David Wax Museum emerged from the creative and romantic partnership of David Wax and Suz Slezak, who merged their assorted musical backgrounds into a style they themselves label "Mexo-Americana." The pair came together in 2008 and spent the ensuing years building recognition through prominent U.S. festival slots and a series of wide-ranging folk-pop releases, among them the 2011 album Everything Is Saved and the breakthrough effort Guesthouse from 2015. Following a compilation of lesser-known tracks, the couple resumed studio work for the 2019 album Line of Light.
While enrolled at Harvard University, singer-songwriter David Wax cultivated his growing fascination with Mexican folk traditions through repeated journeys below the border to deepen his studies. After encountering singer and fiddler Suz Slezak in Cambridge, he integrated his Mexico-rooted material with her Appalachian and Irish sensibilities, forging the hybrid they named "Mexo-Americana." Performing as David Wax Museum, the duo issued their first full-length, I Turned Off Thinking About, in 2008 and took their eclectic approach on the road throughout the United States. Following their 2009 sophomore release, Carpenter Bird, they entered and won a song competition that secured a performance slot at the 2010 Newport Folk Festival. The resulting appearance significantly elevated their visibility, and by the arrival of their widely praised 2011 album Everything Is Saved, David Wax Museum were appearing at high-profile South by Southwest showcases and had graduated to Newport's principal stage. With the 2012 album Knock Knock Get Up, their sonic palette expanded further, incorporating broader, more experimental textures and stronger rock elements.
Though merely friends at the project's outset in 2008, Wax and Slezak later married, and the demands of raising children while touring shaped their creative direction on 2015's Guesthouse, an album that found them embracing bolder artistic choices. The record marked a commercial peak, reaching number 20 on Billboard's Folk chart and debuting at number nine on the Heatseekers chart. In September 2017, marking both their thousandth concert and a decade as a band, David Wax Museum issued the rarities collection Electric Artifacts. They next collaborated with My Morning Jacket's Carl Broemel to record Line of Light, which appeared in 2019.
