LETTERS OF GOLD (2020 album)
Produced by Zlaya Loud & Michael Turner, Recorded with Matt Walker and Rowan Mathews at Stovepipe Studios in Melbourne, Australia. Contributing musicicans: Matt Walker, Michael Turner, Lucie Thorne, Madelief van Vlijmen, Judith Renkema, Steve Gilbert, Nick Larkins, Zlaya Loud
SAY YOU WILL (2019 single)
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This is the 1st taster song off my new album that is currently on the mix desk. My daughter Zsa Zsa created the magic visuals. Its a song about the very human proclivity towards temptation and the thrill of betrayal. What you are listening to is the 1st pass of the song recorded on a ribbon mic in my bedroom while I was still writing the song. I later worked the song up and recorded it in a proper studio but came back to this raw sketch because of its uncertainty and tentativeness. The cracks and white noise you hear on it belong there. Its unfinished business.
SONGS FROM DAN (2017 album)
“Songs from Dan” is my debut solo album and is also the name of the act. The album came about like this. It was recorded over 2 sessions, with the first sesh here in the Netherlands in the Smoked Sounds studio with Michiel Hollanders engineering. I was facilititating Matt Walker & Lucie Thorne touring in Europe in 2013 and they had some time off so we put some mics up one afternoon and ran through a few of my songs – for the hell of it like. It was a cool session and, like a good days fishing, we “bagged” a few. The moon and tides were right and I was encouraged by Matt and Lucies excitement about the tunes. Lucie goes “Dan, thats gold!” and that session formed the backbone of what was to come.
I shelved it for a while, as I didnt see the how it could go anywhere with me on one side of the globe and Matt and Luce on the other. At the same time, I knew I wasnt going to finish it without them. So a couple of years later I got back out to Melbourne and we spent 2 more days in Matts studio together finishing what we started with Rowan Mathews as engineer. Matt was busy with his bee hives and would duck out every now and then to get a rack out of one of his hives and spin the honey out of it in front of his living room fire with a hand operated centrifuge. He’d grin and say something like “We got ourselves a honey flow”, which seemed to me like an apt metaphor for what was going down in the studio. We went at recording in much the same fashion as the first session, singing and playing together around mics, capturing the core of the tunes live. I left town after tracking and left Matt in charge of further development. I said “Matt – I trust you implicitly – throw anything at it you like and consider it your project” . So he called in Shane Reilly (pedal steel) and Grant Cummerford (bass) for some overdubs and did quite a lot of dubs himself (piano/keys/mandolins). Next came a period of sending files back and forwards across the big pond and skyping about it all – great fun! Matt had taken my offer of throwing whatever he wanted at it to heart and had thrown in the kitchen sink as well. I subsequently edited and peeled it back somewhat until we ended up with tracks that were mix ready. The whole time Id had Zlaya in the back of my mind for mixing and mastering. He was the guy who could really bring something extraordinary to the project, something that would match the value of the every previous step of production and send it off the scale. He did.