Americana Alt.Country CD Reviews

Danny Schmidt
talks about
'Owls'
(Live Once Records, 2015)
www.dannyschmidt.com

Danny's BIO:

Named to the Chicago Tribune's 50 Most Significant Songwriters in the Last 50 Years, Austin, TX-based singer-songwriter Danny Schmidt has amassed a cult following for his stunningly poetic, poignant imagery. With lyrical depth drawing comparisons to Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, and Dave Carter, Schmidt is considered a preeminent writer, an artist whose earthy poetry manages to somehow conjure magic from the mundane, leading Sing Out Magazine's proclamation that: "Schmidt is a force of nature: a blue moon, a hundred-year flood, an avalanche of a singer-songwriter. His songs are a flood of poetry, mythology, folk wisdom, and surprise. He is perhaps the best new songwriter we've heard in the last fifteen years."

Performing solo almost exclusively, armed with just his voice, his acoustic guitar, and his acute commentary, Schmidt's an authentic timeless troubadour, one man sharing his truth in the form of songs, unadorned and intimate. The understated effect can be startlingly powerful. As songwriter Jeffrey Foucault put it: "Everything about the man is gentle, except for his capacity for insight, which is crushing."

After garnering unanimous critical praise for his self-released 'Parables & Primes' album in 2005, Schmidt's follow up release, 'Little Grey Sheep' in 2007 began a streak of albums that charted at #1 on the Folk Radio Charts internationally. And on the heels of being crowned with one of the prestigious Kerrville New Folk awards in 2007, Schmidt won the notice of venerable Americana roots label, Red House Records, who began releasing his albums in 2009, alongside such notable artists as Greg Brown, Eliza Gilkyson, Jorma Kaukonen and John Gorka, thus exposing his music to a broader audience.

Schmidt released three albums on Red House Records, including the critically acclaimed 'Instead The Forest Rose To Sing' in 2009, the spare and intimate 'Man Of Many Moons' in 2011, and culminating with the amorous duo album 'For Keeps' with his partner, Carrie Elkin, in 2014.

Schmidt's latest release is a mystical collection of ethereal allegories entitled 'Owls'.

Danny's ALBUM:

'Owls' is a vibey dark record, produced by David Goodrich (Chris Smither, Peter Mulvey, Jeffrey Foucault, Red Bird) and tracked live at Fire Station Studios in San Marcos, TX with a stark, sparse core of a band, creating the sort of live energy exchange that can only be generated when great musicians are in the room together, playing off one another in real time. The result is a record that feels timeless, gritty and real.

The tone of the production melds perfectly with the tenor of the songs, themselves. These are moody, metaphoric, almost esoteric songs of symbolic depth and discovery, revolving around themes of Identity and Transformation. But they're stories told from above, an almost omniscient perspective, as if perched curiously from a branch overhead. It's a smart edgy song-driven album that straddles the Americana / Roots world and the Indie Rock world, in the mold of Joe Pug, Josh Ritter and Damien Rice.

Lending their considerable musical talents to 'Owls' were Mike Meadows on drums, Andrew Pressman on bass, David Goodrich on electric guitars, Lloyd Maines on lap steel, and Carrie Elkin & Daniel Thomas Phipps adding an emotional and expressionistic backdrop of lush harmony vocals. It was a small, but staunch cast.

Danny's Thematic Overview: Like I've said about some previous releases, I don't start off with a thematic concept and build a record from there. I write the songs as they come to me, and as the production unfolds, and as I have time to reflect on what common threads run throughout the songs, as a collection, themes begin to emerge.

So, as I was recording the songs that were to become the 'Owls' album, I realized that many of them had taken on a sort of mystical tone. They asked existential questions, and they told stories of personal discovery, growth and transformation. But they did so in symbols and metaphors more than in actuals and specifics.

And so, as I thought about the songs together in one unit, I started picturing them as a row of owls, perched overhead, side-by-side on a branch, somewhat ethereal in their nature, quietly and knowingly observing us go about the process of figuring out our lives. Sympathetic, but aloof. Almost like grown-ups watching a child fumble through trying to put a puzzle together. So I called the album, 'Owls'.

The songs, individually, deal with the puzzles of Relationship... our relationship with ourselves and with our lives, our relationship with others, and our relationship with the earth... and they deal with the puzzles of Identity and Transformation, and our ever-shifting sense of ourselves in the mirror of ever-changing circumstances. I'll speak more to the songs, individually, below.

I don't know, specifically, why these songs came at this time. Maybe because I'm getting older and entering 'middle age', and because after you've committed a certain significant chunk of your life to an endeavor, you start to ask if it was worth it, and if it has any real value. Maybe because I got married, and the process of merging your life with another person is one of not just learning who they are, but learning who you are through them. I don't know, honestly. I just know that most of the characters in these songs are going through some sort of self-evaluation and self-transformation, for better or for worse.

I hope you enjoy the album, and I hope you're able to spend some time absorbing this new batch of songs. I think they have more layers than any I've written since the 'Parables & Primes' batch from almost a decade ago.

The stunning owl photos used in the album design are by a photographer named Michel Soucy.