‘The State’ of David Boone

Last week, David Boone had a dream. He was standing on the ground, looking at the sky, wishing he could fly. He leapt into the air, but predictably came back down again.

“Then I realized that the very notion of jumping is an up-and-down movement,” recalls Boone. “I’ve already limited my parameters to something I’m familiar with, when what I’m trying to do is unfamiliar to my experience.”

“So I thought, I don’t need to jump; I need to lift. I did that, and I started floating. And then just I flew away.”

It’s a telling fantasy in the world of David Boone, a poetic and prolific Missoula songwriter who has spent the better part of his adult life questioning – sometimes at his own peril – the assumptions that govern our lives in modern society.

Now just 28 years old, Boone has already encapsulated his thoughts and emotions in no fewer than ten albums of his original music. In his ever-growing oeuvre, Boone has proven himself capable of both heart-lifting optimism and dark despair over the state of humanity.

Now comes “The State of the Union,” a new album that he recorded last spring with help from the Mercenaries, a backing band made up of some of this region’s finest young musicians.

From the very first notes of the album’s opening track, “Heaven’s Falling,” it’s clear this isn’t the upbeat Boone singing.

“I’ve been searching through the ages, through a thousand pages / Looking for the answer to break us from our cages,” he whispers over a jittery guitar line, which soon explodes into full-on, full-band musical angst:

So I’m crawling through my veins and I’m searching for the reason
All the songs with meaning have left us with our treason
What’s a boy to do with a God who knows perfection
I’m fed up with these questions I just want direction.

Speaking earlier this week about the album’s inspiration, Boone said that in the wake of his most recent album, the uplifting and hopeful “A Tale of Gold,” he was dogged ever more by a sense that our society is caught in a deepening rut of misguided priorities and selfishness.

“I think I always picture a world where everyone helps one another and we give to one another, but in reality there’s this self preservation and the climbing of the ladder that throws so many good things off course,” he said. “This material specifically deals with that.”

Indeed it does, in eleven tracks of hard-driving rock music that never relent from addressing hard questions about the state of our personal relationships and our society – the “Union” of the album’s title – while longing for breakthrough, for clarity.

“I wanted to tell you / We could be healing or we could keep dying,” he cries at full voice in the album’s raging closer, “We Could Be Flying.” “I wanted to show you / There’s never a ceiling / We could be flying.”

“It’s definitely a darker, more aggressive album,” said Boone. “I think we’re always being tempted to take the easy route, to trade in what’s valuable and what’s lasting for the temporal things, for money, for success. I’m mentally exhausted with thinking about these concepts…I feel like this is my last word on the subject.”

David Boone and the Mercenaries will perform a CD release concert this Friday, Feb. 27, at the Wilma Theatre in Missoula. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; tickets are $18 at the door. Local singer/songwriter Jacob Kuntz will perform an opening set. The concert is a benefit for Mountain Home Montana and the Poverello Center.

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