Friday, August 30
7:30 PM
at the Barn
The David Wax Museum
$22
7:30 PM
at the Barn
The David Wax Museum
$22
David Wax Museum || You Must Change Your Life
In the presence of the strange digital drone of hospital machines, David Wax’s thoughts turned to
13 songs and the changes they give voice to.
After suddenly and inexplicably collapsing, Wax—half of David Wax Museum alongside wife
and bandmate Suz Slezak—was headed for a heart catheterization in his hometown of Columbia,
Missouri, his doctors suspecting a heart attack. At a moment with more questions than answers,
he hurriedly signed his name to a waiver—and was struck by a revelation.
“Lying there on that stretcher the thing that kept running through my mind was: at least we made
You Must Change Your Life,” Wax recalls. “Whatever else happened, I felt at peace because this
record exists.”
The album, out May 5 on Nine Mile Records, is an openhearted manifesto – a collection that
embodies, then transcends bedrock elements of the band’s 15-year recording career.
For Wax, music has guided every step he holds sacred; he’s followed its palpable power, abiding
by its requisite unpredictability. After graduating at the top of his class at Harvard, he wandered
off an academic path to southern Mexico, finding what he calls “a clear before/after moment in
my life.” There, he studied folk music “at the feet of the masters” and internalized structures and
rhythms that continue to drive the band today. He and Slezak fell in love on their first national
tour, setting in motion a future full of vivid waking dreams. Together (now with their two
children in tow) they’ve logged 1,500 shows in every corner of the globe. From the back of a
pick-up truck in Nome, Alaska at a solstice parade, to a surreal moment in a tent filled with a
thousand Czechs hollering along to their iconic song “Harder Before It Gets Easier,” these
dreams continue to unfold for Wax and Slezak.
Their latest effort encapsulates this wildly winding spirit and delivers the past-, present- and
future-tense promises Wax and Slezak consider their shared purpose as musicians. To borrow
lyrics from early highlight “Luanne,” the duo’s life—just like the album—is a shape-shifter,
fate-twister, truth-sifter, dream-drifter, seam-ripper.
In this way, the album is fit for a world tilted off its axis, colored by a collective resistance to old
norms. Wax and Slezak give listeners permission to answer the whispers around and within
them—Be patient / Don’t tell me that you’re unworthy—affirming and exhorting the pursuit of
new ways of living.
During this season of oddly borrowed time, Slezak crafted her NPR-praised solo debut, Our
Wings May Be Featherless, and initiated what she calls a “rebalancing” of her own creativity.
The result—her power—is undiluted. On You Must Change Your Life, Slezak is a choir, a
conscience, an instrumental trailblazer. And when she takes the lead on “Go Break Some
Hearts,” she delivers a dazzling, dreamy innocence, evoking a kinder, gentler likeness of David
Lynch’s iconic Twin Peaks soundtrack.
David Wax Museum blends the ancient and ever-relevant rhythms of traditional Mexican music
with amber pop hues, their unabashed rock riffs emanating an air of AM radio circa 1975, all
tethered together by seductive harmonies. It’s a seamless tapestry of boundless curiosity, an
artful display of what Wax frames as “the lines blurring and dissolving between musical cultures
and eras.” As it humbly beckons listeners to fulfill its title, You Must Change Your Life sounds
out a thousand minor- and major-key ways one can do just that.
Producer Dan Molad (of Lucius, Coco, JD McPherson) brings a particular brilliance to David
Wax Museum’s makeshift orchestra, an array of instruments bewildering on paper but perfectly
intuitive to the ears. The album features everything from electric guitar and bass clarinet duets to
the large-bodied Mexican huapanguera; tubular bells a la Pet Sounds to Jagger-esque heavy
breathing; fiddles and marimbas adventuring through effects; and a saxophone “pitch-shifted
several octaves into a helium state of excitement,” as Wax puts it. He credits Molad’s instinct
with making the songs “3-D,” each tune inching toward pop glory.
You Must Change Your Life refracts the light of a band whose vibrancy has been globally
recognized by the highest tier of tastemakers. Since their early breakout as a buzz band at the
revered Newport Folk Festival, Wax and Slezak have transmitted their kinetic energy in
platforms including CBS This Morning: Saturday, Tiny Desk Concert, and NPR’s World
Cafe. They have soundtracked love stories on and off screens, from the Netflix #1 show Firefly
Lane to the wedding of US Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg.
Throughout You Must Change Your Life, Wax and Slezak convey how a single response to the
heart’s cry—returning a stolen glance, ripping off a bandage, stepping out in faith—can make
our world over. Pain and peace attend every shift. After all, Changing your life ain’t like
changing clothes, Wax sings on “Your Heart’s a Pinata.” The band has held tightly to this truth,
attending to Wax’s ongoing health journey and reshaping their career with intention. The album
boldly testifies: Your life will change with deliberation, but also in the mere act of living.
The album is a celebration and an invocation, pure and infallible: It’s never too late. What are
you waiting for? You must change your life.