“Some songs preserve a moment; others preserve a person. David Moore has built an entire album around doing both.”
David Moore’s A Wink Is As Good As A Nod To A Blind Mule is an album built from friendship, memory, and a desire to keep someone’s music alive. At its heart is the late James Masters Patterson, Moore’s writing partner, closest friend, and someone he describes as a brother during an important period of his life. Every track on the album was either written, co-written, or inspired by Patterson, giving the record a sense of purpose that goes beyond simply putting together a collection of songs. Even the title carries a piece of Patterson’s personality, reflecting the kind of humor Moore remembers and believes his friend would have appreciated. After nearly two years of work, Moore has turned those memories into something listeners can actually spend time with.
The album’s emotional center is particularly clear on “Mysteries Of Life,” where Jay Michael Smith’s guitar playing becomes almost uncanny in the way it captures Patterson’s original style. Moore says that when he hears the finished recording, it sounds as though Jim himself is playing, and that feeling gives the song a special weight. The careful construction of the record is just as important to its character. Moore went back to older recordings and rebuilt drum parts measure by measure using MIDI before sending the tracks to collaborators, allowing the songs to develop piece by piece rather than trying to recreate everything at once. Across the album, musicians recorded from Texas, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and the UK, including Brian Patterson, Fred Sullivan, Ralph Galetti, Abbie McKinney, Jackie Dwire, Hollan Holmes, and Stuart Epps. The result feels less like a conventional studio collaboration and more like a group of musicians coming together around material that genuinely mattered to them.
What makes A Wink Is As Good As A Nod To A Blind Mule connect is that Moore never loses sight of why he made it. His own path into music began after a soccer injury ended his professional ambitions, and Patterson was one of the people who believed in him as that new chapter began. That history gives the album a quiet sense of gratitude running underneath the songs. Rather than treating the project simply as a look back, Moore has given Patterson’s songwriting another life, bringing old performances, new musicians, and years of personal memories into the same space. There is something deeply human in that process: sometimes making music is not about moving on from the past, but finding a way to carry the people who shaped you forward.
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