Tunes for the tribe.

Gay singer-songwriter Dave Hall talks about writing music that speaks to the whole community

In an era of Britney and Backstreet Boys, it is comforting to know about songwriter Dave Hall. Despite the music industry's current teenybop pop trend (or maybe because of it), Hall has chosen to release a CD so dense with meaning and musically gentle that it stands out simply in its quiet candor.

Against the backdrop of a retro '50s diner in Brooklyn, N.Y.'s Park Slope neighborhood, replete with egg creams and olive vinyl booths, Hall explains why his third CD, True, is more about shades of quiet than walls of sound.

"The title cut is about an old friend of mine--my very first boyfriend--who I'd just discovered had passed away," recalls Hall. "It was really hard to hear that this young guy had died from HIV.... It got me to thinking about life and how it needs to be lived and addressed."

Hall built a hushed, eloquent base for his melancholy lyrics, one that is accentuated by two instrumental pieces that interpret Bach's cantata "Sheep May Safely Graze," making it clear Hall was on a quest to craft elegance through atmosphere. These classical adaptations book-end a set of bittersweet tracks that broach topics including Hall's 100-year-old grandmother, simple life regrets, and the persistent taboo of gay sex.

The Brooklyn-based musician says it was his current romantic partner and manager of nine years, Joe Romano (whom he met at a gay runners' club), who insisted on keeping the tracks as unadorned as possible, thus preserving the CD's bare-bones, delicately drifting quality. By contrast, Hall's two prior releases, Playin' the Man and Places, rock a lot harder, with cowboy croons and carefree folk-pop. Hall, who attended the Manhattan School of Music and received a degree in classical composition, says he was influenced in part by his childhood record collection, one filled with Cat Stevens, drama rockers like Queen, and the traditional Arabic melodies cherished by his Arab-American mom.

Hall, who grew up in Vermont, where his father is from, and upstate New York, added a few spare cello and violin flourishes to the tracks on True, and also layered them lightly with austere choruses and organ swells--though the 12-song set hardly suffers from an absence of instrumentation. Rather, listeners can more clearly zero in on Hall's true-to-life tales--ones that will surely resonate with dreamers in various life crises and the people who love them.

"This record contains some of my truest work," Hall reveals, though the CD art contains a photo of Hall crossing his fingers, as if to say that maybe some of it is actually fiction. Ever the heartfelt artist, Hall quickly points out, "people also cross their fingers as a sign of hope."

Of the self-revelatory nature of his CD, Hall says, "I've never been one of these artists who writes therapy songs." Instead, he says, he is driven to being "a community-minded artist, like a tribal artist. I always feel that if somebody's gig is to be a bricklayer, I hope that they are making the kind of houses that everyone wants to live in. My thing is to write songs that the whole tribe can read and say, `Yeah, this person is speaking for all of us.'"

Find out more about Dave Hall and his new album at www.advocate.com

Tucker has also written for Time Out New York, Interview, and Paper.