Daily Inspiration: Meet David Wimbish

Today we’d like to introduce you to David Wimbish.

Hi David, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself. 
From my earliest memories, music was everywhere: my mom taught choir, my dad played piano, and my family would sing harmonies together in the evenings. I grew up hungry for it – I wanted to play every instrument I possibly could and become my own orchestra. Once I discovered multi-track recording, I could finally make that dream come true. My random teenage and dorm-room recordings felt limiting, though – I wanted to hear my creations live in a room. I gathered a rag-tag group of musicians, folks that played flute in high school or had an accordion in their grandma’s attic, and we began performing under the name The Collection. 

Since then, the project has become my full-time passion and job, writing songs about mental health struggles and small stories of hope with wonderful friends and musicians alongside me, bringing them to life. Last year, we signed with Nettwerk Music Group and are currently in the process of putting out our next full-length album. 

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
As someone who has struggled against my own brain chemistry at times, this line of work has been difficult, especially in an age where content is kind. It’s hard knowing whether I will wake up with any energy or I will be in a dark pit of depression, working to create something in the public in the midst of it. There have been past years of eating mostly rice and beans while trying to self-fund my albums and songs. It’s definitely not an easy road, but it has constantly been rewarding. 

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My project, The Collection, plays indie-pop music with a variety of instruments, from horns to harmoniums. I’ve always made it my goal to write songs that feel very honest about the human experience. Since I first got into music, I felt captivated by songs that made me feel less alone in their lyrics. The fact that I could be sitting alone in my room with my own struggles and realize someone else across the country or across the world is struggling with the same thing gave me hope to keep going. So, I’ve tried to create that in my own music. A friend recently described our project this way: “Many artists focus only on struggle, which is cathartic at first but exhausting after a while. Other artists present a hollow hope, one that is buttoned up and not dynamic. But The Collection presents honest struggle along with the thought that ‘I think there’s hope, and I’m going to try to find it, even if I don’t know what it is yet.’ I think and hope that’s what can define us. 

How do you think about luck?
I feel like so much of this industry is luck. There are so many creative and wonderful songwriters and performers that never get heard and so many okay ones that hit it big. I think there’s a part of it that involves having a song speak to a cultural moment without being able to plan for the possibility it will. For us, we’ve been lucky a few times – getting our music on a platform several years ago called Noisetrade just as it was coming up gave us our first big audience. Having a few videos go crazy on TikTok really helped us find new audiences we could never have dreamed of. Covid, obviously, played into the bad-luck part of things, having tours and albums canceled we’d been working on. It’s always a bit of a roller-coaster but we try to stay grounded as best as possible and accept the good things as they come. 

Contact Info:

• Website: thecollectionband.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/collectionband
• Facebook: Facebook.com/thecollectionmusic
• Twitter: twitter.com/thecollectionnc
• Youtube: YouTube.com/thecollectionband
• Other: TikTok.com/thecollectionband

Image Credits
Corey Wood
Szonia Nemes