Highlights of Performance History

cartoon: Malik Zidi

Singer-songwriter David Francis held a residency at the BMW Bar in NYC from 1999 until its closing in 2001.

BMW frequenter the late Giorgio Gomelsky, former manager of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, wrote the first serious criticism of David’s music.

The late Maureen Holm, organizer of Carnegie Hall’s Lyric Recovery Festival, featured David in a series of readings and music. He also composed music for a revue at LaMaMa ETC Theatre.

His eponymous debut album, released in 2001, caused a buzz in the Village, where it was surreptitiously placed in jukeboxes by fans.

Fake Valentine was recorded in 2003 with top NYC session musicians and engineered by Jeff Philips. The album garnered editor’s picks in the underground press and e-zines, while exposure on radio and podcasts further expanded David’s reputation. That year, he participated in WUMB’s Bazaar of the Stars in Boston.

In 2006 he toured England twice, and was interviewed on BBC and other radio. Fake Valentine gained momentum through further airplay and reviews in the UK and Europe.

Poet George Dickerson and David collaborated on two highly-acclaimed poetry/music shows in NYC.

The next year David released Poems, an album of 18 poems set to 18 pieces of music. This radical departure received excellent reviews and was played on poetry radio programs and, as a coup, some music shows.

NYCBigCityLit published his article “Utterance and Hum: The Difference Between Poem and Song.” His poetry was published in a number of US and UK magazines.

David embarked on a music and poetry tour of England in 2008, reading and singing at venues across the country.

Early in 2009, Monochrome Records released an EP Anthem for Green England by David Francis & The Global Village. The title song, written on tour in 2008, protests the UK government’s plan to destroy 910 acres of green fields to build an “eco-town.” BBC Radio interviewed producer John Mono, and the story of the song was picked up by the press.

In July 2009 David was invited to lecture at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution. The same month, the UK government announced that for the time being it had abandoned its “eco-town” proposal.

Much of 2010 David spent in England planning and recording his fourth album, to be released by Monochrome Museum. In the fall, a short story was published, as well as an essay. Oilcan Press brought out Always/Far, a book of song lyrics from the first two albums, illustrated with black-and-white drawings by the author.

Five new short stories appeared in US and UK magazines. The end of 2011 saw the release of On a Shingle Near Yapton, featuring “Anthem for Green England.”

“Anthem” received reviews and radio play in 2012. It was also a prolific year for short stories: eight were published. After a hand injury forced David to cancel a tour of England, he resumed work on a long-shelved film project about his music…

More fiction came in 2013, a poetry residency at Swans Commentary magazine, and two sonnets were included in the book The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of Sonnets of the Early Third Millennium. David played concerts in New York and Connecticut.

On October 28, 2013 his “musical documentary collage” Village Folksinger premiered to an enthusiastic audience with a lively Q&A at Anthology Film Archives in NYC.

A second documentary Projection was produced in April 2014. That October David released his fifth album Cassette, made entirely from pre-recorded cassette tapes, accompanied by a video “Commercial for Cassette.”

Village Folksinger was selected by NewFilmmakers New York to be screened on January 3, 2015. The film also screened at the Center for Progressive Therapies in Manchester, Connecticut and the Gulf Coast Film & Video Festival in Houston, Texas.

In March/April David digitized his reel-to-reel tapes from the past – 26 hours – and made an hour-and-a-half work about his youthful influences of folk, blues, rock, jazz and classical music. Memory Journey was released in December 2015, with an event held April 8, 2016 in NYC comprised of an exhibition of original drawings and photos from the 1970’s, a live performance and Q&A.

In October Radio Wildfire hosted the European premiere of Village Folksinger, a concert, and Q&A at Hermon Chapel Arts Centre in Oswestry, England. Improvisation, an album of instrumental compositions, was released in December 2016. On the literary front, over the year some thirty poems appeared in print and online journals.

David resumed work on an archival film project: an anthology of live performances from 2001 to the present. The rules were: no added images or sound, only what was captured onstage with the original audio. Let the songs tell the story. He faced, however, formidable technical challenges. By June 2017 a finished 28-minute version comprising nine songs was ready, but still not completely happy with the film, David decided not to release it. Stories Onstage remains “in the can.”

Memory Journey, the film, takes up where Stories Onstage left off. It is a metaphysical biography, or bildungsroman, that covers an artist’s life from birth to nineteen. A symbolist film about youth and time, as David called it, a kaleidoscope of images and themes set to his early music. Memory Journey was screened with a Q&A at Anthology Film Archives in New York on December 7, 2018.

In 2019 David performed in five “Tuesdays at Lady Stardust” in the East Village. One of these was as a featured poet. The shows were taped for a future film. In June, Memory Journey was shown with Robert O’Haire’s Cecil Taylor – In Context, with Q&A’s, in a Brooklyn garden. During the year David was also busy preparing a poetry manuscript. Poems from Argentina, his first collection, was published by Kelsay Books in November 2019.

The party/launch for the new book was held in January 2020. This intimate gathering, in a loft, included a recitation and Q&A. David participated in a group reading for Big City Lit magazine in February, and was featured in Su Polo’s Saturn Series in Manhattan. Three more readings were scheduled, when the worldwide pandemic hit. Despite this devastating event, David knew he was fortunate to happen to be working alone, not dependent on a sound engineer or video editor, and concentrated on a follow-up manuscript. Besides publishing many poems in magazines, he regularly appeared in The Green Pavilion online poetry meetings.

David was featured in the Brownstone Poets Zoom event in April 2021. He also featured in the first “A Persistence of Cormorants” Summer Poetry Series on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn in June 2021; returning in June 2022 and October 2022. In May his publisher Karen Kelsay came to town and he attended and recited. Toward the end of the year, actor Edgar Oliver and David did a “read-through” of three of his short plays to a rapt audience.

He was the music feature for the Green Pavilion Poetry Event in January 2023. And one of the poetry features at “A Persistence of Cormorants” Outdoor Summer Series in July. In November a new collection of poems New York Revery was published by Cyberwit.net.