BIOGRAPHY
About David Champagne
“The songs gradually got less bad and less derivative until, four or five years later, he finished a good one. Then some interesting ones. Then some that were both.”
Back when cars were made of steel, an eight-year-old boy with freckles and patched jeans went to the Prairie Village Shopping Center with his mother. Crossing the Safeway parking lot, he stood in front of the red granite statue of the Prairie Woman and wondered, "Have all the songs in the world been written?" It seemed like every possible combination might already have been used up.
In sixth grade, he wrote a parody of the Jimmy Dean song "Big Bad John" about his primary school teacher, Miss Durr. His classmates liked it, and one of them offered to show it to his uncle, who he said was also a songwriter and happened to be in town from New York. David procrastinated until it was too late. It turned out the uncle was John Kander, who was working on his breakthrough musical, Cabaret.
At fourteen, having left a party at Ginger Cornelius's house near Brush Creek, David had the fantasy that he could go back in time six months with the knowledge of what the popular songs would be. When he returned to the present, he would get credit for writing them.
As a senior in high school, he wrote most of a song while lying in the back seat of Pete Snyder's Pontiac. It was a banal pastiche of Merle Haggard and Frank O'Hara. The songs gradually got less bad and less derivative until, four or five years later, he finished a good one. Then some interesting ones. Then some that were both.
Garage pop for Shane Champagne Band.
Surfin' swamp-a-billy for Pink Cadillac.
Bluesy country for Treat Her Right.
Jazzy talking blues for Jazz Popes.
Retro country duets for The Heygoods.
Postmodern Americana for Agnostic Gospel.
Lyric-driven dream pop for Sunset Engine.
His new project, Morning Camera, has been described as Astral Weeks played by The Velvet Underground.
The goal is still to write songs that are good, interesting, distinctive, familiar, and memorable.
Listen and see if things are going in the right direction.