The Sustained and Passionate Verve of David Ramirez
By Brian D’Ambrosio
Pangs of intense honesty and instinct set David Ramirez in motion. Indeed, the Texas-bred troubadour is defined by the profoundly touching and personal quality of his songs, his reputation for candor unassailable.
“Songwriting is something that I have used over the years to cope with many internal and external things –romantic relationships, abuse, addiction, the church how I was raised,” said Ramirez.
Ramirez, incurably restless since taking his first steps, started writing songs at age 17, an experience that provided him with most wanted feelings of self-acceptance. He was introduced to the power and prize of musical expression by a group of his peers while attending high school at Missouri City, Texas.
“I came out of the womb more emotional that most kids,” said Ramirez. “My folks moved houses and I moved to a different school, and I fell in with the kids who were musicians, the theatre kids, the choir kids, and all of them were into art. They were the ones listening to vinyl and every record on the radio. That launched everything creatively for me. After I was introduced to the art of songwriting, I opened up within myself and learned who I was, and I felt okay with being me, whether I belonged or not.”
After he scribbled some lines in a battered three-ring binder, the rawness and sensitivity of writing had been unearthed, and he valued the means. Eventually, he and some friends mustered up the bravado to show up at the neighborhood pool with a crude sound system and sing and perform for anyone who would listen, or, well, not listen.
While enrolled at a small, private Christian college in Dallas, David Ramirez began to venture out, attending open mic events, and, for more than two years, he plugged in and played just about every Tuesday at one particular coffee house.
“The first song I ever wrote, I remember it like it was yesterday,” said Ramirez. “I never looked back. It was more about the creative process of putting who I was down on paper, and everything that I was feeling about one specific thing. The clarity, the piece of mind, the chance to know myself, to know that feeling – I was hooked. “
In 2009, Ramirez self-released his first full-length album American Soil. And since then he has kept the emotional tone of his art at a high pitch. Though his career hasn’t always matched up with what he has had in mind, the satisfactions and compensations have been many, and Ramirez has never surrendered the burning intensity of his desires. Now and again, he said, it’s even been to his own detriment.
“In my early 30s, I was still coming across as the kid who didn’t care that much,” said Ramirez. “In the past, my entire identity was wrapped up in what I did on stage and I’ve learned the hard way that that’s not a healthy way of living. Ego flooded my relationships and flooded all of my joy and centeredness and my piece of mind, and all of it was influenced and affected by ego. The more I embrace other characteristics of myself beyond music, the healthier I become.”
One of the most exciting songs from Ramirez’s 2015 record Fables is a track titled “New Way of Living,” in which he addresses the cruel discrepancy between expectations and reality and acknowledges that “the best writer I ever met” was a quiet, unassuming plumber from Arkansas who, unlike himself, had no lust for recognition.
“I wrote the first verse before I met that fella in Arkansas,” said Ramirez. “It was a song about writer’s block, the pressure of wanting to be successful because of this creative endeavor of music. I played at a festival in Fayetteville and after the show I was playing songs around the fire with some other musicians and I met this one guy. It was refreshing to see how good he was and how he had no desire to capitalize on it. It was encouraging and inspiring. And it pissed me off. He was writing way beyond his years. We were the same age, and it made me a little jealous.”
In 2017, perhaps Ramirez’s most hypnotic record to date, We’re Not Going Anywhere, was released by Thirty Tigers. Songs come and go in an almost magical, floating light, the artist creating in the works a mood of fantasy and enchantment. While the content is at times heavy, the recording is seemingly timeless, a fluid, stylistic haven of contemplation and pleasure. “Telephone Lovers” is unashamed Ramirez, describing the end of a long distance relationship – two people separated by continents, in fact –told with no hint of grudge, only a devastating composure.
“That song reminded me that you can have a sense of humor when talking about something serious and heartbreaking,” said Ramirez. “Where’s my charger? To be able to say that – a line that can be hurtful but also be playful. This relationship is a drag and it is not sustainable. But the phone dies when you are on FaceTime at the bar. The line is light, but contextually, it’s a very heavy song.”
Over the years Ramirez has bounced back and forth across several canvasses of music – folk, country, pop – the brush-strokes assuming an independent, expressive power, the innate honesty and sad reserve of his storytelling strongly entrenched.
“My father introduced me to melancholy music as a 14 year-old,” said Ramirez. “That was years before I was even playing music. Once I got the guitar in my hands, I was doomed for melancholy writing. But you feel free when you are able to get those dark things out on paper. When I get to sing them, it is extremely freeing, and I don’t feel caged anymore.”
Ramirez, 40, is stocking up with new material and plans to start recording his sixth album in a couple of months. He said that now he is “trusting his gut” and not “overanalyzing” the writings, preserving and exploring them without the larger goal of extrapolating a song or two out of the musings. Following an especially harsh breakup which took about 18 months for him to suitably process, Ramirez said that he resisted the ineluctable impulse to jot down and record a bitter, aggressive breakup record. He added that, as of late, he was been sitting down and “learning how to play the guitar,” finally learning how it operates, instead of solely using it as a ferry to transport all of his feelings.
“I decided not to go down that road and to say no to myself,” said Ramirez. “The impulse was to write about all that I was feeling – the anger, the hurt, the disappointment – but that’s a slippery slope. You could end up with 30, 40 songs of that. That’s lot of material for people to digest if I am just using music as a personal diary. Now that I’m on the other side, I’m getting to tell stories about my dad giving me, as a 10-year-old, a walkman, a cassette of The Cars’ greatest hits, and how I wore that tape out. I’m working on songs of hope. Songs that are abstract. Songs that are more musical and more creative, where I will be taking out my emotions with instruments instead.”
On this night in Roswell, New Mexico, Ramirez rendered the set list with a sustained and passionate verve, an artist fixed aflame on a mild night in between larger gigs. Well-prepared to handle all of the invested listeners – acoustic renditions of “I’m Not Going Anywhere” and “Telephone Lovers” were especially wholehearted – he outfitted himself with enough fervent rock ballads to let the sound soar and emotion go sky-high.
“There is a piece of me that wants to catch that feeling as often as possible,” said Ramirez. “There is a part of me trying to remind myself to be thankful that it happened at all. I don’t require anyone to do or be anything specific. You are there to take something and I’m there to give something.”
Find more information here: https://www.davidramirezmusic.com
Music writer Brian D’Ambrosio may be reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com
