Editor’s Note: Last year, singer-songwriter and drummer Dave Purcell released a new album titled Destination with his band Radio Free ABQ. You can read our review here. The group started in summer 2021 when Purcell moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, after three decades of leading successful bands in Cincinnati, Ohio and Chicago.
Some quick backstory: For 13 years and three records, he performed with the band Pike 27, whose unique alternative and roots music garnered sublime reviews and radio airplay, won regional music awards, and earned them opening spots for national acts (Dave Alvin, Tim Easton, Chuck Prophet, Vigilantes of Love). Later on, he founded the band Ghost Man On Second, an instrumental quartet that got popular with a wider range of influences. Following his move to Albuquerque, he drummed for other artists before forming Radio Free ABQ.
Since that band’s recent album release, he’s relocated again—this time to Milwaukee, Wisconsin—and has begun feeling doubts and stress about his current trajectory.
“I crashed emotionally in February with the long process of making and promoting this record, followed by our move, all catching up to me,” Purcell tells SWT.
It lead him to a more happier place.
“The happy outcome is that I finally realized just how much of a toll what the years leading up to this – what I’m now calling The Six Years of Really Fucking Good Times – took on me and I got some help for it (it was even worse than I briefly allude to in the essay),” he says.
Below, Purcell penned an essay for SWT about his journey towards that realization.
“I’ve been rewriting this in my head all this time, with multiple versions competing for what I wanted to say,” he tells us. “Writing this helped me process where I was and where I’m headed, so thank you again for the opportunity to share. As for where I’m headed, I’m happier and healthier, loving our new surroundings, and demoing new songs with a plan to start approaching potential bandmates soon. I already have a great bassist who’s interested.”]
“Is there anybody alive out there?” — Bruce Springsteen
This isn’t just another musician’s blues story — hang in there with me.
Songwriters will tell you that ours is an inherently lonely endeavor. We spend a lot of time alone, mulling over flashes of inspiration in our heads, nurturing them to life with an acoustic guitar in a quiet room, recording demos in a basement studio before giving the songs to bandmates to learn.
Releasing a record as an independent artist in the streaming era is an even lonelier endeavor. When my first band released a cassette in the late 1980s, I was taught to start publicity efforts locally: send press releases to the dailies and alt-weeklies, get your friends and fans excited, and build word of mouth. Do this well and attention would radiate outward to nearby cities — before long, you’d earn a reputation within a few-hundred-mile radius. That approach worked well into the 2000s. New releases were relatively rare, most cities had dedicated music writers, and my peers were still curious about listening to new music, even when it meant paying for it.
Insert the sound of a needle skipping across a vinyl record.
I released Destination with my last band, Radio Free ABQ, in November 2024. Comparing then to now is like comparing apples to Buicks. Streaming services are flooded with an estimated 99,000 new songs every day on interfaces that discourage close listening. Music writers have been laid off. Research shows that our interest in discovering new music generally peaks in our mid-twenties and calcifies by our early thirties. In other words, it’s nearly impossible to get noticed in a wildly oversaturated music market, to find writers to review your music, or to get people who once supported your bands to check out your new record instead of listening to The Queen Is Dead (or Pleased To Meet Me or Parklife) for the 794th time. And yes, I lost money in the process.
Bummer for you, Dave – why does this matter?
It matters because the record documents a journey toward love, connection, and meaning after a six-year stretch that was the darkest of my life. It began with the tragic death of a friend and mentor, continued with my wife experiencing the trauma of a mass shooting, and included the loss of a favorite dog and more than a dozen people — my mother, my sister, close friends, former bandmates. It matters because it’s a record about grieving, surviving, and fighting to find one’s place in a world where the old assumptions have been shattered. It matters because my bandmates and a deeply thoughtful co-producer, Matthew Tobias, put their hearts into it and helped make it the best record of my career.
So, hell yes, I absolutely want people to hear these songs. But if most of the community I helped build for years won’t bother to listen, why should I expect strangers to?
Enter Scummy Water Tower, as well as On Repeat Records, Rosy Overdrive, Add To Wantlist, 3Albums6OldGuys, and ABQ Green Room. These are independent blogs written by people who still care enough to listen closely and write thoughtfully, often showing they understood the stories I told without needing the grisly details behind them. (I’m not one to highlight my troubles in a press release as some artists do — no judgment.)
In a music world run by metrics, algorithms, and social media, these blogs are beautifully, stubbornly human. They don’t rely on hype or Spotify picks to tell them what matters — they listen. They take chances on artists without a PR team or a marketing budget. That act alone, in this numbing age of sensory overload and distraction, feels almost revolutionary.
So, thank you, Scummy Water Tower and the others, for being lifelines for lesser-known artists who have stories to share, and for reminding us that honest music made in basements and small clubs still has a place in the world. Countless artists like me don’t need millions of streams (and won’t pay the price of chasing them). We just need proof that someone’s out there on the other end, listening — one four-minute song at a time. Indeed, there’s somebody alive out there.
Dave Purcell
Contributor
Dave is a Milwaukee-based singer-songwriter and drummer who has played with bands such as Radio Free ABQ, Pike 27 and Ghost Man On Second
