With lines that murder like:

• “His laughter is like a bar fight running at half speed.”
• “We have crashed the streets as echoes fleeing dreams.“
• “He saw the bodies slumped in chairs like tortured wicks, the faces sagging like used cigarettes.“

He evokes gruesome beauty, bold-faced truth, hard-won compassion. He sets other people’s shoes before you, helps you try them on, and then takes you for a mile-long walk.

And all that is just on the page.

In 2009, his work was featured on the face-melting intro and outro tracks of the DLRN ep “No More Heroes”, an entire album which is well worth checking out. The intro, also titled “No More Heroes”, is a surreal journey through the bowels of the metropolitan night, a dystopic vision of despair and disappointment, the pressure of bills to pay and the defeat of living inside a system where the house always wins. And the outro, “Grandfather Jensen”, picks up where the intro left off, following a mysterious old man, a street-corner prophet, soothsaying the dooms and victories of how we choose to carry ourselves through our lives, that in the end the fact of our successes or failures are carried in the power of our own choices. Both tracks are beautiful, breath-taking, worthy of standing ovation.

The hurricane-force of his writing ability is matched only by the jaw-dropping power of his performance. To witness his stage show is to be broken open utterly. The combination of his accomplished acting background and the sincerity of his words and delivery serves to leave audiences ringing, breathless, and understandably speechless. His live performances being few and far between, David Scott is the best kept secret of California literary scenes.

If you haven’t yet heard of D. Scott, it is high time that you did.

His website would be a good place to start:
www.spacesickdiaries.com

Waterkeeper floats upon the clear ringing of Daly’s vocals and the sometimes head-spinning fervor of her piano work.  The minimal arrangement works well, occasionally married to the wistful wails of fiddle and cello on songs such as “Apple Tree” and “The Hinterlands”, or the thoughtful intensity of the trombone on “Crafter”.  Daly comes from a folk tradition with its roots in earthy places.  Inside these songs one can feel the changing of the seasons, the running of rivers, the hard beat of the sun, the burn of snow, the solidity of the forest, and always the movement of a journey whose destination is uncertain, yet assured.  These songs make their home in the land.

Daly’s true artistry lies in her ability to move deftly from soft, somber, melancholic balladeering to sweeping cinematic fullness in the space of a moment.  Just as potent is her ability to hit the brakes and stop on a dime, using moments of silence as punctuation to draw out spaces of emotional intensity, before jumping back off the cliff into the terrifying bliss of musical free-fall.  Waterkeeper breathes in all the right places.

The more subdued tracks on the album, like “Dark Little Bird”, “Crafter” and “Like The Sea” are graceful hieroglyphics of simple beauty, in the mood of dancing light, gentle-moving wind chimes, or the first autumn rains.  But at the height of her power, in songs like “Fire Find Your Way”, “The Hinterlands”, and “Apple Tree”, Daly draws one into the emotional space of the lone passenger of a driverless carriage, drawn by horses gone mad, careening over the narrow roads of the vertiginous heights of a snow-covered mountain pass, through suicide turns at breakneck speed, only to emerge pounding-chested and breathless, somehow miraculously unscathed.
–
-Joseph Boyle
Oakland, CA 2010

Sample Tracks:
“Fire Find Your Way”
“Apple Tree”

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