Guitarist / Composer / Lyricist David LaMotte

Thanks to friends Carol Fuller, John Fuller, and their colleague Zach, I attended a private concert in a backwoods venue behind a home north of Kennesaw, Georgia. We drove up a gravel lane, parked in grass, walked up past the mud and the railroad ties to a pot luck buffet, paid ten dollars to the host, and picnicked on the lawn where a long-haired guitarist sang in a little gazebo built for singers. Crickets, kids playing, and a frog were all part of the ambience.

The singer/songwriter was David LaMotte ( davidlamotte.com), fifteen years into his recording career, based in North Carolina but reaching worldwide into Europe and to a school named for him in Guatemala.

Early on, he sang an earnest and amusing song that played with a "conceit" in the old John Donne - 17th century style, taking a metaphor (my friend's brain is like a home) to a ridiculous extreme, yet taking it seriously:

Gonna crawl inside your soul
Gonna cook you up a little meal
You've been feeding yourself this garbage
Makes you feel the way you feel
I mean you got junk in your refrigerator
That's way, way overdue. . .

Another song describes a Friday night high school basketball team. With meaningful triple-rhyme (slant, but consistent) and economy of expression, LaMotte pictures the scene. . .

Do you see 23? That whole row is his relatives
His Mom looks sad, sitting over there next to his
Red faced Dad, trying to hold back the expletives

The grandfather "almost went pro" and the Dad had his own dreams, unrealized, "And it looks like the roots will take hold." La Motte plays by association, ""So it's root, root, root for the home team, / 'Cause if they don't win he'll be shamed. . . ."

Good as the lyrics were, and his witty patter, everyone with me was especially impressed by an instrumental number that he used to end his first set. Using his sound equipment's delay, he set up patterns of melody, chords, and rhythm (beating his guitar) that unfolded in canon over each other.

Long hair, casual clothes, Sixties persona -- but a serious musician and lyricist in the vein of Joni Mitchell, playing with different tunings and sounds, thick chords, and counterpoint. He's wise enough to know that not all poetry makes good lyrics, and not all good lyrics are poetry.