One of the best-kept secrets about the Church is that Christians have often been pioneers and giants in the arts. You certainly wouldn’t know that from what’s peddled as “Christian” music, that incestuous sub-genre known as CCM (contemporary Christian music) that embodies all the excess of the Nashville-based music industry. Vain, kitschy, sappy, vapid, and overproduced, it’s an insult for us to offer such tripe in our worship instead of impassioned, finely crafted art.
Over the next few months, Big Hollywood will be highlighting the work of Christian musicians who buck this trend, who don’t use their music’s subject matter as an excuse for sucking but push boundaries for themselves and their listeners. I’m personally ecstatic that our first contact is Daniel Smith, the founder and leader of the New Jersey-based music project named “Danielson” which has gone through many variations over the years, the first and most search engine optimized being the Danielson Famile.
Starting as a senior project at Rutgers University, the Danielson Famile was an experimental folk-rock outfit that consisted of Daniel Smith and his four siblings, some of whom were still in their teens. Focusing on the marvelous fact that God has adopted him as a son, Daniel communicated his childlike faith through yelping, falsetto vocals, instruments like xylophones that sound like they’re being played by an out-of-control nursery, and unpredictable song structures. As a fan, the first album A Prayer for Every Hour, I’ll admit, is off-putting and hard to sit through, but it was miraculously picked up by Tooth and Nail Records, which was then primarily known for releasing Christian punk music, allowing the Famile to tour and build up buzz in the indie world. The rest is history, well documented in a great film from a few years back.
Over the past decade-plus, Danielson has gained and lost members as siblings moved on to other endeavors, and Daniel himself has settled into a different mode of writing as he’s built up his own family, started a record label, and come to appreciate a more provincial place in this world. He’s gone from freak-folk ringleader to the frontman of one of the most slyly subversive pop-rock groups around, weaving layered Biblical allusions into poetic lyrics that can take Rubik’s-level effort to unravel. His voice has given up on its squeakier octaves, and his melodies, while still unpredictable, have grown more accessible. It’s a perfect time for anyone who’s unfamiliar with Danielson to hop on board and work their way back through his catalog of work.
Daniel was gracious enough to answer some questions about his new album Best of Gloucester County, which is hitting shelves almost five years since his latest (much lauded) release, Ships— an eternity in music years, but as you’ll see below, for good reason. You can order the album directly from his label, Sounds Familyre, and those who purchase the vinyl LP will receive a digital copy of the album. Below is the first single for Gloucester, a song called “Grow Up,” followed by part 1 of our exclusive interview.
There’s always been a strong visual element to the Danielson project, a lot of different media are put into it to help communicate the music’s message. In the video for “Grow Up” you’ve still got the nautical uniforms from the Ships days, and there’s this new imagery with those flags with eyes on them, and they fly around and form a unit like the Trinity. What kind of allusion are you making through that?
Well, that’s a good question. The theme of the record, Best of Gloucester County, started out, at least, as this idea of celebrating coming back home to my childhood land. It’s a rural place in south Jersey that, originally, I couldn’t wait to get out of and move on to the big city–you know, find good culture and whatnot. So it’s about coming back here and finding this to be my home and having a family here. Once I got past what it wasn’t and started to get into what it is, with farmland and fields and trees, I was able to start celebrating it–the nature, the peace, all those things it has to offer.
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The image of the eye–in the fall around here, farmers will put up these balloons with these eyes on them, kind of like scarecrows, to scare away the birds. So I adopted the image of these balloons with these kind of menacing eyes on them and applied it to these flags. This kind of triangular flag is an image I’ve been using for a while. I started to put these flags in the fields and these eyes on various other things as well. It hints to this idea of the “all-seeing eye”–the Spirit of God being present in all things.
And there’s also some motifs with farm equipment, grass-cutting, both in the video for “Grow Up” and on the album cover. The blurb about the album written by Rick Moody describes a theme of the album as “the locally grown opus.” What is the message you’re trying to send about what’s unique about Gloucester County, about identifying with a particular place in this world?
Well, I use that as an example of, like I was saying, growing up in a place that, at the time, was very un-romantic. I wanted to live in Philadelphia, New York City, ’cause that’s where the culture that I was feeding off of–music, mainly–was coming from. It was hard for me to get excited for a place that I was disconnected from culturally growing up, and I was longing for something else.
So as you grow older, you go away and satisfy those desires for traveling, exploring, and getting your culture elsewhere, and then there’s a point where you realize there were great things happening around you but you didn’t notice them. I remember going away to college and then coming back on the weekends every once in a while and seeing things almost for the first time. With nature, everything seemed so green, whereas growing up it just seemed so gray. So the album’s talking about those kind of things, and just having fun with the idea where we travel around Europe and America playing our music, yet no one around here has a clue who we are, so it’s kind of fun.
