Daniel Romano

An insightful, subtly witty, and prolific Canadian singer/songwriter whose music reflects a mix of Nashville’s countrypolitan era, 1960s psych-rock, and a host of other diverse influences, Daniel Romano earned widespread acclaim with the release of his 2011 album Sleep Beneath the Willow, which made the long list for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize. A literate storyteller, Romano’s lyrics are as strong and compelling as his music, with a style that makes room for the straightforward and the surreal. Talented and prolific, Romano’s catalog includes detours into smart pop (2016′s Mosey), prog rock (2020′s How Ill Thy World Is Ordered), and elaborate concept pieces (2022′s La Luna), with his road band the Outfit often providing the accompaniment.
Romano was born in Welland, a city in Southern Ontario, in 1985. His parents were folk musicians, while his grandparents were fans of vintage country, and he grew up with a taste for classic folk and country sounds; he also developed a proficiency on a number of instruments, including guitars, drums, pedal steel, and keyboards. While he was in high school, though, Daniel and his brother Ian Romano were bitten by the punk rock bug after hearing straight-edge pioneers Minor Threat, and the siblings formed the indie punk band Attack in Black. While Attack in Black developed a loyal following in their native Canada, and their second album, Marriage, earned the group an award as NXNE Favourite New Indie Record Release at the 2007 CASBY Awards, bad business deals made trouble for them, and they released their final album in 2009. (During Attack in Black’s run, Romano also landed a side gig as drummer and multi-instrumentalist with City and Colour, a project led by Dallas Green of Alexisonfire.)
Frustrated with the music business, Romano channeled his emotions into new songs that reflected his country influences, and after forming You've Changed Records with Steve Lambke of the Constantines, he released 2009′s Daniel, Fred & Julie, a collaborative session with fellow songwriters Julie Doiron and Frederick Squire. Romano used his experiences in Attack in Black as the basis for his first solo effort, 2010′s Workin' for the Music Man, which he recorded in his own private studio, with the artist handling nearly all the instruments himself, a practice he would continue for most of his subsequent work. Romano’s second country album, 2011′s Sleep Beneath the Willow, received a long list nomination for that year’s Polaris Music Prize, awarded to the year’s outstanding Canadian album regardless of genre or commercial success.
In 2013, he struck a deal with an American label, Normaltown Records, a subsidiary of New West Records devoted to up-and-coming independent artists, and Normaltown gave Romano his first U.S. solo release, Come Cry with Me. He was moved to the official New West Records roster for his next album, 2015′s If I've Only One Time Askin'. For his second New West release, 2016′s Mosey, he took a creative detour, adding a strong dose of ’60s and ’70s pop influences to his music and turning back the country accents. That same year saw the prolific Romano release the eponymous debut from his proto-punk/power pop alter ego, Ancient Shapes.
Drawing inspiration from artists like Lee Hazlewood, Leonard Cohen, Serge Gainsbourg, and Randy Newman, Romano headed to Finnsäs, Sweden, with longtime engineer Kenneth Roy Meehan to record the follow-up to Mosey. The resulting Modern Pressure was released in May 2017. With a seemingly bottomless well of material, Romano kicked off 2018 with the surprise digital-only release of two albums, Nerveless and Human Touch, returning in December of that year with yet another LP, Finally Free, which he recorded using a minimalist four-track cassette setup. 2020′s OK Wow was a collection of fan favorites recorded live in Scandinavia during a tour by Romano and his road band the Outfit.
Later in 2020, Romano issued a studio LP, the stylistically diverse and prog-influenced How Ill Thy World Is Ordered, attributed to the Daniel Romano’s Outfit moniker. It was part of an abundance of material Romano and his Outfit would issue while they were kept off the road by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the songwriter keeping his fans satisfied with a wealth of digital releases. He issued two albums in 2021 — Fully Plugged In was another live recording, this time from a club date in Atlanta, while Cobra Poems was a studio set that folded elements of classic rock into his usual rootsy formula, as well as bits of found sound as narration. Two digital-only releases from 2020 were reissued in physical format in 2022, with Visions of the Higher Dream finding him dabbling in psychedelic sounds and Content to Point the Way steeped in the country-rock sounds of his most popular work.
September 2022 brought one of Romano’s most unusual and ambitious projects to date, La Luna, an album devoted to a single song, performed in 12 parts over the course of 33 minutes. Members of the Outfit served as Romano’s backing band for the sessions, and the music was also the basis of a feature film released later the same year, starring Julie Doiron of the band Eric's Trip, who was one of his collaborators for Daniel, Fred & Julie. ~ Mark Deming