From the great suburban lawns of  Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is where Daniel Adam Smith grew up. After forming and leading several bands in Central Pennsylvania, Daniel came to the conclusion that so many people make as they see the dwindling prospects of a small town.Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was not big enough or open-minded enough for him. At 18, he left for New York City and chased the dream that so many people from everywhere seek in the place that so many people seek it in. After he spent a few years playing in NYC and working the odd job in Bars , he came to the conclusion that there was something more than music that drew him. He left NYC for the first of two significant journeys. The first time his travels took him to Austin, Texas for a spell and then eventually to study film in Pittsburgh.“Pittsburgh seemed like the perfect place to study film. It was in my home state therefore cheap and it also seemed a strange city filled with the ghosts of an industrial past. It was in film school I learned to conceptualize my ideas and also take criticism that previously hurt me but now helped me develop. After film school I spent a bit of time in Nottingham, England around 95/96 and that was a really golden time for me. A bit after the peak of Britpop, but Nottingham at that time was a center of dance-free party culture. He came back to NYC with tons of ideas and ready to take the things I had learned in art school and in England and apply them to music. This is when the birth of Lit Plastic occurred.“Lit Plastic was the sum total of my frustrations about consumer, packaged culture. All the neon lights had been replaced by plastic light-boxes and I saw this as an apt metaphor for where culture had moved towards. I want to drape this character Lit in the clothing of 70’s soft rock with more subversive lyrics.” This is when I made a conscious effort to develop “Narrative Pop”. It was a mixture of story-telling, subversive 70’s cinema, and orchestrated bombastic arrangements. It was my goal to take that lite 70s am gold sound and subvert it with deeper content. This shift in his art also coincided with his growing love of more orchestrated pop music in the vein of Scott Walker. Several years after arriving again in the city, he met an austrian actress that he married soon after. He took her name and became Daniel Mölksmith.It is in late 2003, he starts work on “Pictures from the Neon Forest”, his self-released solo ode to the characters both lost and aloof that permeate city life. This was the same time as the World Trade Center destruction that so many have justified for the shift in world politics. Because of this shift in the country his wife was not granted re-entry into the U.S. due to customs problems. He was given a choice of either staying and resolving this problem or leaving and moving to Austria.“While I was mad as hell that my country had given me and my wife such a hard time, there was also part of me that wanted to leave Bush’s America and seek opportunity elsewhere. Frankly I had been treading water in NYC for years.” He came to settle in Vienna in early 2003. “Once I arrived in Vienna, I met everyone I could in the local music industry and asked them about working together. The standard answer I got was ‘nothing happened here except Falco.’ This is what I call the Falco Syndrome. One of my band members then told me about musik vereins and this non-profit model of getting your music out seemed to be the perfect vehicle for what I wanted to do. I met a couple of other people that shared my love of live music played on instruments and this is when I created the Vienna Songwriting Association.”He decided that the future of music is not tied to the major label model. “The future is small individuals working together with a small group, indie label, and other talented people using a DIY approach. “The majors have all the money, but very few ideas. Ideas are the great equalizer in life”. An army of music lovers gathered and Daniel, Klaus Totzler (ORF journalist), Jenny Blochberger (FM4 Press Agent), his co-founder Eva Woska-Nimmervoll (Singer/Promoter) set about creating a DIY, non-profit organization built for developing the Vienna music scene. Offering monthly concerts and introducing Vienna to both Austrian and International artists the VSA has raised the bar for live music again. Their annual event is Blue Bird, a festival where a large scope of entertainment is presented over three nights in late November. “We have taken a small thing in a relatively small city and turned the mentality around that DJ’s are not the only option for entertainment anymore and the rest of the world reflects that with the re-interest in more sincere and less packaged music once again” Things were not going nearly as smoothly on the home front for Daniel. It was in early 2005 that his marriage began to fall apart. After separating and divorcing he once again became Daniel Adam Smith. During this time he wrote and recorded “SALTWATER DAYS”, his ode to the end of all things innocent, based upon the metaphor of saltwater for tears, oceans, and work. Saltwater Days is concept