David Newberry, Autobiographer

David Newberry is a musician who used to be 'with it', but then they changed what 'it' was.

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Autobiography

(Here's the "professional bios" if you need them).

On one of my first tours, I was afternoon-soundchecking at a pizza bar in Southern Alberta when a day-drunk patron on the descending curve of life approached and asked me what kind of music I play. He let me stumble awhile through an under-prepared explanation of a subject I really should have had a better answer for before cutting me off and stammering:

You know what? Just make me feel something.

At the end of the show, he bought a CD.

And that was it. I made a drunk man in a pizza bar in Alberta feel a feeling. I was the king of the world. I spent the next 10+ years throwing good money after booze, writing songs, singing songs, recording albums, making mostly-drunk mostly-men have feelings, making best friends I rarely got to see, and singlehandedly keeping the rental-car-industrial complex afloat. Sometimes people noticed, and that's all it took to keep the cycle going.

Like everyone else on earth in 2020, I had an album in the bag and was preparing to head out on the road to "give it another go" when the music (and everything else) simply stopped. Frankly, I was tired, and after years of watching album-sales-to-drunk-people-whom-I-made-feel-feelings turn into drunk-people-who-paused-their-playlist-long-enough-to-ask-me-if-I-was-on-Sp*tify, I was ready to take a break.

In 2021, my daughter Magdalena was stillborn, and I more or less forgot everything nice that had ever happened to me. I decided at the time that I would never do anything else, ever again. Later, my son Leonard was born alive, and I have spent the time since with my family, trying to do nice things to make new nice memories.

I still write songs sometimes. I still sing them in public sometimes. I would still like people to notice, but I don't play nice with algorithms. Here we are.

So: What kind of music do I play?

I don't know. I just want to make you feel something.

Go listen if you like. If you want to talk about it, you can drop me a line via davidnewberrymusic [at] gmail [dot] com.

Photo by Meaghan Kelly

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