Also posted today is a delightful new tune from Half-handed Cloud involving bassoons and cheese bag snares.

Listen below to the whole compilation so far. New tunes are being added daily until the 23rd, so make sure to keep checking back!

Finish your holiday shopping at Sounds Familyre!

There are some amazing deals going on at Sounds Familyre, including the “Three For Thirty-Five” sale, the “Disco Update Bundle”, and the “Gloucester County Power Pack”. Also, don’t forget that the new Wovenhand book, Black of the Ink, is now available. Go here to read all about it, and finish that shopping!

Flexi-discs from Joyful Noise Recordings!

The good folks at Joyful Noise are launching a Flexi-Disc series in 2012 featuring all kinds of great artists: Deerhoof, Of Montreal, Tortoise, Jad Fair, Rafter, Danielson (hey, how about that!), and more. One artist per month! Get your subscription now! What in the world is a flexi-disc? Find out and subscribe!

Be well, all, and merry Christmas!!

Letters to Santa:

In Chicago, IL today and tomorrow (Dec. 6 & 7)? Come to the Letters to Santa fundraiser, at which Danielson will be performing. GREAT cause. Details as follows!

A Familyre Christmas – Volume 4!

Artwork by John Ringhofer

It’s here. The tradition continues with a whole new batch of Christmas music from Sounds Familyre family and friends.  As always, one free download (and occasionally two) per day from now until December 23rd, Christmas Eve Eve.  We kick off the whole thing with Ortolan’s "Christmas Auld Lang Syne", which is (not surprisingly), charming as all get out.  Make sure to check in each day to hear new music–there’s a lot in store for you.  Also, remember that you can purchase A Familyre Christmas Volumes 1, 2, and 3 for only four dollars each.

Danielson Weathervane T-Shirt:

Weathervane Music is offering Danielson-designed Ts as awards for their annual fundraiser. Support them in style! They do amazing things.

UPDATE: THE WEATHERVANE KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN WAS A COMPLETE SUCCESS. THEY NOT ONLY MET THEIR GOAL, BUT THEY BEAT IT BY ALMOST 40%. CONGRATS WEATHERVANE, AND THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO CONTRIBUTED! ENJOY THE T-SHIRTS.

Screamin’ Sounds Familyre Christmas Deals!

If you’re looking for gift ideas, Sounds Familyre has put some wonderful packages for you (all with free shipping, of course)  Take a gander.

Gloucester County Power Pack:

Gloucester County T-shirt, CD, Flag Patch – $26.  What what?!  For more info and to order, click here.

To read about more great Sounds Familyre deals, go here!

Danielson on Daytrotter:

Go here to hear "…this ability that Smith and Danielson have of making you cock your head and your ears differently." Thanks, DT!

Take care folks, and don’t forget to check in every day to hear what new sonic stocking stuffers await in A Familyre Christmas – Volume 4!!

In honor of Halloween, we’d like to share with you “Allhallow’s Eve”, a Danielson Halloween song originally part of Secretly Canadian’s The Unaccompanied Voice: An A Capella Compilation. The song is a celebration of all things costume and candy-corn, and also of Danielson’s Rachel Galloway, whose birthday is October 31 (that’s today!-Happy Birthday Rachel!).

We hope you’ve all been well. Barring the frequent trips to the freezer to reload our water glasses with fresh ice cubes (it’s been on the warm side), things on this end are humming along.

We wanted to give you a quick good news update: The new Danielson shirts and patches are now officially available. Horray! Just click on the images below to order!

Hartz Patch!!

Flag Patch!!

Gloucester County Girls’ T!!

Gloucester County Boys’ T!!

ENJOY!

Today Danielson’s People’s Springtime County Partay starts off at Swedes Inn in beautiful Swedesboro, NJ (in beautiful Gloucester County, of course!). There are a few seats left, so get your tickets by calling or emailing for reservations: 856-467-2052 / info@swedesinn.com Things begin at 8:30 with Ben and Vesper!

Click here for itinerary and ticket info!

Calling All Horn Players!

Do you play trumpet? Sax? Trombone? Tuba? If so, we’re extending a warm invitation to join us on stage to play along for the song, "People’s Partay". Just click on the image above to download the score (all parts transposed), and email peoplespartay@gmail.com and tell us what you play and which show you’ll be at. We’ll email back to work out the detais of sound-check and rehearsal. Then show up with instrument in hand!

