as solo songs from Slezak.
“We really treasure it now,” Slezak says about touring. And then, the next minute, she says she has to go vacuum out the “last tour’s Goldfish” from the van.
How to see David Wax Museum
When: 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 1
Where: Payomet Performing Arts Center, 29 Old Dewline Road, North Truro
Tickets: $22, with a discount for members
Reservations: https://payomet.org/
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Cape Cod Music: David Wax Museum on tour at Payomet with indie folk
