I haven't heard David's new CD yet, but I've heard all the others and love them. And I know David, and he couldn't be more real. I was born in England, got all the usual hazing after my family emigrated to Canada. My dad was straight-on Bradford, a Yorkshireman through and through; my mum was from one of those unpronounceable towns near Cardiff in Wales.

Eventually their accents shifted, so that they sounded British to the North American ear, but American to the Brits. (I think they call it a mid-Atlantic accent.) Perhaps that's what happened to David. His accent sounds plenty Scots to me, and I have a pretty good ear for accents. Btw, I pick up accents so easily now that strangers sometimes think I'm mocking them. Many of my friends think I'm a Yank.

That's how it goes with accents.

Anyway, David is a poet with the soul of a working man, and that's what he sells, but not in a fake way. He's just being who he is, and that's what moves us.

Balladeer