David Mallett

Years at Winfield: 

If you grow up in a small town, as David Mallett did, you can't help but learn its stories. He knows the factory work, the fieldwork, the memories of summer dances, the loves and losses, and the stunning incidents of courage and despair. People everywhere understand what David Mallett's songs are about. They are rooted in place, they speak to the essential things that move us all. His songs have achieved international acclaim, and one, "The Garden Song", has been translated into several languages. The source of this well-traveled music is life in a rural, small town in Maine where there is still a main street, and you can still find old barns and backyard gardens.

He has eleven albums to his name. Other singers who have recorded his songs include Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Hal Ketchum, Pete Seeger, Kathy Mattea, John Denver and even the Muppets. The songs Mallett writes and sings are filled with passion, evocative imagery, and a sense of the inevitable passage of time. When he is not on tour, the place where he makes his songs is in his writing room in an old farmhouse in Sebec, Maine, with a view across a field and a tintype of his great-great grandfather on the wall. "I like to keep reaching out to touch the past," he says, "to connect it with what's going on now. To me music is one of the few things that is timeless ... human emotion is one continual chain."