Bob Davoli’s professional career has gone from businessman to musician. Although he has been dedicating more time to writing and recording music lately, he still maintains his current business endeavors as well.
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In his 20s, Davoli started playing the guitar, but soon after, quit to make his family a priority. About 30 years later, he decided to pick it back up again, and from that point on, music became a bigger part of his life.
Davoli’s first song was written when he was almost 60 years old and now at the age of 72, he is excited to debut his first full-length Americana album, Wistfully Yours. This personal album talks a lot about “longing, getting older and looking back on life,” he says.
“It’s kind of cathartic and some of it is biographical. It deals with the dark sides that everyone gets with life and trying to find solace through music and hoping other people might too,” Davoli adds.
Some of the big influences on this album, Davoli recounted, are Bob Dylan and John Prine, whom he found similarities with. “After all is said and done, we had a pretty good run. We had our ups and downs, lots of common ground, etc.”
Davoli told American Songwriter about one song in particular on the album, that turned out to be very important to him because it contains reminiscences of his life as a young boy.
The track, “Transistor Radio and Me,” came from a memory of his childhood when he would escape to find comfort in a treehouse. In this spot, all he had was himself and his transistor radio. The lyrics of this song tell the story of someone who experienced a difficult upbringing and had to deal with the pain of parents fighting and feeling alone.
There is no doubt that a lot of thought went into each word of this song and all the others on Wistfully Yours. Often, it can be difficult to share your personal thoughts and experiences with the world, but Davoli did a wonderful job portraying both of those aspects of his life through his music. He may not have been confident at the start of how it would all turn out, but in the end, he was satisfied.
“I didn’t know if it was going to come out okay, but when I put the headphones on and listened to the whole thing, I said, ‘it works, it definitely works,’” Davoli shared. “I was very pleased with how the production came out.”
As if this album couldn’t get any better, Davoli and his family decided that they would donate all proceeds from the album to the organization, Food Not Bombs—a volunteer movement focused on recovering food that would be wasted and sharing it with the hungry, in a protest against war. Davoli’s son and his son’s girlfriend are involved in this movement, so he felt it would be fitting to choose this organization to benefit.
Wistfully Yours is available for streaming here and the lead single, “Don’t You Let the Darkness Drag You Down” can be heard below:
