Interview w/ Casey Daniel

Thank you for sitting down and talking to FLEX, can you tell us a bit about how you got into music?

I have more memories of playing music than those before it. I was a timid kid, and music brought me out of my shell. I started playing piano around four and writing songs around eight. It helped that I grew up in a house full of music. My dad’s a guitarist, and my grandfather was a fantastic singer. I grew up singing in choirs. My mother would let us watch any musicals we liked on VHS, so we’d binge the Sound of Music. I came into making albums quite earnestly. The idea was planted in me so young by the songwriters from the ‘70s my folks were listening to: Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Carole King. 

Who would you say are your biggest musical influences?

I have a great many teachers. First, I owe a debt to all the great pop-piano bards. Nina Simone, Little Richard, Billy Joel, Elton John, Laura Nyro, Kate Bush, and later on Fiona Apple and Tori Amos. The roots in classical and jazz run very deep for me. Keith Jarrett and Abdullah Ibrahim hugely influence me. They make the piano sing. I may not sound much like any of them, but it feels cozy to think of myself as part of this long lineage. Same with singing. In terms of lyrics, I draw a lot of inspiration from music, film, and other writers. For My Heart is an Outlaw, I was reading a lot of short stories. Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Lydia Davis, and Annie Dillard. Thinking of ways to pack life into each song while retaining some level of simplicity. Sometimes the most poetic verses are the most plainspoken, y’know? Funny and sad and hopeful all at the same time.

Congratulations on your brand-new single ‘Your Girl’s Upstairs’ —what inspired this particular release?

Thank you! It felt like a perfect invitation to the world of the album — a scene within a scene. The first verse is all drama: The girlfriend upstairs, the upset husband. The second verse subverts it. It’s so interior, what the narrator is thinking. How they used to be in the girlfriend’s shoes. So many times in relationships, you get to this place where even when both people are individually good people, they start to “play house” or “play dead.” Easier to keep the peace. I’m very interested in these thresholds we uphold. What’s stopping us from crossing them? What are we so afraid of on the other side? In my experience, being on my own has given me a profound sense of stability. Yet, it seems we’re all taught to be afraid of ending up alone. 

How do you channel personal experiences into your songwriting, and what do you hope listeners gain from connecting with your music?

I’d think of it like autofiction. Like Shelia Heti and Ben Lerner’s writing. Perhaps the text draws from life, but the moment you put it into song, it dramatizes it and transforms it into something else. So to have this rich well to draw from, as a queer person and someone who is sometimes in polyamorous relationships, sometimes not, that’s a gift. I’d be stupid not to use it. But the imagination is more powerful than reality, 9 times out of 10. A song’s not usually worth being an asshole about turning everything into copy; I find it just leads to a lot of unnecessary conflict. If you’re not careful as a writer/songwriter, you forget to live first, write second. Life is for savoring; the work is for remembering. When I was younger, I worried a moment would lose its potency if I didn’t immediately capture it like a lightning bug in a jar. With time, you develop better writing habits. You put those memories in a holding pen for later, alter them, pull in references to history or literature. There’s less scarcity around ideas. This is the thing about writing in your thirties and forties that I didn’t understand in my early twenties. Songs will always come. Your faith around this gets reinforced by time. 

Each aspect of music—writing, recording, practicing, and playing live—offers something different. Can you share a particularly meaningful moment from each?

Writing is very solitary for me. It has to be that way; I need to be able to read the tea leaves and see what subjects are coming up. When I quit touring in 2018 and got a day job, I was surprised to learn I’m a morning person. I love to write between 6 and 9 am, preferably outside in my garden or moving around. I write more interesting melodies and progressions away from my instrument. 

Recording opens the aperture on what I wrote. Can it take on more voices than my own? I think about producing like a mood board, in a very visual way. For My Heart is an Outlaw, it was Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, Springsteen in blue jeans, a big American highway with no cars on it—William Eggleston’s photography. In 2023 I ran into Adam Schatz on tour with Japanese Breakfast and we batted the idea of working on an album then. I knew he’d be a good foil for me, because he’s brilliant and fun. For instance, I’m allergic to repetition. I’ll start riffing after 2 vocal takes. Early on he gave me a note to “sing it stupid”, or to sing what I’d written. It helped focus the performance. We treated the album personnel a bit like central casting. I like a particular kind of chemistry in the room: just enough familiarity between players to make it friendly and keep players on their toes. There’s so much AI slop and manufactured music out there; I wanted this to feel really live. Like you’re in the room, sitting in on the session.

Live performance is more complicated. I’ve always had stage fright. But many years ago in London, I opened for Jakob Dylan in this old theater. I was backstage, shaking like a leaf, and he came up to me. He ended up shaking my hand, and his hand was so cool and soft. He was dressed head to toe in denim, and his eyes were this crazy shade of blue. He said, “don’t forget about the little people on the way up.” To this day, I have no idea why he said that, but it broke the spell for a second—made me laugh. 

Is there a song in your repertoire that holds a particularly deep personal meaning for you? Can you share the story or inspiration behind it?

I have a penchant for the bleeding-heart ballads. I love a good wallow. So does my mom, so on every album I leave a sad song for her. There is a song off White Hinterland’s album Baby that I’m still very proud of to this day called ‘David.’ It’s a song people have told me over the years got them through a tough period of their life, like the loss of a relative, a relationship breaking down. Lyrically, it’s about losing faith while acknowledging the beauty of the world. Grief is this triple-headed beast: your love, your loss, and your memories all swirling in the glass. It can isolate you. It’s the kind of song I don’t hope to write again because of the conditions under which it was written, but I’m so glad it’s there for people when they need a song to comfort them. 

What are your goals for the future with your music?

It may sound modest, but the goal is to keep going. I spent the first 20 years of my career following advice from industry veterans. The next 20 are about listening to my own gut. I really needed those 8 years away to go and get a life. Pick up a hobby I couldn’t monetize. It helps that I have divorced my income source from this work, and while maybe that’s not for every artist, I encourage everyone to look at the model and build something that feels right to them. Being a working artist under late-capitalism is not for the faint of heart, and the more transparent about what’s working —and what’s not— the better it will be for everyone.  Look at what happened during the pandemic. The first thing we did under lockdown was turn to music, movies, and television. People need art and music. It is not optional. We need stories to make sense of our lives. Yet, the economic model of streaming and touring continues to undervalue artists’ time and work. For independent artists to promote their work requires a lot of content, and that content comes with a price tag. Now, with AI on top of that, it’s a lot of pressure. I think now is the time to dream and envision radical alternatives. For me, that’s where community comes in. I’m always writing, and what interests me most is collaboration. Co-writing, jumping on different records. Doing sessions with other artists without a set end-result in mind. Finding ways to challenge the status quo. Investigating alternative DSPs to Spotify like Qobuz, and so on. I have a little group chat going with pals where we dream and scheme together. 

What message or feeling do you hope listeners take away from your music?

I hope listeners come away with a sense of generosity. In the arrangement, the lyrics, the production. I want my songs to take you somewhere, even if it’s like you came over for a really good meal. The wine was flowing, the gossip was good.