Danielson Street Team!
Power to the people! We’d love any and all help spreading the good word about the tour. If you’d like to be a part of our street team, go here for a downloadable poster, press photos, etc. Any flat surface is candidate for postering–barber shop windows, lamp-posts, tables, mirrors, windshields… You have our very very sincere thanks!

Be well, folks, and see you super soon!

It’s so much fun to share our new record with you all. Celebrate with us and buy the album! It’s available on vinyl (download code for the album included with purchase!) and CD right here. Also, we’re thrilled to announce that a limited cassette run (only 300 copies) is available from Joyful Noise Recordings. Yep, you heard correctly. CASSETTE! Go here to order!

Fire!

Not only are the very good people at Fire Records distributing ‘Best of Gloucester County’ to the UK, Europe, and Asia (if that’s you, click here), they’re also releasing a brand-new Danielson 7″! Available exclusively through Fire, Side A is the attitude-drenched and instant-classic "Grow Up". Side B is Danielson’s take on the Journey classic “Wheel In The Sky”, and it’s all strut and swagger and burnin’ 2-step. Preorder here!

Smile!

Thank you to everyone who has submitted to our "People’s Picture Partay"! We’ve had so much fun seeing the pictures that have come in. So much fun, in fact, that we’re going to extend the festivities for few more days. If you haven’t heard yet, the "People’s Picture Partay" is a worldwide music video-making party. What we’re doing is collecting drawings and photos of people (that’s you) whoopin’ it up, and the best submissions will assembled into a video for the Danielson single, "People’s Partay":

How-to!:
1) Submissions will be accepted through March 1st.
2) Send as many images as you want to peoplespartay@gmail.com
3) Images need to be original (meaning you own the rights to the image)
4) Images of "conversation, recreation, and celebration", i.e. downright partaying.
5) Images need to be rated G
6) Images need to be 1MB or less

The video will be availabe right before Danielson hits the road for the "People’s Springtime County Partay" (see the itinerary and get your tickets here). So get those pictures in and we’ll see you in the video!

La Blogotheque!

Last October, Danielson was invited by Pop Montreal to perform a couple shows. While they were up in beautiful Montreal (what a city!), the folks at La Blogotheque seized the opportunity to capture the band performing a couple Danielson classics in a rare acoustic setting (and out of uniform, to boot–this usually only happens when the uniforms are being dry-cleaned). Click on the still below to watch!

And now for something completely different…

On a related but non-Danielson note, we’re thrilled to announce that our good friends Ben + Vesper’s CD release party for HONORS is happening this coming Monday night at Zebulon in Brooklyn, NY. The show starts at 8 pm. $10. It’s going to be a fun night with some very special guests. Click on the show poster below for details!

Enjoy everyone, and take care!

Danielson: Grow Up from Sounds Familyre on Vimeo.

L, Daniel

Read more below!

Five years. A very long time in popular music, especially in the present moment when the delivery systems, the methodologies, are changing weekly. And yet five years is the time it took Daniel Christopher Smith, a.k.a. Brother Danielson, a.k.a. Danielson, to complete this his newest work, Best of Gloucester County. Normally what happens to our artists of the popular song, in the completeness of adulthood, is that the demands of family and mid-life make the write/record/tour rat-race unappealing, and five years ensue because the artist no longer wants, not entirely, what the popular song offers in the way of profession and culture. Instead, he wants some of what family brings. Who can blame him?

But in a way, Danielson has, during the five years, let go (reluctantly, perhaps) of some family collaborators—namely his brothers Andrew and David, the percussionists, and childhood friends Chris and Ted, on keys and bass/guitar respectively. While sisters Megan and Rachel and Daniel’s wife Elin, the essential chorus for many a Danielson Famile song, still appear, the bulk of Best of Gloucester County revolves around a completely new “team,” as Smith has put it himself (Patrick Berkery- drums, percussion; Evan Mazunik- piano, organ; Joshua Stamper- bass; Sufjan Stevens- banjo, vocal; Andrew Wilson- electric guitar), most of them local players from the Gloucester County, NJ, area where Smith lives and works and has his studio.

