Daniel Romano
Real bio:
Daniel Romano is difficult to work with. He has very little or no understanding of the music industry. He is very hard to get in touch with.
He runs a record label (You’ve Changed Records), has a platinum record for production (City and Color’s Bring Me Your Love) and a Juno nomination for graphic design, but his greatest satisfaction comes from the music itself.
Daniel has been in the critically acclaimed band Attack in Black for seven years now and has been very successful with his endeavors with this band. Now, for the first time he is branching out into a solo career. Daniel has created a heaven for himself in his basement with a fully functional 2″ 16 track studio and is constantly in production mode. He has a 45 coming out with Dine Alone Records showcasing two alternate versions of songs to be released on his full length album Workin’ For The Music Man.
Daniel’s music is simple, quirky and honest. It contains elements and influences from his childhood and from his parents; folk tinged ballads and country music paralleling the works of Hank Williams and George Jones.
This album is classic, not only in it’s song writing but in it’s production as well. Daniel recorded the album, which features performances by his father (David), his aunt (Darlene), his love (Misha) and a family friend (Natalie). Workin’ For The Music Man is a close look at about four months of Daniel’s life; it captures the beauty and the struggles of this time with a humorous and humble delivery.
Fake bio:
My folks gave me up shortly after I was born. An older couple, Dwayne and Clairey Talbot, adopted me when I was five. They said that in music years they were old but that their children had kept them young. They said that I was an old soul and that they intended to raise me backwards. Dwayne played the tenor guitar and Clairey played the autoharp. They had me play the six string guitar and told me my other job was to keep the wood box full.
I thought I’d been raised on music rather than born into it but when I was thirteen, the Talbots got a call from my birth parents saying they wanted to meet me. The Talbots said that was alright, “in deference to the blood in your veins,” and when I met my birth folks I was surprised they were a musical family. I visited them more and more and we started playing together here and there.
Mostly, I spent the next two years trying to get my pilot’s license but as I got close to the final test I found out I was colour blind. When that happened I started drinking and one day me and my brother (my real blood brother) were shooting BBs at a pop can hanging from a tree and one of the pellets refracted off the can and hit me in the eye. I lost 70% of the vision in my left eye and when that happened, I got really depressed.
Mr. and Mrs. Talbot passed away and so I decided to go back to the old house. My brothers and sisters were looking after it but no one was actually living there and so I went there. I bought a tape player and started recoding music there. I started gigging around and selling the cassette tapes offstage. I played a show in Welland, Ontario where these guys asked me to start a band with them and so I did. They said they wanted a drummer and I told them my brother can play drums and we started a band and played together for seven years.
I started missing what I was doing at the beginning, the simplicity of it, and it happened that we had a long break. I went back to the same house and wrote a whole bunch of songs and then recorded them. I went to play a show on the weekend and while I was away the house got demolished. Someone in the family who I hadn’t spoken with hired a demo team to tear the house down and in the process, all the tapes got destroyed.
Instead of recording the same songs over again, I wrote a whole bunch of new songs. Really it was a blessing in disguise, as they say, because the twelve songs I’d written before were dark and depressing and something about the old house being torn down was sort of a relief. Certain memories and thoughts that I didn’t even know were lingering there seemed to finally come through the other side of my soul (like how dirty water without knowing it runs a long distance to get clean…)
At the moment I realized the recordings were gone I also realized it was the same thing with the music I’d been writing the last 7 years. As soon as a song was completed it was forgotten – never the same as it was in the form it took up in completion. To this day, I wish every record I ever made could be buried somewhere (along with those songs, that old house and the wreckage of the plane I went and flew blind anyways…)
MP3: “A Losing Song” from Workin’ For The Music Man:
http://pigeonrow.com/DanielRomanoALosingSong.mp3
High-Res photo of Daniel Romano (1):
http://pigeonrow.com/Danpromo1.jpeg
High-Res photo of Daniel Romano (2):
http://pigeonrow.com/Danpromo2.jpg
http://pigeonrow.com/DanMusicManArt.jpg
In Studio: Daniel Romano from Adrian Vieni on Vimeo.
