New Single Available Now
Listen to all of Dan’s music on your favorite streaming platform
Voice in my head SINGLE Now Available
This is a very simple song and after I recorded the vocal and acoustic guitar I thought we’d make very quick work of it. Boy was I wrong. We experimented with all kinds of different tempos and feels and I just wasn’t feeling any magic. We tried slowing it down and doing a simple trio of acoustic, upright bass and fretless. We tried a piano motif, a synthesizer motif. Then we tried a harmon mute on a trumpet. We tried a kind of rustic Spanish version. We took a Paul Simon approach with pizzicato strings doing rhythm. We tied just guitar and vocal. We tired four different approaches to bass. When it was paired down, the story was very clear, but it wasn’t very interesting musically. When we added instruments, the story kept receding into the background. It was when we asked Marc Muller to try a lap steel that it all came together. It gave the song an other-worldly feeling that the story was calling for. It was big without suffocating the negative space we needed for the lyrics to come through.
all of our dreams SINGLE NOW available
Where all despair and our unanswered prayers turn into all of our dreams.
KENDRA’s pictures SINGLE Now Available
This is a very simple song and after I recorded the vocal and acoustic guitar I thought we’d make very quick work of it. Boy was I wrong. We experimented with all kinds of different tempos and feels and I just wasn’t feeling any magic. We tried slowing it down and doing a simple trio of acoustic, upright bass and fretless. We tried a piano motif, a synthesizer motif. Then we tried a harmon mute on a trumpet. We tried a kind of rustic Spanish version. We took a Paul Simon approach with pizzicato strings doing rhythm. We tied just guitar and vocal. We tired four different approaches to bass. When it was paired down, the story was very clear, but it wasn’t very interesting musically. When we added instruments, the story kept receding into the background. It was when we asked Marc Muller to try a lap steel that it all came together. It gave the song an other-worldly feeling that the story was calling for. It was big without suffocating the negative space we needed for the lyrics to come through.
House on the reservoir SINGLE
My grandfather built a house in the 1950s where I spent a good deal of my childhood. It’s a monolith in my personal psychology. And it’s still there, solid as a rock. This is about that house, literally and metaphorically, and what went on inside it between me, my dad and my grandfather. It’s about being in the middle of things that you didn’t start and don’t have the power to finish. It’s about taking on responsibility for things that were never yours to take responsibility for in the first place. And ultimately, it’s about the tragedy of the love that should define the relationship between a father and son that, in the case of my dad and my grandfather, never came to life and never got expressed.
PIECES SINGLE
Sometimes life feels like a big family party to me. And the older I get, the later the hour. More and more people say it’s getting late, grab their coats, and whisper their goodbyes. And as each of them goes, I feel a part of me go with them. It got me thinking. Maybe we don’t leave this earth all at once, but in fragments and chapters as the people and times that shaped us migrate on into the unknown. This song is called, “Pieces.” I hope it touches something in you. I hope it brings some of the people who were at the party back to you, if only to say they left their pocket book.
Kickin' a Stone SINGLE
I wrote this song on a walk one day. I’m kickin’ a stone down the road in my little town on this tiny little planet we call home, but it’s activating my stream of consciousness, and I’m thinking about the seven year-old me who used to do this and wondering where he went, I’m asking where we all came from and where we’re all going and reflecting on the fact that what we have in common is that none of us know. And that ain’t no small point of connection. Hope you enjoy it. It’s one of my favorite songs on the new album.
Couldn’t Make it Rhyme SINGLE
The song was inspired by a relationship that began nearly forty years ago, when I was in my early twenties. It was one of those typical youthful entanglements—the cat-and-mouse game —one chasing, the other playing hard to get, the dynamics occasionally shifting—a lack of commitment and infidelity surrounding it that could never survive in a mature relationship. Some young people have enough self-respect at a young age to avoid these dysfunctional romances. I did not. Any song I would have tried to write about it forty years ago would have been nauseatingly cliché and self-pitying. It wasn’t until a year ago, when I learned that this man died—under tragic circumstances—that the full story revealed itself to me and a song surfaced.
the man that fortune forgot SINGLE
This is the second single from my new album, “Winnebago Dreams.“ The idea for the song came to me when it started raining three seconds after I got my car washed. I never use self-defeating language. I never say, “Just my luck,” when something bad happens. So I guess this is a song about a guy I never want to be! Still, I hope you get a kick out of him. I got a kick out of bringing him to life.
Soozie Tyrell from the E Street Band is featured on fiddle and Tony Garnier who is Bob Dylan’s music director is playing the upright bass.
Winnebago Dreams SINGLE
A dream is a dream, whether it’s to be President of the country or king of the open road, driving a motor home through spacious skies, purple mountain’s majesty and the fruited plain with your sweetheart at your side and the responsibilities of a life well-lived behind you in the rear-view mirror. The first single from my new album, “Winnebago Dreams” is about that open highway kind of freedom, the breeze blowing through rolled down windows and a person feeling the mastery of their own destiny. It’s a carefree folk song about every couple’s dream of one day exiting the rat race and spending time together on in a cozy motor home seeing the country. And it’s about the deeper liberation that comes with that
AMERICAN pICtures FULL LENGTH ALBUM
“American Pictures” is the first album I’ve written since I was a long-haired kid in L.A. struggling to get a record deal. It’s about the malfunction of the American dream, seen through the eyes of uniquely American characters caught between their potential and their circumstances. It’s folk music—simple melodies with dulcimer, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and guitar.
STORE
AMERICAN PICTURES LINER NOTES & JOURNAL
(Available in October)
24-page, 12.5 inch x 12.5 inch over-sized, staple-bound booklet. Full lyrics to the album plus exclusive photography.
$14.99
View Product
T-Shirt
(Available Now!)
$29.99
View Product