A few months into a place, Dave Dondero gets restless. He's in Austin, Texas for now, but he sounds itchy, so he's probably going to get back on the road soon. The road is his muse. It has already inspired six studio albums and one live one. Dondero, a minimalist in life and song, suggests he might be willing to settle down, but he doesn't want to be tied down, to be burdened.
Restlessness is his muse, too.
Dondero's seventh studio disk, Number Zero With a Bullet, is due out August 3, on Conor Oberst's Team Love label. It spans the wavelike country of “It's Peaceful Here,” the pneumatic, catchy gumbo of “Don't Be Eyeballin' My Po'boy, Boy,” and a haunting, howling wind of a tune about self-denial and self-realization, “All These Fishies Swimmin' Through My Head.”
Dondero keeps the lyrics lean and resonant, the arrangements spare. Solo seems to be how Dondero likes it: The plaintive “Number Zero,” a song about the hollowness of fame, could only have been written by a man in touch with his sorrow, his loneliness. Dondero's gift is making art out of such conditions; he seems to sustain himself that way. His restlessness aligns him with numerous songwriters, but, more significantly, with Jack Kerouac, Jack London and Henry Miller, writer-troubadours Dondero says he “fell in love with early on as a young person.”
Dondero moved around a lot as a kid and has been to all 50 states, though he hasn't yet performed in Delaware or West Virginia. He drives a Honda Element, which works well for sleeping and camping. He's a business major who grew so bored in class at Clemson University in South Carolina he began writing songs. That was in 1986.
“I wanted to be a stock broker,” says Dondero, by phone from Austin. “I learned everything I didn't want to be in that process. I think of all the people I didn't want to be around; everything about it turned me off.” He graduated from Clemson in 1991 and has been “in a lot of bands through the years,” including Sunbrain and This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb. Since the end of the '90s, he's made quite a name for himself as an artist in command of an astonishingly diverse repertoire. Dondero's lyrics are so vivid, so inside, so accurate and detailed, when he rolls through a place pieces of it stick to him like glue. “Wherever you, then there you are,” he sings in the jaunty, tart “Wherever You Go,” a travelogue that plunks the listener in a rodeo. “Wherever you go, you are.”
Dondero likes “playing in bands but it's harder and harder as people get older to keep a band on the road,” he says. “People get married, have kids, and having mortgages and being tied down, you can't travel as much, especially if you're not making money.
"I'm 40 years old, most of my friends are married with kids; around Austin, you can have a band but most of the people in Austin, they can't travel.”
Born in Duluth, in Minnesota's Iron Range, Dondero moved around a lot as a kid after his mother remarried. He went back to Duluth last summer, and the summer before to play at Beaner's Central, a “coffee shop place,” he says. “It's always awesome to get back there; it's times it really feels like home.” He likes playing to appreciative audiences, though he's not concerned with traditional measures of popularity.
“I love to play crowds. It's always a bummer to show up somewhere, and no one comes to your show,” he says. “When you get a little more popularity, you make a little more money and you can stay in a hotel instead of sleeping in a car. I'm all for that.
“I'm not out to be some millionaire, but if there are people at your show it makes your life a little easier. I wouldn't keep doing it if I was just after the money, you know?”
Dave Dondero - "Rothko Chapel" from 2007's Simple Love
/media/Music/rothkochapel.mp3
David Dondero is scheduled to perform, solo, at 7:15 p.m. Sunday, May 23 at the Weapons of Mass Creation festival at Parish Hall & Church, 6205 Detroit Avenue, Cleveland 44102. Check out
www.wmcfest.com for more information.
