The Furious Light is the incessant, merciless drive to create... to discover... to uncover… to improve... to evolve. To bring something into existence through sheer will and determination.
Ten years into writing, recording and performing as a solo act, I felt lonely, isolated and angry. My music was not connecting with audiences the way I’d hoped. My friends were scattered across the world, and I’d made little time for them amidst the constant melee of my creative pursuits.
I felt frustrated and lost; and, as I tend to do when I feel that way, I picked up my pen and my guitar and started writing a song. Over the course of the next two years, that song turned into ten. Along the way, I ended up recording an album with my brother in Ohio.
I needed to get away from the idea of “making it” and get back to the practice of “making things” of Dreaming Out Loud… To do away with the hubris, the entitlement, the expectation and get back to the purity of creating something because you cannot help but do so.
I started writing music because I needed to. At age 25, I was newly divorced and had reached a real low-point in my life. I needed a mechanism through which to process the upheaval I was experiencing. I was not very amenable to clinical therapy, so… Music became my therapy. Writing and sharing songs was cathartic and turned something terrible into something positive. My music is still that for me, and such is the guiding principle of my work--to turn a negative into a positive.
My aim, very simply was (and is) to be true to myself, make the best music I can make and not get too caught up in how it may or may not be appreciated and/or perceived.
For years I’ve been “too rock for folk” and “too folk for rock.” This album embraces both extremes and blends them in a way I’ve never been able to before. Some will dig it. Some won’t, but this is exactly the record I needed to make--with precisely the people with whom I wanted to make it: my brother Brian (guitars) producing and my friends Brian Yost (drums) and Tara Hanish (cello).
I’m really proud of their work and the record as a whole. We set out to make something which was honest and raw, as well as sonically engaging. It’s the truest, fullest expression of myself I’ve been able to capture so far.
- David Ullman, May 2015