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Watching the Wax Museum come to life

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  LIZ LINDER

Wax, left, and Slezak, pose with the quijada.

Singing a Picasso

Wax takes a learned approach to songwriting that straddles Mexican and American cultures. Lyrically, he doesn’t always draw from his own experience though.

The infectious “Born with a Broken Heart,” which is one of the songs that gets the crowd singing along in a celebratory fervor, comes from a concept that Wax read about in a Saul Bellow book.
  
“I think that the song can sometimes be more honest and have some deeper kernel of truth if you’re able to take yourself out of it,” he says. “You see a painting of something and it looks exactly like a photograph of the thing, but then you see a painting of something and it’s all distorted, an Impressionist or Picasso version – something about that captures the truth of what you’re looking at in a different way.”
Published: August 23, 2011 6:35 p.m.
Last modified: August 23, 2011 6:39 p.m.
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David Wax Museum are in that beautifully hectic state of incline where they say yes to almost everything  that comes their way, and it seems they’re fulfilling the title of their most recent album, “Everything Is Saved.”

“For many years we were booking all the shows ourselves,” says frontman David Wax. “I think that now opportunities are coming knocking and it’s just too hard to turn them down.”

His partner in song, Suz Slezak, says it’s been refreshing to transition from being an opening band that people happen to catch to a band that audiences get there on time to see.

“It’s really a new realm to be able to go to a brand new city and have people singing along to our songs,” she says. “That did not used to happen. So that’s an exciting turning point.”

The band began in Boston in 2007, shortly after Wax returned from the Mexican countryside, where he had begun a yearlong musical fellowship. What he brought back with him were deeper understandings of and a love for the rhythms and instruments of that area. His enthusiasm was so contagious that when he recruited Sle-zak, who primarily played fiddle, he convinced her to invest in an instrument called a quijada, which is an actual donkey jawbone.



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