David Wax Museum duo answer life-altering challenges with life-affirming music
After driving some 900 miles from Virginia to his parents’ home in Missouri last Thanksgiving, David Wax wasn’t feeling so hot. He thought a jog on a treadmill might do him good.
“I was playing Clue with our kids. Then I heard this terrible crash,” recalls Suz Slezak, his wife and musical partner in their band David Wax Museum. “I found him convulsing with his tongue out and eyes rolled back — then he got very still. I thought he died in my arms.”
An ER nurse told Slezak her husband had suffered a heart attack. But he hadn’t. Months later, no one’s quite sure what caused him to collapse that day.
“It’s still a bit of a medical mystery,” says Wax. At the time, David Wax Museum was readying to release “You Must Change Your Life,” and he worried that he “might not get to see this album come to light.”
It was released in May, and the day before the couple left on tour, Wax got his doctor’s approval. “We were in the hospital for his final test. They said, ‘He’s clear!’ We said, ‘Great! Because we leave in the morning,’ ” Slezak says with a laugh.
Wax, a 2006 Harvard grad, and Slezak, a 2003 Wellesley grad, met in Boston and formed David Wax Museum, a “Mexo-Americana” band inspired by Wax’s time in Mexico, around 2007.
Fronted by Wax and Slezak, both 41, the band has earned a reputation for its fiery, bombastic live shows.
The couple moved to Charlottesville, Va., in 2013. But they’re bringing it all back to Massachusetts for a date at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod in Yarmouth on Aug. 9 and a sold-out show at the Burren in Somerville on Aug. 10. We called them at home for a personal and wide-ranging interview about some of the life-changing moments they’ve experienced.
Q. Suz, you released a 2022 solo album [“Our Wings May be Featherless”] of personal songs — a friend’s suicide, a traumatic birth.
Slezak: During this tour, I’ve been performing one or two solo songs, and it’s been such a wonderful way to give breadth to the set, because our band songs are so energetic and full of life — and my songs are slow, quiet, and have lots of references to death [laughs]. It’s been fun to share my journey with bipolar diagnosis, and depression and open up on stage.
People, after every show, thank me for talking about depression or bipolar disorder. It’s striking, because mental health should be talked about openly.
Q. You were diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 24, after Wellesley.
Slezak: I graduated, traveled the world studying textiles for a year, and ended up back in my hometown [Free Union, Va.] dreaming of starting a farm school. I experienced my first true mania and crash. I got diagnosed, started meds, and crawled way back out for a year.
The creativity that can happen in a brain on the manic spectrum is quite profound — unfortunately, it has to crash. So I’m grateful for mood stabilizers that I’m still on a journey with.
Q. Why did you move back to Boston in ’06?
Slezak: The [Wellesley] Career Center, ironically, found me a job at McLean Hospital, the premier psychiatric hospital. I was writing fund-raising letters about removing the mental health stigma — and meanwhile never told my boss I had bipolar disorder. I’d sneak out at lunch and participate in patient studies: “Are you bipolar? Get $25 an hour!” [Laughs]
Q. You were embarrassed to tell David about the diagnosis.
Slezak: When I finally got the courage to say, “I’m bipolar, and I take lithium,” he immediately said, “I have acid reflux and take pills for that.” [Laughs]
Q. That’s awesome.
Slezak: He was really good at putting mental health into the same category as physical health.
Q. David, what were you doing?
Wax: I’d just graduated from Harvard. I spent a year in Mexico on a Harvard fellowship to study Mexican folk music. It enabled me to attend musical festivals, fandangos — which are like a Mexican hootenanny. That was a clear turning point in my life. This sense of: I have to change the direction of my life.
Q. Suz, you were playing in bluegrass bands in Boston.
Slezak: Going to old-time jams at the Cantab was my way of meeting boys, meeting people.
David was putting up posters all over Boston: “Do you play the . . .” and a list of every instrument you can think of. “If so, would you like to join my band? Check out my MySpace page.” [Laughs]
I would like to say I saw one of those posters, but I didn’t. We were connected by a mutual friend. I went to his house concert. We started playing. We probably had our first band gig in the fall of 2007.
Q. Your friend Luke died by suicide. You wrote “Why Luke” about him.
Slezak: A couple of the songs are about or for him. I’d never heard of suicide when I was 15. I’d never heard of depression. I don’t know exactly what he was dealing with. But it was such a traumatic event that my own mental health journey has been colored by it.
Q. You also wrote a song about a traumatic birth, “Take Me.”
Slezak: When I sing it live, someone always comes up and thanks me. I joke onstage: It’s weird there aren’t more songs about C-sections, because it’s love and loss and pain and suffering and joy all at the same time, which is exactly what you want in a great song. It’s flabbergasting that there aren’t hundreds of C-section songs.
Q. Are any songs on this new album sparked by personal moments like that? Wax: “Desire” was written when I was in the hospital with my dad. He was diagnosed with leukemia and lymphoma. He’s doing well now but it was pretty touch-and-go for a while. I wrote those lyrics by his bedside.
“Summer Wrapped in Gold” is partly about my relationship to Mexico and Mexican folk music. Trying to reconcile what it means to be from the outside falling in love with this music and trying to honor it but also realizing it’s a complicated relationship fraught with different dynamics that come from being white and outside that culture.
Q. What was it that so captivated you about Mexican music?
Wax: On one level, it was simply seeing a thriving folk music that had this continuous thread going back hundreds of years woven into every aspect of daily life. It’s also this very rich musical tradition that comes from Spanish and Indigenous and African threads coming together. These incredible syncopations.
The title track is based on a Rilke poem [”Archaic Torso of Apollo”]. The last line is: “You must change your life.” It’s about what happens when we interact with art.
I was a research assistant at Harvard, studying in the archives. Then when I was in Mexico on fellowship, I ended up playing in a fandango for a woman’s 100th birthday party. And I thought: This is what I want to be doing. I don’t want to be in the archives — I want to be at the party.
Q. Does it feel like a homecoming to play Boston?
Slezak: It always does. Our deepest, oldest, most diehard connected fans are in Boston. It’s the birth of the band. Our relationship — and the dream of this band — was ignited there. It’s emotional to play Boston.