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Alabama Music Office.com goes to the 30A Songwriters Festival 2014 in South Walton County, Florida. This was their 5th year and is one of the very best Songwriters Festivals that I have covered. David Berkeley was at Central Square Records in Seaside to entertain with Bill Titus on guitar and Jordan Katz on trumpet and banjo.

"I went out to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head."
--W.B. Yeats

Itinerant songsmith and author David Berkeley went out into the sagebrush and cactus of New Mexico and found his head was similarly ablaze. Indeed Berkeley's head has been ablaze for some time now, writing songs capable of both breaking and mending the heart.

Berkeley is a New Jersey native, but in the past decade, he's lived in Brooklyn, Atlanta, Berkeley and Corsica. Santa Fe is now home, where he lives with this wife and two young sons. Within months of arriving and still overwhelmed by the palette of reds and browns, the endless open sky, and the frightening lack of water in his new high desert surroundings, Berkeley wrote and recorded his most haunting and personal songs to date.

"The best of the young American songwriters, a voice full of feeling and a big, big heart. And the balls to say what he thinks." -- Boston Phoenix

The result is The Fire in My Head (Straw Man), Berkeley's fifth studio album, recorded in two days at Jono Manson's ramshackle studio in the wilds above town. All the songs were performed live by Berkeley's trio (David on vocals, guitar, percussion and bass; Bill Titus on guitar, keys, organ, drums; and Jordan Katz on trumpet and banjo).

Berkeley's doleful baritone and vulnerable falsetto, called "lustrous and melancholy" by the New York Times, is up front in the mix, showcasing his profoundly elegiac lyrics. Indeed, Berkeley cites Yeats and Melville among his greatest influences. For his unique way with words, the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed Berkeley "a musical poet." He seems even more reflective and more mature than usual in this collection, though, confronting themes of aging, mortality, and the enduring and redemptive power of love.

"Dashing singer-songwriter David Berkeley delivers his warm, thoughtful songs, along with a reliably hilarious line in onstage banter." -- Time Out New York
More at: http://www.davidberkeley.com/bio.php