His family moved to Lakeville, Minnesota when he was a young boy, and he was formally introduced to music when his father got him a guitar and taught him three chords.
[10] The first two albums in the Stuart Davis catalogue, Idiot Express and Big Energy Dream, are social and romantic critiques featuring simple acoustic guitar progressions and minimal instrumentation characteristic of folk music.
The music featured driving bass lines, electric guitars, and richer vocal harmonies characteristic of alternative/pop, and lyrically it was more intellectual and subversive.
They were inspired by the book Grace and Grit, another work by Ken Wilber, and "tell the story of a soul going back home.
Bell was followed by ¿What, a radical sonic departure in the Davis discography, which features performance poetry by Saul Williams on "April Showers, April Tears", beat-boxing on "Easter", house-influenced synth bass lines on "Dirty Purity", dissonant sampled loops on "Voodoo Dolls", and the spare, haiku-like "Glass".
Davis worked with a new roster of musicians for this project, including Wendy Melvoin on guitar, Ed Kowalczyk on backing vocals, and Sean Hurley (John Mayer, Pitbull)[20] on bass.
Joe Viglione noted the influence of Al Green and Elvis Costello on Something Simple and wrote that the song "Deity Freak" "is as infectious as it gets."
He wrote that Something Simple "demands a number of spins before it reveals itself and some of the mystery still remains, which is the kind of intangible quality usually indicating that something special is going on.
[22] The album features a collection of songs written over the course of the last year of his father's life,[23] and explores themes found in several "books of the dead.
"[24] Once again it was produced and engineered by Alex Gibson (David Lee Roth, Sting, Ben Folds),[25] and features musicians Blair Sinta (Alanis Morissette, Annie Lennox)[26] on drums, Joel Shearer (Christina Aguilera, Dido)[27] on guitar, Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Tori Amos, Beck)[28] on bass, and Nathan Jenkins (Beyoncé, Slim Thug)[29] on various instruments, electronic programming, additional production & engineering.
Davis also has written several screenplays, one of them with Steven Brill, and published an audiobook called Love Has No Opposite, which he describes, in the introduction, as a tome that "some might consider a Blog-ography...a biography minus sequence, thematic continuity, and facts.
"[37] A book with a title similar to his television program, Sex, God, Rock 'n Roll: Sacred Comedy for Profane Sensibilities, remains unpublished but is the source of many of the spoken word segments read by Davis at shows in 2012.
[38] Davis has long been an advocate of the probability of extraterrestrial life, in part fostered by his friendship with the late John E. Mack, and his fascination with the subject has manifested in the songs "Universe Communion", "Shades of Grey" and "They’re Already Here".