David Rovics - Biography

Biography

David Rovics was born in New York City. His family moved to Wilton, Connecticut when he was young. Rovics was politically inspired during his adolescence by his experiences with the conservative-oriented, Christian milieu of his home town. His parents, both classical musicians and educators, were liberal in their outlook. Perhaps for this reason, While in his teens Rovics acquired interests in nuclear disarmament, vegetarianism and other counterculture issues.

In 1985, Rovics enrolled at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana but dropped out and moved to Berkeley, California. He worked in varied occupations, including as a cook, barista, secretary and typist, while pursuing his musical interests as a street and subway performer and in small clubs and bars. He immersed himself in leftist counterculture and made contact with other songwriters and performers on the underground circuit.

By the early 1990s he was a full-time busker in the Boston subways.

On May 1, 1993, Rovics was involved in a traumatic incident in which a close friend was shot dead after intervening in a gang shoot-out. This was a turning point in his life, forcing him to concentrate on his songwriting career, initially as a means of dealing with the grief over his friend's death. He had already amassed a fair collection of lyrics and songs by that time, but his own admission, his compositions prior to this time were inferior and "preachy," and none were used in his later albums.

From around the mid 1990s, Rovics has spent most of his time on concert tours around the world. In 1996 he self-released his first album, Make It So, which consisted mostly of covers of other artists’ songs. He released his second cover album in 1998. He produced a series of five original song albums between 1998 and 2003 as self-released titles. The album Who Would Jesus Bomb? was entirely distributed in mp3 format over the Internet and had no commercial release, although it was included in a later "best of" album.

Rovics is a Wobbly- a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. “In that Wobbly tradition of sharp social commentary, David is a master.” — The Industrial Worker.

In 2003 Rovics signed up to Ever Reviled Records and produced a studio album, Return. Later that year, he released Behind The Barricades: The Best Of David Rovics in association with AK Press, including titles from his earlier self-releases which met with minimal commercial success. He has since released the Songs for Mahmud album as a self-release in association with Ever Reviled Records. Despite being the sole performer in most of his work, he usually describes himself only as a songwriter.

Although Rovics' work has never met with great commercial success, it has been acclaimed in sections of the press and continues to be popular with a small yet widespread base of fans with similar political interests, as well as supporters of internet file sharing.

Rovics tours regularly on four continents, playing for audiences large and small at cafes, pubs, universities, churches, union halls and protest rallies. He has had his music featured on Democracy Now!, BBC, Al-Jazzeera, Acik Radyo and other networks. His essays are published regularly on CounterPunch and Truthout and the 200+ songs he makes available on the web have been downloaded more than a million times.

He currently lives in Portland, Oregon with his family and has a daughter, Leila, who was born in 2006.