album tied together not by technical gimmicks but musings on the subjects of magic, loss & redemption. And in a turn of events around the same time he came to meet his soulmate, Ines. As one love story ended another began. Ines and Daniel met, fell in love and shacked up….Saltwater Days was released in 2006/7. It was in the post Saltwater Days period where he decided to part ways with the Vienna Songwriting Association, the baby he had created. “I realized that I wanted to make music more than organize, book, find plane tickets and mandolin strings at 3 in the morning. It’s hard to be a musician and then be in the position where one figures out that the support act shouldn’t get this or that amount of pay. I always want to pay everyone the same and as a business model that wasn’t working for what the VSA became. No bitterness or resentment. Klaus took over the position of President/Obmann and he and the rest of the people have made the VSA far more successful than I imagined it could or would be. There is a part of me that’s sad because I wanted to create an austrian scene and the VSA has largely become another organization that books mainly international acts, I wish them great success. When you have a child it’s natural to want that child to become this or that, but in the end the child becomes their own person. That’s what happened to the VSA. That experience was also my very own House of the Seven Gables moment. You know, this idea that a group of artists and like minded souls can all compromise and share a common dream. That is very difficult, a bit like herding cats….”It was during this time that Daniel took a break from music all together. There were numerous things that happened all at once. First I was newly in love and in the process I was also interested in other things, like Politics. As he said, ”I was caught in the 2008 election and I worked for the Obama campaign as a volunteer. There are some things more important than music and that election was one of them. In the middle of the campaign my wife and I discovered she was pregnant. It was the most astounding news I’d ever heard. We were thrilled. Just as in a dream I had when I was very young we found out it was a girl…We were over the moon. 2008 was a great year.  In early 2009 I travelled to Washington D.C and witnessed the inauguration of Barack Obama. It was a beautiful day. Millions of people with smiles on their faces, many with tears. I remember after the event I walked from the Capital to the Lincoln Memorial and read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address which is engraved on the stone wall inside….I realized then what my next record would be called, A NEW HISTORY. A new history for America and a new history for this American. In April, Matilda Josephine Smith was born in our flat on 67 Beheimgasse  in Vienna. A more intense and beautiful experience I have never known. The work and struggle that Ines, my wife went through was incredible.” Daniel Married Ines on June 6, 2009. ” I figured we had a child and it just seemed natural. The failure of one venture does not always mean the failure of another. This time I had actually lived with someone a long time.After the birth of Matilda, Daniel began work assembling the tracks, some of which were already recorded that make up his latest record, A NEW HISTORY. He brought together the same team that produced Saltwater Days. Don Piper as producer and Michael Musmanno as mixing engineer. He used many more musicians from New York City. It is these musicians that Daniel relies on heavily. “There’s nothing like working with players that really get it. Those guys are real players. I’m just a guy doodling around on a guitar.”A NEW HISTORY is a departure from the long orchestrated arrangements of Saltwater Days. Only one song reaches 4 minutes and most of the record is upbeat, and percussion driven. The themes are more about looking forward and in some cases when looking back ;more nostalgic. The record is also about him turning 40 and about the career re-assessment that people undergo at that time. “When I turned 40 I realized that I wasn’t going to win the Gold Medal in any olympic events and more importantly my dreams of making music as a profession were worse than slim to none. That’s okay though. I’m still making music and still making records and just like in the film Sideways: “get it in the libraries, man…let the people decide”. Smith realized that he had come back to the same point at which he started. Making music not for celebrity or success but simply for the love of it. I think all of us should hang on to that reason. When you start worrying about what people think, and you start kissing asses to get radio airplay or saying anything you can to feed your ambition that’s a great pressure that usually doesn’t yield thoughtful work. As he says “in some ways letting go of ambition and pressure is both the easiest and hardest thing in the world..you can’t imagine how much pressure you carry around. When you’re young you can handle it as you get older it just seems silly”Ascot Chang
THE BIONIC SOUL
(unpublished)
(taken from interviews with Daniel Smith conducted from 2010Top of Form