Cincy Groove

David Berkeley

Interview by Scott Preston

The story of David Berkeley is the story of so many indie musicians: He first sang publicly at age 4 in the company of a traveling saleswoman. They went door to door, and he sang to help her sales. He honed his musical skills at a nursery school run by hippies, where young female teachers wore guitars around their necks (and in David’s memory, nothing else). “My first crush was Miss Judy,” David recalls. “She had an old Gibson and flowers in her hair. I was 5 and had found my calling.

That said, the true uniqueness in David’s music is his gift for melody and his poetic and philosophic lyric writing. “I’ve always been singing, but I came to song writing late,” David says. “I can’t quite say where my melodies come from, but I work long and hard on every word in every song I write.” There is a profound depth in his songs, a refreshing honesty, and his delivery is unaffected. The New York Times’ Jon Pareles praised Berkeley’s “lustrous, melancholy voice,” finding “shades of Tim Buckley and Nick Drake” in David’s music, a comparison also made by Rollingstone,com. Pareles went on to write “as [Berkeley's] melodies ascend to benedictions and consolations, the music shimmers and peals.” Atlanta’s Creative Loafing writes that “Berkeley crafts his songs like watercolor paintings, intimate and introspective.” Relix Magazine calls David “one of the most promising young singers to emerge in recent times.”

Cincy Groove: What brought about the All The Lads & A Lady Tour?

David Berkeley: I ran into my friend Micah Dalton in a Decatur coffee shop a few weeks ago, and he was putting together some dates with a few songwriters that he liked. We had talked about collaborating on things before and this seemed like a perfect chance to do it. Playing shows in the round forces us to work together on the fly–literally learning harmonies during someone else’s performance and jumping up to try out parts in front of the audience. It has an energy that most rehearsed shows don’t have. Read more