Being a singer/songwriter during the sixties must have been both an exciting and frustrating thing. Getting out all that pent up energy, feeling as if it was working towards some sort of international realization of peace and acceptance was a boon to the era. Of course, with such a dearth of players attempting roughly the same vibe and using Bob Dylan – or Donovan if you were living in a part of the Brit Empire – there wasn’t a great deal of variety. So, hearing players who didn’t achieve widespread success at this late date’s only going make folks realize, the genre was a pretty boring, stodgy thing even before the seventies.

It’s not that David McWilliams is a bummer, he’s actually got a decent voice even while the guitar playing on his first disc, Singing Songs By…, isn’t really worth noting. Including a spate of supplemental instrumentation, inching his work towards rock stuff, might still have been novel by ’66, but today it’s just boring. Nothing the guy turns in is embarrassing or even utterly unlistenable. “Question of Identity” gets pretty far into Monkees territory and turns in a few too many haughty lines about being a self assured individual. The rest of the songs riff on the same lyrical concerns, positing McWilliams and his ilk as a handful of all knowing, love-in types.

Maybe, upon its release, Singing Songs By…seemed fresh. Probably not, though, seeing as “Time of Trouble” is straight up a Donovan rip off. Kind of a bummer, but a listenable one.