In our continuing effort to document key music-makers whose headline space doesn’t measure up to their behind-the-scenes contributions, I found myself talking this fall to two guys named Daniel whose accomplishments and esthetics seem to complement one another. Dan Knobler moved to Nashville from New York and quickly became one of the most admired producers of Americana and folk music. Daniel Tashian has lived in Music City basically all his life, building a circle of influence as a songwriter, artist, and producer, culminating in the Grammy Award he shared for making 2018’s Album of the Year, Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves. Both gentlemen have released new albums with cool stories, and we talk about them in this co-headlining episode.
When I met Dan Knobler at Goosehead Palace, his home-based studio near Brentwood, the tension was between my wonder at its settled, cozy ambience and the reality that he was planning a move. It almost seemed too much to pack every guitar pedal, amp, instrument, device, lamp, photo, but such is life. I can’t disclose where Goosehead II will be, but there’s reason to believe it will have the same mojo, because it’s the guy not the gear. And the guy has earned the trust and admiration of a huge swath of the Americana/folk community during his relatively short five years in Music City. Knobler has produced outstanding albums by Erin Rae, Maya De Vitry, Della Mae, Kelsey Waldon, Rodney Crowell and others. His work on Allison Russell’s career-defining Outside Child led to multiple Grammy nominations and the coveted Americana Album of the Year trophy last fall. I’ve heard nearly all of these artists gush about Knobler’s attention, empathy and skill in helping them execute what they have in mind.
Knobler grew up in New York City, where by high school he says he was leading bands with a fervor and myopia that sometimes clashed with his friends’ odd desire to do other things besides music sometimes. He played guitar (and still does quite often with many of the artists he produces). His world was blues and rock, then funk. He says his journey into roots music might have begun with a live show by The Meters that blew his mind. And he fell for The Band on record. Meanwhile, he veered off his plan to study jazz guitar at Berklee in Boston in favor of a recording program at NYU that put him in a real studio for the first time. It was a revelation. “I was just very quickly enamored with the whole thing,” he says. “I've tended to enjoy playing around with technology, and buttons and knobs and all those things and figuring out how something works, and then figuring out how to subvert how it works to do something else. And, you know, a recording studio is just the ultimate version of that.”
Even on the new album bearing Dan Knobler’s name, he’s making and steering music behind more famous voices. It’s called Friends Play My Son’s Favorite Songs, Vol. 1, and it’s just as described. Knobler plays a lot of music around his two young children and Willoughby, now 4 years old, had demonstrated strong, often uncannily discerning preferences for some songs over others. He’s a devotee of Paul Simon for example. He loves “Route 66” and “What A Wonderful World” and even “Case Of You” by Joni Mitchell. For Knobler, fatherhood has been a graduate course in how the developing mind grasps sound and lyric and rhythm. “Before I had kids, I would have thought that a young kid’s relationship with music was really just about sort of rhythmic energy, and then the sort of simple melodies that they can grasp. And what I realized, at least with Willoughby, and my daughter, you really get the sense that they are tuned in to the emotional timbre of a song.”
As the pandemic wound down, and live sessions were returning, Knobler revived his studio and its social atmosphere by having artists he knows and loves come over and record Willoughby’s playlist. It’s a delightful concept, and it is by no means a children’s album. Maya De Vitry’s “Case Of You” is plangent and dreamy. Aaron Lee Tasjan performs John Prine’s “Pretty Good” with jangly good humor and a dose of jam. Allison Russell’s take on “I Must Be In A Good Place Now” by the late great Bobby Charles is as uplifting and lovely as anything out this year. And it ends with the song that made Dan think this project should come to be, the serene clarity of Erin Rae on “It’s A Wonderful World.” This record, the spirit of its toddler A&R executive, and our conversation about how to maintain our youthful fervor for music suggests that it wonderful indeed.
Daniel Tashian is the son of Barry and Holly Tashian, a notable folk duo with many more musical credentials besides, including Barry’s run with Beatles-opening Barry and the Remains in the mid 1960s. As he told me, Daniel dabbled in music growing up, but he felt more drawn to the visual arts. Still, between banging around in the garage and the osmotic influence of his folks’ world, he developed a feel for songs. And when he was 19, he got signed to a deal on Elektra and made a debut album with none other than T Bone Burnett. It didn’t really take off, and Daniel told me when we sat down that he took that pretty hard. It was during that spell that he checked a book out of the library about producing records and started thinking about a different musical life than that of a touring artist or rock star.
Fortunately, Tashian found multiple outlets for his esthetic, which had to find its own lane in Nashville as a devotee of sensual pop music. As a performer, it was The Silver Seas, one of the most beguiling bands of the past 25 years with five albums to its credit. As a songwriter, he contributed to the Music Row caravan with cuts by Lee Ann Womack, Martina McBride and the cast of the Nashville TV series, even a number one for Josh Turner. And around 2018 he got involved with the Kacey Musgraves project, co-producing with her and Ian Fitchuk, an album that was like nothing else in its time. All this time, Daniel maintained a relationship with English songwriter Paul Kennerly, a one-of-a-kind artist and figure who used to be married to Emmylou Harris. He’s known in part for his Emmylou hit “Born To Run,” with his typical pulsing acoustic guitar and elegantly simple lyrics. Like his friend Nick Lowe, Kennerly is a musical economist, making the most of tempo and terse lyrics, a fusion of Buddy Holly and Brit pop. Tashian loves his style.
“He's always humming and strumming, and he has these little ideas,” Daniel says. “And he showed me one little idea that he had that came out of talking, you know. We were talking about my daughter, and he showed me this idea he had called ‘Somebody's Thinking About You,’ and I just was immediately, well - I could sing it right back to him. It was just immediately accessible to me. That kind of began the whole (thing).”
The thing is Daniel’s new album Night After Night, a thrumming, jangly opus that pulls the listener away from the strife of the world and makes everything feel younger. The lyrics need no interpretation. The melodies stick but it’s not bubblegum. It’s country, but in the way the Everly Brothers were country in 1960. And it reveals that fun music takes intense craft to sound so easy. “I think it says something about me that hasn't been said,” Tashian says. “And in a way that I feel really reflects an important part of me that I would like someone to stumble on and know.”