That means that Best of Gloucester County is not, despite the title, a retrospective “Best of” album (that would be Trying Hartz, the last Danielson-related release), but rather a statement of intention. Danielson is now a locally-owned and locally-ambitious entity, and, in this case, a locally-released (Gloucester County) album, since this is the first Danielson release on Daniel Smith’s own Sounds Familyre label. Seizing the means of production! With the result that here is a genuine attempt to dazzle! The tracks are thoroughly arranged (with bass player Joshua Stamper creating some great horn charts), and the rhythm section (which, in the past, was charming and lovely) sounds more like a rock and roll rhythm section than ever before, and the addition of an electric guitar player throughout means that the interplay between guitars, and the relationship between guitar and keys and glockenspiel, is quite a bit more dramatic, more cinematic.

What does that mean? What does a Danielson album actually sound like, if it is no longer “outsider art,” but is, as it ought always have been considered, a thoughtful and persuasive contribution to the world of popular song? Suddenly the musical forebears are not quite as distant, so that you can hear bits of Captain Beefheart and Syd Barrett in the mix, psychedelic music in general, also the Kinks, the Beatles, T. Rex, and also country and folk and gospel (but in a way that doesn’t sound like country and folk and gospel). These influences now give way to a completely realized musical vision, in which arrangement is pursued with a singularity untold earlier, but which is just as virtuosic as on the “chamber pop” releases of the present moment, on an Antony and Johnsons album, as on a Grizzly Bear album, as on a Joanna Newsom album. Danielson, that is, has become a beautiful thinker in popular music, idiosyncratic but accomplished, whose major keys are always slipping away into minor keys, whose chord progressions are most often chromatic, always modulating, whose voice, somewhere in the area of two entire octaves, is in every register here, as though he has to be the entire chorus himself.

For this writer, one of the very best of the earlier Danielson Famile releases was Tell Another Joke at the Ol’ Choppin’ Block (1997), in which there was a trance aspect to some of the compositions, as though the record were Qwaali or Raga. The good news for listeners to Best of Gloucester County is that it picks up that same meditative, and semi-improvised approach to the drone, in “Hosanna in the Forest,” and in “Hovering Above that Hill.” In fact, the album drives ultimately toward these more uncommon song structures, passing through some musical-theater and pop-inflected numbers—“People’s Partay,” and “Lil Norge”.

The whole represents a new and welcome chapter in the Danielson oeuvre—a startlingly effective new band, a new thematic field (the locally-grown opus), produced with more sonic ambition than any recent Danielson effort, but without sacrificing the brave interior journey that we have come to expect from Daniel Christopher Smith: the world is complex, slightly dangerous, full of temptations, but there is still grace, beauty, meaning, and the music that is required to suggest all this is anything but easy, but that doesn’t mean it is not rewarding, beautiful, funny, sad, and generous.

–Rick Moody, November 2010

Track List
1.  Complimentary Dismemberment Insurance
2.  This Day Is A Loaf
3.  Grow Up
4.  Lil Norge
5.  But I Don’t Wanna Sing About Guitars
6.  People’s Partay
7.  Olympic Portions
8.  You Sleep Good Now
9.  Hovering Above That Hill
10.  Denominator Bluise
11.  Hosanna In The Forest

Players
Core lineup:
-Patrick Berkery- drums, percussion
-Rachel Galloway- vocal
-Evan Mazunik- piano, organ
-Megan Slaboda- vocal
-Daniel Smith- vocal, acoustic guitar
-Elin K. Smith- vocal
-Joshua Stamper- bass, horn arrangements
-Sufjan Stevens- banjo, vocal
-Andy Wilson- electric guitar

Horn section:
Michael Cemprola: Alto and Tenor Saxophones
Jon Rees: Baritone Saxophone, Piccolo
Paul Arbogast: Tenor Trombone, Bass Trombone

Special Guests:
-Jens Lekman: Swede vocal on "Lil Norge"
-Emil Nikolaisen (Serena-Maneesh) : electric guitar #2 on "Olympic Portions", "Hovering Above That Hill"
-Glen Galaxy (Soul-Junk), Mark Shippy (US Maple), Chris Cohen (Cryptacize): electric guitar solos on "But I Don’t Wanna Sing About Guitars"

Alerting all Danielson fans!

If any of you find yourselves in England this coming weekend, come out to the amazing All Tomorrow’s Parties festival curated by Matt Groening, the genius behind the Simpsons and Futurama! Matt is a Danielson fan too, and has invited Danielson to share the bill with some incredible musicians: Iggy and the Stooges, She & Him, Toumani Diabate, Panda Bear, Deerhunter, Joanna Newsom, Daniel Johnston, and so many more!

Danielson will be playing at 3PM (England time) on May 8th. Click here to get tickets, and see you there!