David Knudson “The Only Thing You Have to Change is Everything”
The pandemic happened. We know this as fact. (Well, most of us do.) We know the start date, the down time, the love of Zoom calls and ‘Tiger King,’ etc, etc. We know it’s still going on in some capacity, We all probably know a few people that are sick with COVID. Hell, Weird Al is sick with COVID this week. We know the strange times kicked off in March 2020 but still feel like they’re rearing their ugly head every few days.
What most of us don’t recognize is that the downtime of the pandemic allowed some of us to actually grow.
David Knudson was the lead guitar player in Minus The Bear for almost 18 years. His signature guitar playing was virtuosity unfolding before your eyes. He could make a guitar tapping technique sound like a dance record, or hold a note on that same guitar with Pink Floyd-esque precision. He really knew no limits to what he could accomplish with a guitar and pedal board, and I count myself lucky to have been able to witness that in real time.
What I didn’t know is that David was battling his own demons. “At the end of [Minus the Bear], I had a drinking problem,” Knudson told Guitar World recently.
And I could relate. Towards the end of 2016, I decided to take a year off of a few beers a night, wine all the time, and it radically shifted my habit from over-the-top to mostly non-existent (I maybe manage one drink a week these days). I also went from being angry almost all of the time to finally looking inside, questioning where the anger was coming from, and addressing it.
But this isn’t about me.
For David Knudson, sobriety brought forth a new creative era. Without a band, he got to work creating an at-home studio and exploring sounds. If you reach back into his Instagram, circa 2019, the sounds he was starting to create felt all-new. He wasn’t filling in the blanks between four other band members; he was the band.
In January, Knudson shared a drop down image of a folder on his drive with song names from a new album. In March, he started sharing songs from a new solo record, beginning with “Jealous Time Steals” featuring fellow MTB member Jake Snider on vocals. And it wasn’t MTB by a long shot but it also kinda was. It’s poppy, hopeful, catchy; it gets stuck in my head a lot. It’s also over before you realize it.
And then Knudson dug deep into his catalog with at-home renditions of older songs on Instagram. Old bits from Minus The Bear fan favorites once again came alive, and he even squeezed in a few Botch songs. People took notice. It was a perfect primer for a solo record, and a reflection back on Knudson’s evolution as a songwriter and musician. Circa 2022, I would call it the perfect formula for releasing a solo record (but I also don’t want Dave’s formula to become standard practice.)
Last week, the full-length arrived, and it’s a fantastic deep dive into Knudson’s songwriting abilities. In between catchy, upbeat summer jams are complex, emotional arrangements, with the majority of instrumentation done solo. Sometimes, he’s having fun; other times he’s excising demons. Personally, I’m just glad he’s making music again.
“I’ve been sober for about two-and-a-half years now; this record wouldn’t exist if I was still hitting the bottle. I haven’t felt this level of creative passion in years,” Knudson told Guitar World.
And in that process, he seems to have re-discovered his love for simply making music. As much as we still hear about the horrors of the pandemic, it’s nice to hopefully be near the end, knowing some people used the downtime to learn, to grow, to fall back in love with their first loves.
You can buy the new record from David Knudson here.
