David Saw
Daytrotter Session - Feb 21, 2009
- The One I Love
- Broken Down Figure
- Savannah’s World
- Buy My Record
The songs that you’re about to hear are of the faintest light. They are lit like a fancy dinner club and the attire is more spectacular in its lack of complicity (standard suits and ties, solid-colored dresses or skirts), in its lack of being so defined as a sharp image, of something that feels like it’s anytime before nine o’clock at night. It’s where there’s a swaying, woozy, between the main course and dessert sensation – the time prior to and during a cup of winding down coffee – that we find our subject people-watching. David Saw, the London-based songwriter, has a way of blanketing beautiful and desperate situations in a similar way and it comes out as some of the crackling light that the needles of record players seem to always throw out into the conversation. His songs about love, love that isn’t love and what it’s going to take to make it to an older age in as proud of shape as possible are the same as a shaft of blazing sunlight too, channeling down and through a window making all of the fabric particles, skin crumbs and debris floating around in the air look like a white-out snowfall, treating all of the surroundings as fuzzy space. Saw has lately been spending a lot of his time crashing at Ben Taylor’s house, writing and playing songs together. He’s currently out on the road playing in his roommate’s band, adding the exact kind of complement to Taylor’s chilled out, not a damn care in the world aesthetic and even though some of Saw’s own material carries with it some heady and not exactly ideal dilemmas, it’s the same carefree nature that he’s able to lend to all of his songs. He’s heard talking a young, real-life teenager out of wanting to marry him and bare her soul’s darkest problems, making the argument sound like the advice that a father would give to a daughter who came home from junior high school one day inconsolable, destroyed by someone poking fun at her bucked teeth, her clothes or the zit on her forehead. Suddenly she’s wrecked into thinking that no one will ever love her. Saw kindly tells the Internet acquaintance – through a personalized song – that everyone finds love – even the unloveables. It’s not a running theme in his material, but he regularly generates this comforting thought and another – that love comes to those who deserve it and that growing older shouldn’t be approached as the same as growing closer to a funeral. It’s just a fading of light and a bit of patience that will solve all and conquer the dreadful hives of uncertainty that there’s no way of avoiding. Love and aging love them.