David Dondero

Related Content

• Win Bright Eyes prize pack, including merch and a pair of tickets to the Fillmore show
  May 19, 2011
• Velocirapture
  January 19, 2012
• Bright Eyes Boulder Theater show announced
  June 6, 2011
• Review: Bright Eyes at the Fillmore, 6/5/11
  June 6, 2011
• Ted Stevens of Cursive: "There's a lot of risks you take in making a record like this."
  February 10, 2012

More About

• David Dondero
• Townes Van Zandt
• Robert Smith
• Social and Behavioral Sciences
• Science and Technology

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Music Newsletter: Keep your thumb on the local music scene with music features, additional online music listings and show picks. We'll also send special ticket offers and music promotions available only to our Music Newsletter subscribers.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

In his anthem "Living and the Dead," road-hungry songwriter David Dondero calls his chosen vocation "highway archeology." Add folk architecture, soul excavation and cardiological spelunking to that job description. Over the past half a decade, Dondero's odometer hasn't slept as he's relentlessly toured the side roads and shitty bars of America, spreading his shaky, open-hearted confessionals like some thrift-store troubadour. If you've ever wondered how Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst might sound if you replaced his Robert Smith pacifier with the broken bottles of Townes Van Zandt and Paul Westerberg, then here you go. Dondero's newest disc, Live at the Hemlock, is a rousing in-concert set that ably follows his gritty, semi-autobio opus, 2003's The Transient. Both open with the rollicking "Living and the Dead," in which the self-styled student of the interstate reveals, "I played the skinny indie white-boy blues/In scuffed-up, military-style shoes." And he still does.