David Ford [ tickets ], a British born singer/songwriter, recently finished up a North American tour behind his latest album titled "Songs For The Road."

LiveDaily contributor Jed McGowan caught up with David Ford to discuss the new album, his live performances, and much more.

You have a new album out, “Songs For The Road,” and you’re currently out playing a lot of live shows in support of the album. How’s the tour going so far?

David Ford: It’s a never-ending, relentless barrage of travel and song, which is my idea of a good time. It’s a lot of work. I’m used to touring and promoting records in Britain which is a tiny, wee little country, and so to come over here, there’s a whole continent of work to be done so it’s keeping me very busy. It’s kind of nice, like an extended vacation for me.

Your fans always rave about your live shows. You do cool things like looping the tracks and building up the songs. How would you describe one of your live shows? You usually play on your own, right?

DF: Yeah. For me, I enjoy the challenge of doing as much as I possibly can without involving other human beings, so I’ve got a bunch of instruments and some clever machines that bind them all together. I like to think I can make as much noise as most bands can, but just by myself. It makes it more interesting for me and hopefully it makes it more interesting for an audience. The term ‘singer/songwriter’ is a term of abuse to me. It kind of implies a certain style of music and a certain style of music presentation, which for me is a fairly simple and bland one-dimensional form so the challenge for me is to see how far I can take the one-man performance into an area that is every bit as audio and visually stimulating as any band can do. That’s the challenge for me, and one that presents itself everyday.

Do you feel more at home in the studio recording a new album, or onstage performing for people?

DF: I don’t really like studios at all. I like to record at home whenever possible, in a familiar environment. I think studios can be quite sterile and impersonal. They’re almost like record factories and you go in there, and you’re just another product on the slate for that day. You make your record and then it’s forgotten about the next day. If you make records at home, then it has the fabric of your being engrained into the tracks and you can often end up with something with a bit more personality rather than something that sounds like everyone else’s record.

Let’s talk a little bit about “Songs For The Road,” the new album. Listening to your old album and your new one, I would say that the new one has way more instruments. You’ve really built up the sound. How did you approach recording it? Did you just want to expand your sound a lot?

DF: No, the sound of the record is very much what I thought the songs wanted. The thing is not so much to think about what the sound of the record is. It’s more about how the songs should be presented. That’s just the body of songs that I was writing. That’s just how it felt for me, and the way they wanted to be presented. We had slightly more means for the second record. The first one was made and there was absolutely no money spent on making it. It was entirely made at home for nothing whereas with the second record, we had a little bit of budget to splash out, so if I wanted a nice string section, then we could get that done and take a little more time and effort filling out the sound. It wasn’t necessarily a plan to do that though. That’s just kind of what ended up happening, as the most tasteful way of rendering the songs in question.

What’s your typical songwriting process?

DF: My typical songwriting process is to ignore the process and do nothing for as long as possible until such time as inspiration strikes. I don’t ever try to write songs. In the past, years and years ago, when I tried to write songs, they just wouldn’t turn out right and the ones that would sneak up on you by accident would always be the better ones and so I’ve learned to just not try and to ignore the fact that writing songs is anything that I ever do. I just trust that sooner or later I’m going to feel strongly enough about something to want to write about it and also the ideas, musically and lyrically, will just sort of arrive in a relatively formed and coherent way. It’s kind of terrifying because it could mean that any idea I just dry up and never write another song again, but you’ve got to have a certain faith in such things as inspiration. There will always be things that I feel strongly enough about. As long as there’s always a song in my heart, then they’ll always be songs to write and sing.

Tell me a little about your background. I don’t know too much about what you’ve done before this solo career. I know you have played with some other bands…

DF: Yeah, I played in some pretty awful indie rock bands in England, but I feel like that was all schooling, like growing up and making a lot of mistakes and discovering exactly what it is I wanted to do by doing all the things I didn’t want to do. That focused me into realizing what the important things were in music, and I found that working on my own is the purest way to be able to not dilute or compromise the things that I consider to be important.

Did you grow up playing music?

DF: No, I didn’t start playing music until I was 17 or 18. Certainly when I was a kid, I wasn’t a musician at all, which I quite like because it means I wasn’t forced at the age of six to have piano and violin lessons and learn to develop a kind of bitterness towards music. For me as a relatively grown up individual, it was like a fantastic journey of discovery just finding out exactly how music works and what it can do, but finding out fresh as an adult, I think it’s a good way to learn your chops in music.

I wanted to get back to talking about your live shows a bit. I went on YouTube and searched your name. I found a lot of cool footage from your live shows. One thing that really stood out to me was the humor and interaction you have with the audience.

DF: I think I might be somewhat misrepresented by YouTube in that there appears to be a lot of video footage of these charity shows that I do in Britain. I do these little benefit concerts every year where I’ll play like Phil Collins songs and things like that, and it’s stuff like that that always winds up on YouTube. The intense, fantastic live shows that I put on week in and week out, they don’t show up there. It’s the Phil Collins songs, or Britney Spears or Meatloaf that do. I don’t like to take myself enormously seriously in the live scenario. I take music very, very seriously but I don’t think that I’m a particularly serious individual, and should not be taken seriously by anyone.

I find it interesting because often your music will go into the serious issues and you seem to balance it out with your interactions with the audience.

DF: Well you know it’s not all doom and gloom. I’m very much a believer of tempering the light with the dark. I like to think that I don’t write pessimistic songs, but that there’s a silver lining in every cloud that I present. Part of it too is that going to see a show should be entertaining and fun. Even if you’re singing songs about some pretty dark issues, it doesn’t mean you want to bring everyone down. You want everyone to react or to connect or to consider the things that you’re singing about. I think it’s good to try to affect people’s mood, but not to actually traumatize them, so a little light relief every now and then is useful.

Who’s live show do you really admire? Are there any performers that you really admire?

DF: I don’t see a lot of live shows these days. Generally I only see the live shows of the people who I’m opening for or who I’m on tour with, so of people who are around these days, my favorite performers I’ve seen in recent years who I’ve played with…I did a tour with Ray LaMontagne a year and a half ago and he was fantastic. I recently did a tour with Ingrid Michelson who I really like even though people tell me I’m not supposed to like her because apparently we do very different things to each other but I think she’s actually a very impressive artist with a great live show. The best live show of all time I wasn’t even alive for. It was in 1978 that I saw a DVD of a Tom Waits performance which blew my head off. It was about the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

Do you think you’ll dive back in to writing new material?

DF: Well, I don’t know. Obviously I will have to wait and see if the material finds me. I’ve got a few ideas forming in my brain which will hopefully at some point become another record that I get to make when I’m done pimping this one to America. For the time being, my plans are to travel and sing songs and hopefully maintain some semblance of mental health.