David Halley
Stray Dog Talk
© 1991 david halley
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"His music gives country heartbreak a fierce rock kick; his songwriting is good poetry with a bad attitude." San Diego Union-Tribune June 3, 1992
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For many out-of-town attendees, SXSW was a chance to catch highly touted but rarely heard Texas institutions such as singer-songwriter David Halley, whose evocative lyricism and rootsy drive suggest Richard Thompson and The River-era Springsteen, caked in prairie dust. Although his songs have been covered by Joe Ely and the late Keith Whitley, Halley remains unsigned with only a superb 1990 import compilation of independently released cassette material, Stray Dog Talk, to his credit. "The next number is from our album," Halley said with a laugh during his band's galvanic set at the Steamboat. "Too bad you have to take a plane to England to get it."
David Fricke Rolling Stone May 16, 1991
...Enduring mystery of the age: Why hasn't a major label signed David Halley? The brilliant Austin-based singer/songwriter thrilled the crowd at a Saturday show at the local PBS studio where "Austin City Limits" is shot: his great band included master guitarist Rich Brotherton and bassist J. D. Foster. Commenting on Halley's unsigned status, producer and Los Lobos saxman Steve Berlin (who used Halley and Brotherton on his Tish Hinojosa album) remarked, "It's a mass hallucination on the part of the A&R community"...
Thom Duffy Billboard March 30, 1990
Here's an album for people who liked the Eagles but were too hip to admit it. Tom Petty with a brain, Richard Thompson with a heart. David Halley spins out little tales of hard luck love and harder luck life. His spirit shines through these seemingly effortless wonders, bringing a poet's vision to some testy rock with blue country fringes. Guitar works is uniformly superb, ranging from hypnotic jangly solos to feather touch acoustic picking. I'd definitely recommend you give this stray dog a home.
Tabula Rasa Magazine 1994
When the traveling package show "Songwriter: Austin on the Road" came to the Birchmere last Monday night, it resembled nothing so much as barhopping through the Texas capital during South by Southwest. Jo Carol Pierce, David Halley, Michael Fracasso and Jimmy LaFave, each a legitimate headliner at home, sat in chairs on the Birchmere stage and took turns singing one good song after another...The evening's highlights, though, came from Halley, who backed up everyone else with unforced, lyrical guitar fills that reminded one of Richard Thompson. When Halley sang his own songs, whether with the consoling sympathy of "Prayer" or the barbed warning of "Man of Steel" he put together the whole package-words, music, vocals, guitar-as few others can.
Geoffrey Himes The Washington Post Tuesday October 26, 1993
Another one of those Lubbock to Austin transplants? Yes, and more. Some swear Halley is the most talented of the bunch - he's certainly more angry and desperate than Gilmore, Ely, Hancock and company - just this side of crashing and burning.
Last year's Broken Spell (dos) made everyones best list. It gave Halley's record company a good reason to re-release Stray Dog Talk, originally done in 1989 and available on a British import label (Elvis Costello's Demon Records).
There's a line from the song "Darlene" that crystallizes what Halley is all about: "what I like is...sensation." Halley doesn't walk, he races. He doesn't play cards, he stakes his heart on every hand. the lesson Halley imparts is: live like a house on fire and learn not to build houses that will burn. Halley's music is the combustion between heat and light.
Aaron Howard Houston's Public News December 7, 1994
Why Austin's David Halley doesn't have a label deal is like a mathematical equation that leaves you confounded. He can sing. He writes catchy, straight-ahead songs. He plays some fine guitar, too, and has a crack band behind him. It simply makes no sense. Halley proved it all and more in a support slot opening for Rosie Flores. In "Opportunity Knocking," a guitar vamp on each verse turned a rockabilly variation on its side. "Walk the Line" took off like a modern-day Buddy Holly and straight into pop hitsville. There are country-styled flourishes in a few other songs, like "Rain Just Falls," but make no mistake, Halley is a rocker. So are the musicians in his band: drummer Don Harvey on the beat; no-frills guitarist Rich Brotherton, and J. D. Foster on bass. Foster, who's worked with a diverse lot that includes Dwight Yoakam and the Silos, produced a seven song demo tape that's been a hot item around Austin. It's now been picked up along with three more songs by Demon Records U.K. and it is an import worth seeking out. Meanwhile, one has to wonder about American A&R types-given ears but they will not hear...
Darryl Morden Bam Magazine Los Angeles June 1, 1990
The latest graduate of West Texas' thriving singer-songwriter school, Halley remains unsigned in America despite having his songs covered by Joe Ely, Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the late Keith Whitley. Yet another native of Lubbock, Halley's style is less obviously regional than Hancock, Gilmore and Ely. Texas towns and border accordians are kept to a minimum and while there's a country flavoring to songs like "Rain Just Falls" and "If Ever You Need Me," two marvelously poised ballads, Halley is ultimately more of a rocker in the Petty mould. Blessed with a pleasant enough vocal style that positively drips sincerity, Halley's debut is distinguished by some delicately weighted lyrics and the punchy production of J. D. Foster.
Mark Cooper Q Review September 1990
Regardless of the kinds of songs he writes, Halley is a rock songwriter the same way John Hiatt is. Rock 'n' roll has always been more of a context than a strict form, a landscape where Chuck Berry shares space with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, where sensibilties matter as much as the backbeat and where songs move in all directions. David Halley fits perfectly in that picture.
