Introducing David Redd
But seriously, what’s in a name? It’s just an identifier, what we call a thing to try to explain or express something we already know. It’s a way to catalogue or communicate, to point-at with words – but a name, in and of itself, has no actual Capital-T Truth to it, only that which it gets assigned.
Today I’ve decided to take a new name for that part of me that puts music out into the world. It changes nothing of who I have always been. A clean slate for who I am now as an artist, that’s all it is.
David Rothschild is the guy you know who put out some endearingly earnest sad-boy country-folk tunes a few years back. David Redd is the man putting out a new record of rock & roll music. And that’s all you really need to know.
I promise it isn’t quite as pretentious as it all sounds. The truth is, Rothschild is long, hard to spell, and strongly associated with old-money banking families and alt-right conspiracy theories that I’ve got jack shit to do with. For years now I’ve had to scrub comments from random internet trolls off my YouTube videos – and yeah, we’re talking iPhone videos with like 75 views of 22-year-old David playing John Mayer songs in his bedroom that still get “Go back to Israel you Zionist pig” written in the comments once a quarter. So, it mostly just feels like a good business decision[1].
But it’s also a good artistic decision. The music I am about to start releasing is radically different from everything I’ve done before. It’s an evolution back to the music I grew up on, a realization that I should be what I’ve always been – a loud-mouthed kid from New York, not a folksy country boy.
As much as I love Americana music and a good pedal steel guitar, the music I’d been making is not the music that’s in my bones. I grew up on rock & roll. The albums that lived in my dad’s 6-CD car changer were Steely Dan, Dire Straits, Neil Young, and The Band. I know every damn word to Springsteen’s first four records – and will sing every note to all of the sax solos if my guard is down. But I never played this kind of music because I was too scared to touch it and felt unable to make it my own. I’m proud to say that’s no longer the case.
So, as I began to assemble these songs about growing up, coming of age, reclaiming who I am and who I am to become, I also assembled the best damn band in all of Los Angeles to help me make a record that blends that classic music with the modern influences that have also shaped me.
If you wanna be all reductive and #marketing about it, think Bruce Springsteen meets Bon Iver...with a healthy dose of The War on Drugs, Wilco, Julien Baker, and Phoebe Bridgers.
If you want to be precise about it, what it sounds like is David Redd. Here’s just a taste of what I can do.
Stay tuned. This is only the beginning.
-DR
[1] Officially for the record: I am not of the well-known Rothschild family. My ancestors were cattle brokers from a small shtetl in Southeastern Germany. This whole being a successful musician thing would be WAY easier if I were.