On a frigid January night, a few days before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2000, I was piloting a Texas-plated Volvo down a West Virginia highway. My buddy Tish was in the passenger seat, our friend Jen asleep in the back, and we were pointed in the direction of Chicago, trying to make the 14-hour drive in a night. We’d agreed that one person would sleep, another would drive and the third would stay awake in the passenger seat, keeping watch to make sure the driver stayed awake, and in this way we made our journey safely.

Tish and I were trading stories and music. We’d bonded over a mutual love and admiration for Rich Mullins, and now we were branching out, and she asked me if I’d ever heard of David Wilcox. I hadn’t, I said; she pulled out her CDs, revealing the man’s entire catalog.

You know that music that is in your life, that you know you wouldn’t be the same without? It’s not the same as the stuff you just listen to, say, for fun, or for singing along in the car or cleaning the house. It’s in a world all its own, and it has shaped you. David Wilcox is one of those artists for me, up there with Patty Griffin and Mary Chapin-Carpenter and Rich Mullins, who not only challenge my creativity but taught me how to be a person in the world, how to cope with such great beauty and pain so often in such close proximity and in such blinding quantities. He came along at a time in my life – sorta like now – when I was questioning loudly what it meant to be a man, and it helped to have one here that I could relate to, even just in my stereo.

Anyway so on Friday I got to see David Wilcox perform live for the first time. I won’t waste time on a review except to say it was better even than I’d hoped, and I was blown away and humbled. Rock House Films in Dallas is a fantastic listening room, and David’s even better on guitar than what you hear on his recordings.

Anyway, David’s got a new record coming out on iTunes tomorrow; it’s called Open Hand and the songs he played from it the other night were fantastic. Meantime, here’s video of David playing one of my favorite of his songs, "Rusty Old American Dream:"

So – who are some of the musicians without whose art you wouldn’t be the same person?

UPDATE: David’s new album "Open Hand" is now available on iTunes Plus. I can’t really recommend it highly enough; "Red Eye," "Open Hand," "Outside Door," "Modern World" and "Captain Wanker" are delightful, and "Dream Again" is like the opposite of a protest song about the new administration. Fantastic.