Yeah, and it’s almost like you’re bringing the culture there rather than kind of abandoning the place and going somewhere else where there is culture. You’re putting your own stamp on the area.
I hope so. I don’t know if I would claim that for myself, but I do feel like if I was living in New York City, I’d be so distracted by all the great things happening. If I’m around here, if I want culture, I just have to go make something.
What other kinds of props and costumes can we expect to see on tour?
Not quite sure. The uniforms that we wear now–the service uniforms–they’re here to stay. They’re uniforms that I like because they’re just kind of the common denominator of the music, which is all about providing a service on stage. We’re up there sharing these songs and working up there and trying to get everyone to join in. So, it’s always a struggle when you’re introducing visual elements on stage that it could start to get too theatrical. I never felt comfortable with theatrics, but I do love visual elements–more when it’s symbolic and it supports and works alongside the music. I never want images to be distracting from the music itself; that’s the most important part.
So, yeah, the uniforms are gonna continue to evolve with more patches and more imagery like that, but I’m not gonna be up there in another tree or anything like that. I’m starting to plan some backdrops and things like that, but again, it’s always a fine line between theatrics and visual imagery that supports the music.
Yeah, and there’s kind of a theological element to that there, where the Protestant church hasn’t had much in the way of visual tradition in their worship. Catholics have icons, but because of the whole iconoclasm movement, Protestants haven’t had too much in the way of visuals in art, so I can understand that tension between wanting to communicate visually, but not wanting to cross over into idolatry, as it’s often called.
Yeah, I’m not so much worried about idolatry; for me, growing up as a Protestant, I wished we had a nice building instead of the YMCA. So that probably had something to do with it. I remember being in churches where there were no visual distractions, and I feel that that’s too reactionary. Stained glass windows and beautiful buildings are a wonderful thing, in my opinion. So I grew up in a place where that pendulum swung too far the other way, whereas I think there should be balance in everything. I’ll walk into a beautiful cathedral and I literally feel a peace just from looking around, and that’s a wonderful thing.
And in the writing process–obviously, it took a while. You polished off Ships, which was this big, broad, and highly-praised album–and then, we’ve been waiting. Just a slow drip of new Danielson material over the past 5 years– what kind of hurdles kept pushing back the release of Gloucester County?
Well, I think it had to do with a couple things. One was just kind of regrouping after all that busyness that came from ships. And it was personnel, because it was kind of the end of my brothers being able to take time out to record and tour, and my friends Chris and Ted as well. And there’s a point where people have to focus on their own dreams, and there’s such limited time in all our schedules as we get older. And, frankly, the music business is a terrible business to be in. [laughs] And Danielson has always kind of been this way–a little heartbreaking–because there are family members always coming and going, depending on the different seasons. And this time, it happened again in probably a bigger way than ever. And it’s bittersweet, because you’re excited for family and friends who are pressing on to their vision in their life, and at the same time, there’s a loss there in terms of the community of musicians.
So, there’s been some building with that, and the other big part of it is that the songs just didn’t come. They were just rendering and just waiting. More and more, I don’t press as hard as I used to. And when I don’t press–and not that there’s not work involved, there’s a ton of work involved–there’s just a difference between when I’ve got the green light on the inside to go for it, things just come together. But when there’s a resistance there, where I used to push and push and push with impatience and believing all those things like “you’ve gotta come out with a record right away or your career’s over” and all that nonsense– whereas I used to fall for that over and over and over again, now I just don’t believe it. I believe that when the music comes naturally, that’s when it’s the good stuff. So a lot of it just has to do with that kind of mysterious place of where this stuff comes from, and don’t force it.
So did the songs all come kind of recently, or was it piecemeal over the last few years?
Well, the way it always happens for me is I’m constantly collecting song bits and ideas and lyrics and concepts and just writing them on pieces of paper and recording them on the little Dictaphone–collecting, but not getting into the next step, which is actually going through and finding things that sound like they should be songs. The collecting process is just part of my lifestyle but that next step of, “Okay, now let’s start analyzing and see what’s still alive,” it just wasn’t time for that until about a year and a half ago.
Aside from the band and writing your music, managing the label, Sounds Familyre, and producing records for all its artists, maintaining family life, and I think there’s still some carpentry going on, right? How does that all come together without driving you totally insane?
Barely. Yeah, that’s what I’m still trying to figure out, actually. So, if you have any advice, I’ll take it. I think it just seems like putting out fires left and right. You know, things come up, and you’ve gotta do this and do that. I’m still looking for a place where I can do it all without getting exhausted and freaking out, which is a real struggle. But at the same time, they’re all projects and jobs and things I love doing. I’m not sure yet; I’m still trying to figure out how to juggle all these things and not go crazy.
Stay tuned for part 2: Danielson discusses his changing band lineup, self-distribution, and his approach to songwriting, plus a review of Best of Gloucester County.
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