With a background in rock music, Dan Davidson initially gained prominence as a member of Canadian rock band Tupelo Honey. However, it was his transition to country music that truly set his career ablaze. In 2016, he embarked on a solo venture, embracing the country genre with his unique blend of rock-infused country melodies and relatable lyrics.
Davidson’s debut single, ‘Found,’ released in 2016, quickly became a radio hit in Canada, earning him widespread recognition. Infectious single ‘Barn Burner,’ a high-energy track that further solidified his reputation as a rising star in the Canadian country music scene a year later. The song’s catchy hooks and Davidson’s dynamic performance resonated with listeners, earning him a dedicated fanbase that has supported his endeavours ever since. We had the pleasure of seeing Davidson in the UK at this year’s C2C festival where he made a bunch of friends with his charismatic and infectious performances. We spoke to him about his career & the UK visit just after the festival and you can read that right here. Our review of his latest project ‘Nineteen Eighty Something’ can be found here and we were thrilled to grab some time with him to talk all about it.
Hi there Dan, thanks for your time today, we appreciate it. How are you?
Everything is A-ok! Thank you for speaking to me.
How was Halloween last night? You get up to much with the family over there in Canada?
I’ve got two little girls so we were three hours out there in a Canadian late October so it got a little cold! Every parent you see out there has got a travel mug that’s filled with more than coffee, if you know what I mean! (laughing) It’s a big holiday out here, man. I was in Australia last year, for Halloween, and it felt pretty weird because it wasn’t really a thing out there.
Congratulations on your ‘Nineteen Eighty Something’ project. As a teenager of the 80’s it speaks to me, it’s like taking a trip back in a time machine to my youth! Have you been pleased with the response to it so far?
Yeah, it’s been great! People respond and respect you when you try something different rather than just stick to the status quo. That was the big challenge for me on the record, to not repeat myself and to pull in some of the sounds that inspired me when I was getting into music and see how Country I could make it.
What goals did you have when you set out to make this project?
Instead of just going through the single / album rotation cycle I wanted to come up with something that felt like one intentional piece of work. Typically, I’ve never been that guy, you know: here’s the brand, here’s the look, here’s the direction and here’s the videos to match but that’s what I wanted to do on this one.
It kinda allowed me to get really creative on the music side of things as well as on the promo side of things too! I sent out ghetto blasters and cassettes to Spotify, Amazon and Apple Music out here and I sent Walkman’s out to various radio stations with my name on. We’re about to go out on a Canadian tour and we’re not selling any CDs, it’ll all be cassettes.
Did you write the songs specifically for this project or were they songs you had that you moulded, with the production values, into the project?
When I started writing these songs i didn’t really know where the project was heading at first. A lot of it was written on acoustic guitar with just the vocals, typical songwriter stuff, right? The first song I wrote for the record was ‘If These Streets Could Talk,’ and I wrote that with Tim Hicks and a producer, Dave Thompson, who has worked with people like Lady A. We had this song but it didn’t make my hair stand up on end when I listened to the demo so I took it and pulled in all these whacky ideas and people really loved how it sounded so that song became the ‘north star’ for the rest of the record.
I’m a firm believer in the idea that a good song can be played or recorded in a million different ways and it will still come across well. There’s a heavy metal version of Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’ and it’s still awesome because the heartbeat and the core of the song is still great.
My touchstones on ‘If These Streets Could Talk’ were Rick Springfield, Peter Cetera and maybe even very early Michael Bolton when he was something of a rocker before the commercial success changed him.
I can see the Rick Springfield thing, for sure. There are some elements to it, like the synth stabs, they are what make the songs so 80s sounding. It’s bright, sparkly and nostalgic sounding. All the music from that era reminds me of all those great teen movies, like ‘The Breakfast Club’.
No way! My very next question was that I think your song ‘Throwback’ could have very easily been found on the soundtrack to a movie like ‘The Breakfast Club!’
(laughing) That’s a perfect tie in then because I totally agree! We had the title for that song and we really wanted to riff of that. It just kinda painted a picture of tie-dye T shirts, leather jackets and Polaroid pictures, you know? Those references are timeless and the way we consumed music in that era was timeless as well, so we were just chasing that feeling.
People often talk about the 60s as being the best musical decade but I would disagree, it was the 80s, for sure, across all genres. Do you think it was the progress in technology that made artists able to create bigger sounds that made it so popular – why was the 80s such a good era for music?