Greg Johnson Texas Life Magazine November/December 1990
Ironically, Brentford-based Demon appears to have taken the lead with Stray Dog Talk which has yet to see the light of day in Halley's homeland. Recorded in Halley's own home, it benefits from the cheap and cheerful approach, which highlights the man's unusual lyrical twists.
"Further" is an allegorical tale where Halley likens his wanderlust to a restless horse while a harmonica wails across the lonesome prairie, and the opening "Live and Learn" is a Dylanesque ramble put to a Tom Petty rhythm track. Halley fits between the musical styles with ease while retaining his own identity throughout.
The Syd Straw duet "Walk the Line" is pure Buddy Holly and Halley's voice on "Rain Just Falls" ("...to the half truths that are always half lies") echoes the fragility of Glen Campbell on Jimmy Webb classics like "Galveston" and "Wichita Lineman".
Terry Staunton New Musical Express August 1990
It's a rainy day in Massachusetts, the house is empty, Paula preparing to be a mother and teaching photography, Fred is at the AP office. I'm surrounded by one typewriter too many and the thought of the things I haven't done, all the writing I want to do that hasn't happened; covered in the memories of bad romances, forced by my circumstances to think of lost loves and too many lonely evenings. I'm playing this tape of David Halley that someone has given me and suddenly I turn to wine and the window, I surrender to memory and enjoy its embrace. It's a long afternoon and a good afternoon and the soundtrack is damn near perfect and I know I've got to hear more. And I do and it's good.
These are songs about love and about memory, about getting there and the journey on the way. Michael Ventura, who can so often put things better than they have any right to be, got at it when he wrote about the first time he heard Halley, that his "...songs kept coming that night, and they've been coming ever since. Whether he sings them quiet or sings them hard, whether it's a whisper in your ear or out-and-out, all-the-way-down- to-the-floor-rocking, this is one of those rare guitar-men who, when he sings for himself, is singing for us."
Louis Black Austin Chronicle
The only act I will mention that I listened to that night is the one I've been yelling at everybody about recently. Yes, folks, I concede that I'm the last kid on the block to discover David Halley, whose latest demo, I think bests the Ely/Hancock/Gilmore axis on its own turf: better songwriting than the first two and a voice almost as good as the third. If he can keep from signing with a label that will lose him in the shuffle, or promote him as some kind of country singer, or otherwise mess with what's a damn near perfect situation, he's got it made.
Ed Ward Austin Chronicle March 17, 1989
...Halley's solo debut, was taped at the singer's house and produced by J. D. Foster (formerly Dwight Yoakam bassist, True Believers, Barnburners). From the complex, affecting rhyme structure of Live and Learn to the sheer sadness of Rain Just Falls, Halley makes a pretty good case for being the premier songwriter in Austin.
Michael MacCambridge - Austin American-Statesman 1989
I don't have many regrets in life, but one of them is that I didn't pen a song lyric like, "I wish hard livin' didn't come so easy to me..." David Halley did, though, and he's written a bunch of other great songs, as well. Yet another of the West Texas expatriates who have enriched Austin music, Halley is a great songwriter and performer and a wizard guitar player. He's even handsome, to boot. (Sorry girls, he's married.)
John T. Davis Austin American-Statesman June 22, 1984
David Halley is a brilliant, evocative songwriter ("Hard Livin''', "Rain Just Falls", and the title track of Jimmie Dale Gilmore's new album Fair and Square, and one of the finer guitar players in a town full of fine guitar players. But it is his songs which stand out, beautifully structured, yet rich in imagery and emotion. In performance he is a pleasure.
Ausitn Chronicle September 16, 1988
...and David Halley, passed on by all the labels who've heard his magnificent demo tape, is going to print it up for sale so the rest of you can hear what I've been raving about.
Ed Ward Austin Chronicle June 23, 1989
David Halley - Simply the best unsigned songwriter in America and when he trades solos with Rich Brotherton, it's reason to holler.
Best Bets Austin American-Statesman
Picking up this tape form the racks of a local record store is akin to catching a performer who ususally plays concert halls in a nightclub performance: It's readily apparent that the talent far exceeds the format in which it's being delivered...Halley's ability to write creative and intriguing songs within an accesible frameworks - an equal parts blend of rock, folk and country - makes his music both critically sound and commercially viable.
Peter Blackstock Austin Chronicle
Finally there are two songs from another old friend. David Halley, a gentleman whose presence in Jimmie Dale's Continental Drifters gives that outfit the double-whammy songwriting power Joe Ely's band had when Jimmie Dale was in it. One, the title track "Fair and Square" is nice enough - a very clever sad song - but the other, "Rain Just Falls" is a real spell, a gorgeous mood and message poem with a power rare indeed in country or any other form. It closes the door quietly on the dense adventure of this album.
Patrick Carr Country Music (reviewing Jimmie Dale Gilmore's Fair and Square on Hightone)
Celebrating his 41st birthday, Halley showed that he remains a master of resigned romanticism whose material deals with difficult emotions in remarkably fluid fashion.
There's something of the slow dazzle in his songwriting, a subtle understatement that never succumbs to cleverness for its own sake but expresses a depth of feeling that gives his songs resonance beyond their deceptive simplicity. Saturday's set emphasized Halley's folkier side, with the guitar complement and vocal harmonies of Brotherton as his only support, though even this setting found Halley tossing off pop hooks that would make Marshall Crenshaw envious. He could well be the best unsigned singer-songwriter in the country, and if the music industry can't figure a way to market him, the strength of songs such as Live and Learn, If Ever You Need Me and Dreamlife speaks for itself.
Don McLeese-Austin American-Statesman January 1993