David Wax Museum

Join us for an unforgettable evening of live music with the David Wax Museum at The Story! Get ready to tap your feet and sing along to their unique blend of folk, rock, and Mexican roots music.

After suddenly and inexplicably collapsing, Wax—half of David Wax Museum alongside wife and bandmate Suz Slezak—was headed for a heart catheterization in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri, his doctors suspecting a heart attack. At a moment with more questions than answers, he hurriedly signed his name to a waiver—and was struck by a revelation. “Lying there on that stretcher the thing that kept running through my mind was: at least we made You Must Change Your Life,” Wax recalls. “Whatever else happened, I felt at peace because this record exists.”

The album, out May 5 on Nine Mile Records, is an openhearted manifesto – a collection that embodies, then transcends bedrock elements of the band’s 15-year recording career. For Wax, music has guided every step he holds sacred; he’s followed its palpable power, abiding by its requisite unpredictability. After graduating at the top of his class at Harvard, he wandered off an academic path to southern Mexico, finding what he calls “a clear before/after moment in my life.” There, he studied folk music “at the feet of the masters” and internalized structures and rhythms that continue to drive the band today. He and Slezak fell in love on their first national tour, setting in motion a future full of vivid waking dreams. Together (now with their two children in tow) they’ve logged 1,500 shows in every corner of the globe. From the back of a pick-up truck in Nome, Alaska at a solstice parade, to a surreal moment in a tent filled with a thousand Czechs hollering along to their iconic song “Harder Before It Gets Easier,” these dreams continue to unfold for Wax and Slezak.