I think technology was probably a big part of it but with each decade and era that comes around there’s always a different level of experimentation and what the industry would support. The industry supported some cool stuff in the 80s and in the 90s too. The gatekeepers really played a factor in that it was so expensive to record music so the big bands of the 70s, like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were untouchable because it was so hard to actually make music but as the 80s came around technology evolved and it became cheaper to record music, so across the board, you had artists like Prince to Def Leppard all experimenting with what was on offer.
It led to so much interesting music, I think. In the 90s the labels were just trying to keep that going as society and the music industry began to change, so they signed bands like Tool, a crazy, out there, new wave version of Pink Floyd! No-one would give a band like that $2 million to make a record like they did now! (laughing)
Given you were born in 1983 I would have expected the 90s to have been your decade?
Yeah, it definitely more was in terms of growing up and discovering new music but all those artists and songs from the likes of Bryan Adams, Corey Hart, Rick Springfield and Don Henley were still around. The good ones always stay and the radio holds onto the hits so hard that they become part of your consciousness alongside contemporary music. They were all present in my dad’s car and on the radio too! (laughing)
What were the influences behind your band Tupelo Honey? Was that more of a 90s rock influence?
Yeah, we were all just coming out of that ‘angry’ 90s phase. We were all younger guys with guitars who were trying to be rock ‘n’ roll stars so we were listening to the bands that were pushing the limits of the 90s like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine, you know? Music back then was more about expressing feelings than it was telling a story and the older I got, the more I understood that there was an art form and a beauty in telling a story with the lyrics.
That mix of expressing feelings and telling a story has really helped me as a Country writer now because I want to feel a song as much as I want to say a song. Country is so much focused on the lyrics and the storytelling but you can’t ignore the feelings or the mood either. Sometimes the vibe of a song is just as important as what it says.
Talking about vibes, I think my favourite song on the project would have to be ‘Spirit of 17’. Do you have a favourite?
That would definitely be one of mine! That song reminds me of my youth, it reminds me of being a young teenager when you finally get that feeling of freedom and independence. It’s a windows-rolled-down, hand-out-of-the-window kind of song. I wrote that one with Tim Hicks too, and another guy, Jason Blaine. We were just talking about those quintessential ’17 years old’ kind of things, you know, like being able to take your dad’s car out, falling in love with a girl, that kind of thing. It’s a pretty universal stage of life that happens to most people, no matter what decade they grew up in.
I bet ‘Spirit of 17’ will be such a fun song to play live!
You know, it’s funny, we haven’t played it live yet. The tour starts over here in a couple of weeks and we’ll be playing the songs live for the first time!
Will you be playing the whole EP live?
It’s tough (laughing) because there are a lot of songs that people want to hear over here. I think we’ll play pretty much all of them, I’m not sure about ‘After Hours’ yet, but we’re working on it. We’ve got to see what hits live and what fits where in the set.
‘Won’t Forget’ will be a great live song. It sounds, to me, a little like an Irish drinking song in disguise!
(laughing) Yeah, that might be true! That song feels a bit more like ‘classic’ Dan Davidson stuff that you might well find on my first record. I wasn’t actually sure about including that one on the album as it doesn’t really have that 80s sound as much but I loved it, it’s such a great song, and I wanted it to be on there for people to hear. I think we can use that song to showcase our fiddle player at the shows too and a lot of east coast Canadians like that kind of thing, alongside the Irish too! (laughing) I can see us releasing it as a single somewhere down the line.
In many respects, with you putting it as the last track, it feels like to me, you are closing down the 80s era of your sound and re-introducing people back to who you are and what your core sound is on ‘Won’t Forget’.
Yeah, I think that’s a great way to look at it. It’s a song about getting older and remembering the important things in life, which hits home hard for me. I got a ‘big’ birthday coming up this weekend (Dan is 40 this year) and it seems like it would be the perfect song to close down this part of my journey with and look ahead to the next decade and the next phase of my career.
You’ve presumably been writing songs over the summer and thinking ahead to your next project? Is it going to be back towards a more ‘classic’ Davidson sound or do you like this 80s incarnation too much to let it go just yet?
I’m not 100% sure yet, to be honest. I’ve been asked that question a couple of times now. I’ve got a bunch of stuff recorded and some of it is more singer-songwriter type vibe. I’m not sure where they are all going to end up or what the next record will sound like but I am having a lot of fun exploring that side of my writing. I might put out more of an acoustic sounding EP to keep the train rolling but I’ll be writing a ton over the winter, after the tour ends, and that will really dictate what happens next.
Check out Dan Davidson’s ‘Nineteen Eighty Something’ on all platforms right now.
