David Wax Museum with Edmund Wayne and Ben Fisher

David Wax Museum

When future music historians look back at the strong currents circulating between the Americas in the 21st century, they will find Los Lobos, Calexico, and a charismatic, lanky Missourian singing tight harmony with a Southern belle rattling the jawbone of a donkey. David Wax and Suz Slezak form the artistic core of the David Wax Museum, and together with multi-instrumentalist Greg Glassman, fuse traditional Mexican folk with American roots and indie rock to create a Mexo-Americana aesthetic. Combining Latin rhythms, infectious melodies, and call-and-response hollering, DWM was hailed by TIME for its “virtuosic musical skill and virtuous harmonies” and has built a reputation among concertgoers all over the U.S, Canada, Europe and China for “kicking up a cloud of excitement with their high-energy border-crossing sensibility” (The New Yorker). With the release of Knock Knock Get Up (September 2012), David Wax Museum has reached a level of cross-cultural integration and musical fluency that allows them to speak electrifying and heartfelt poetry with a tongue that is wholly their own. 

Knock Knock Get Up is a fiercely original, rhythmically undeniable love letter to the Museum’s growing global audience. It’s peppered with field recordings and natural sounds from the city of Santiago, Tuxtla in the Mexican state of Veracruz. From deep in sun-drenched southern Mexico where most of the album’s songs were conceived, the earliest version of Knock Knock Get Up traveled all the way to the frozen winter landscape of the Great North Sound Society in southern Maine. The album is the band’s second made in collaboration with producer Sam Kassirer (Josh Ritter), and was recorded in a month-long marathon at Kassirer’s rustic farmhouse studio in January 2012. The Wax Museum’s fourth LP is a mature and playful evolution of the band’s sound: classical Mexican strumming patterns are translated onto electric guitars sporting halos of fuzz; the leona, a deep-voiced traditional Mexican guitar plays licks like an old-time, stand-up bass; and the track “Vivian” was first written as a bluegrass hoedown before it grew a Caribbean inspired accordion hook and a Brazilian drum part in the studio. With an expanded musical palate of autoharps, organs and mariachi trumpet loops, Knock Knock Get Up is gritty, intoxicating and vibrantly lush. 

Edmund Wayne

Ben Fisher

Ben Fisher was born clutching a copy of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited on cassette. Through his middle and high school years, he was ridiculed for listening to John Prine and Joan Baez instead of Nelly and Lil’ Jon. After being hit in the face with a baseball, and consistently being picked last for recess football games, he stopped playing sports and decided that a less aerobic past time was better for him, so he picked up the guitar. On any given day, you may be able to find him busking for loose change in front of the UW bookstore or at the Ballard Farmer’s Market. Chances are, you’ll mistake him for a homeless person.