In conversation, Daniel Donato is delightfully trippy. His band name and self-declared genre Cosmic Country implies a “frequency.” The Horizons in the title of his third album are “where the land meets the heavens based off any individual's subjective perception.” He can sometimes step way out on the limb of woo woo, but he doesn’t fall, almost always sticking the landing with a good point and a fresh way of seeing things. And things keep happening to him that feel ordered by a benevolent cosmos.
Consider for example his recent headlining debut at the Ryman Auditorium, on the night of Aug. 22, 2025, just a week or two before the interview presented here in String #342. By luck or design, the show took place on the tenth anniversary - to the day - of Donato’s final set at Robert’s Western World with the legendary former band leader Don Kelley. When that vital Lower Broadway tutelage ended after 462 gigs, plus countless hours busking on the street before that, he was 20 years old. Across a twenty-foot wide alley, in the hallowed Ryman, now age 30, a new chapter unfolded.
The show began with the usual rousing applause as the band walked out on stage, except it wasn’t the usual. It was intense - up there with the Ryman walk-ons I’d seen for a young Tyler Childers and an elder Herbie Hancock. The crowd welcomed Donato to the stage with ferocious joy. He took his time taking it in. Not speaking. Just smiling, looking graceful and grateful at the same time, before whipping his band into Merle Haggard’s “Working Man Blues.”
“I knew, in a very solemn and subjective sense, that my job there was to receive that love,” he says when I asked him how it felt to stand there as a headliner for the first time. “Maybe some moments of life are filled with so much reality that they transcend time and space, and you can literally access them in a different environment a week later. And for a blessing of that scale, I hope I can access that for decades of my life.”
Back in 2020, in Episode 142, we covered Donato’s youth in New Jersey, his family’s move to Nashville, and his teenage tutelage with the Don Kelley Band. That interview had to be conducted remotely because of the pandemic. Now, sitting in a room together for the first time, we focused on the dynamic decade between his 20th and 30th years.
He was let go from Kelley’s band, but that was nothing unusual, because Kelley was famous for hiring on Nashville’s top country picking prospects (Brent Mason, Guthrie Trapp, Redd Volkaert and more) and then switching things up every few years. As he regrouped, Donato felt a tidal pull from one of the major albums of the time, Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.
“That was country music that I heard myself in, in terms of songwriting,” Daniel recounts. “And that opened me up to the tapestry of Sturgill’s influences. It was good, because I could hear the history in Sturgill’s music. I could tell it came from somewhere, but it also came from him in a unique way which offers the portal to the present. So that album inspired me to start writing songs. But I had to work. I had rent.”
Instead of finding another gig on Lower Broadway (a sure way to never find a national audience or launching a solo career), Donato followed a tip from Jason Isbell’s guitar player Sadler Vaden that country rock band The Wild Feathers needed a lead guitarist. And for the first time, he went from being a residency musician to a touring musician. He even read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to enhance the experience. He also did a two-year stint with country artist Paul Cauthen, before he thought he was ready to form his own band. One sign he was ready was a cold call from Robben Ford, one of his guitar heroes, who offered to produce an album. That debut, A Young Man’s Country, came out in 2020. And while Daniel was waiting out the pandemic like everyone else, he used the time to write and cohere the idea for his Cosmic Country band and experience.
Donato’s second album marked a real breakout. Reflector was like nothing else released in 2023 - not a concept album but a spiritual journey for sure, with an hour-plus run time and 15 tracks that lay out really well on a double LP. In WMOT’s year-end Outstanding Albums list, I said: “With a true bandstand sound and chemistry, this is the closest thing to a live show presented on a non-live album I heard this year.”
And yet live is where Donato butters his bread. Over just four to five years, he’s graduated from one venue level to another, growing his renown on the jam band circuit. Relix magazine called Cosmic Country “a tour-de-force of guitar shredding in country form, where Donato’s vision makes for a blissful and raucous experience at the same time.”
If Reflector put the emphasis on the cosmic, then the new Horizons, released on the same day as his historic Ryman show, leans toward the country, with (mostly) shorter songs driven (mostly) by country beats and a blues twang. In this hour, you’ll hear “Sunshine In The Rain,” a swift train beat with pulsing Leon Russell style piano. “Translation” channels an Allman Brothers spirit with a dash of fiddle. “Hangman’s Reel” mingles a Lower Broadway fiddle instrumental with Dead vibes. And I love the longer jams on “Chore” and the homeward-looking album closer “Down Bedford.”
This episode concludes a month-long series of String shows diving into the latest wave of Americana/jam band crossover, an important, highly musical lineage that traces to The Band, Leon Russell, New Grass Revival, the Allman Brothers, and of course, the Grateful Dead, Donato embraces the AD (After Dead) era, as he dubs it, saying it reflects the soul of America at its best, “There's art form, there's community, there's commerce, and there's teamwork, there's storytelling,” he tells WMOT. “And I would be hard pressed to believe that the spirit of that would ever go away. This subculture is very much alive and has only grown.”
Check out the series:
String 340 with Robert Randolph
String 341 with Luther Dickinson
Donato is live in Nashville this week, as he brings his Cosmic Christmas show to the Brooklyn Bowl for two nights this weekend on Dec. 5 and 6. Next May 8 and 9, he plays the Caverns in Pelham, TN.
