Audio By Carbonatix
If anyone there anyone especially well suited to our ongoing busking video series, it’s Slaid Cleaves. A native of Austin, Cleaves is the archetypal troubadour: A roving singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar and a sharp eye for storytelling. Give the guy a minute and a video camera and you’ll get a performance at touching, heartbreaking and downright funny. So when Globe Trek Productions set Cleaves up on the patio outside Poor David’s Pub outside downtown Dallas, it was bound to be something special.
See also: Busking with the Toadies: A Video Tour in Downtown Dallas Slaid Cleaves — “Wishbone”
Appropriately, Cleaves picked two vastly different songs for his performance. The first, titled “Still Fighting the War,” chronicles the crippling effects of PTSD on soldiers returning home from service in the Middle East. “It was just really harrowing,” Cleaves says, recalling a photo essay he’d seen in the Denver Post that had inspired the song. “They come up to you at a show and tell you, ‘That’s my song, man.’ It gives you goosebumps, I’ll tell you.”
The other song, “Texas Love Song,” is the flip side of the coin, playful romantic ballad where Cleaves ponders whether not any one person could ever compare to his love of Texas. A real all-rounder, this guy.
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Here’s the video:
