By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Daniel Donato’s dad tried to put a guitar in his son’s hands, but the instrument never caught on with the youngster.
“There’d always been guitars around the house,” Donato recalled in a recent telephone interview. Then the 12-year-old Daniel got fascinated with the video game Guitar Hero. That stuck. “I was bad enough at skate boarding and good enough at Guitar Hero. And I really liked the music,” he said, referencing the game’s repertoire of rock and hard rock classics.
After a bit, he was inspired to try out one of those guitars hanging around the house. “I haven’t looked back or down,” Donato said.
Country rocker Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country will headline the Friday night show at the Black Swamp Arts Festival. He’ll hit the stage at 10 p.m.
The Festival opens Friday Sept. 6 at 5 p.m. with the juried art show, music on the Main Stage, and food trucks. The festival’s offerings expand on Saturday and Sunday with more art and music as well as youth and teen activities. Click for schedule.
“The actual skill and accuracy of it took time,” Donato said of his foray into playing guitar. “The desire, the cracking of the puzzles hidden within the fretboard, was instantaneous.” He likened it to finding “key to a door.”
His father encouraged him. The pair jammed together, and then when the younger Donato’s skills surpassed his, the father, a software developer, created private Java pages to quiz his son on guitar theory, chording, and scale technique.
And it was his father who brought him to Nashville to busk. “I was practicing all the time and getting pretty good,” Donato recalls. His father knew his son was “an entrepreneurial child.”
“I was disagreeable and hard working. I wasn’t really going to get in line.” Donato said. “That’s a potentially volatile personality trait that could ruin someone’s life.”
His father knew his son needed to lock into an activity that allowed him to grow. “He was right on the money.”
Donato remembers they’d arrive at about the same time as the tourists, about 10 a.m. and he’d play for eight hours with breaks.
He was 14 and had been playing guitar for two years.
Then they’d head over to Robert’s Western World, where the Don Kelly Band was the house band.
Donato said every time he went in he’d give Kelly his business card and tell him he knew all the songs in the band’s repertoire. Kelly’s crew played a mix of country that they referred to as “pre-Garth,” as in superstar Garth Brooks. They played songs by Waylon Jennings, Tom T. Hall, Ernest Tubb, the Sons of the Pioneers, Hank Williams Sr., and others.
“It was country music influenced by swing bands and blues and folk music, bluegrass and rock and roll,” Donato said. “It’s really American and the values and the lyrics are still relevant.”
When Kelly’s guitar player left the band, Donato took his place on Telecaster. It was the start of a two-year, 464-show run with Kelly.
“They had a great show,” Donato said. It was highly orchestrated. That experience schooled Donato in how to run a band and develop a set.
It was at Robert’s that Donato’s high school history teacher happened to hear him, unbeknownst to the teenager.
The next morning at the end of class, the teacher summoned Donato. The teacher presented him with three hefty binders full of CDs.
The binder was labeled “Dick’s Picks.” Is this even appropriate? Donato was unfamiliar with the series devoted to live bootlegs and B-sides from the Grateful Dead.
“That’s the most true way of discovering that band’s music,” he said. “I was hooked instantly.”
Now the work of Jerry Garcia and crew, and all the music they were influenced by Elizabeth Cotten, early blues, Chuck Berry, and more blended with the Webb Pierce and Bob Wills, and the like that he was devoted to.
The Sturgill Simpsons’ album “Metamodern Sounds of Country Music” impressed him with its spare four-piece instrumentation, a sound removed from the highly produced, compressed sound of popular country.
All this formed the foundation of the Cosmic Country.
After leaving Kelly’s band he gigged around Nashville with pick-up combos with some of the top Nashville cats on the scene. He’d hire three musicians for a $300 gig and pay each of them $100. What money he made was from the merchandise, he and his father created. It was just enough to pay “the miserable rent in whatever garbage hole I was living in,” Donato said, “It was great. I loved it. In the Kerouac-sense, I was very free.”
He also went on tour as a sideman. “I learned how to start writing and being on the road and not being total mess or a monster of a human,” Donato said.
He knew it was the time to pull together a platform for the ideas he was working on.
That meant doing something he hadn’t done before — making music with musicians his own age. All his work before had been with his elders, which is how he learned his craft. Now he needed musicians under 30 who weren’t tied down by family obligations.
The Cosmic Country were born and hit the road starting out with gigs within a day’s drive of Nashville. They drove his mother’s Nissan to places such as Charleston, South Carolina, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Bowling Green, Kentucky. He had created a Rolodex full of contacts from his sideman days. These were the kind of jobs where they got half-price off their meals at the venue, a six-pack of Budweiser, and $250. The whole band shacked up in a single motel room.
They hooked up with a major booking and management company. That’s what was needed then to get bigger shows, but not best for the long-term, Donato said.
Then COVID-19 closed down nightlife. Donato used the time to synthesize everything he’d learned over the past decade and wrote the songs that appear on his recent release “Reflector,” his first with all original material.
He was back at Robert’s the first night pandemic restrictions were lifted. He continued playing there until April, 2021. That is where he met his current manager and booking agent.
He put together the new edition of Cosmic Country and since April, 2021, the band has been on the road doing 150 or so shows a year.
The setlist features originals and classics he cut is teeth on.
He describe song writing as almost like prayer. “I try to set up myself for success,” he said. “I have a clear head, an open mind and open heart. It’s out of my hands.”
when practicing guitar, if you put in the hours of practice, you’ll have some marked improvement when you’re done. In composing, he said, “you just really leave it to chance and try to stay open and do it every day. …
It’s a genuinely spiritual experience. It’s immensely personal.”
He tries most of all to be truthful. He wants songs to speak to where he is now, where he’s been, and wherever he ends up in the future.
Sometimes he has to “pull the wool from my eyes” and watch the song turn to dust. Others are keepers.
This “prayerful” stage is just the first step in the songwriting process.
Next he brings in the band, and they work it out. Now, he said, it becomes a Cosmic Cowboy song.
Then the music gets road tested. “It’s really living music,” Donato said. “It has to go out and play with people, like children do.”
Sometimes as the song gets aired out on stage the structure will change or a lyric or the tempo. “We show our work. We get feedback from our community,” he said. “Thank god, we have that relationship with our community.”
The relationship is the same, he said, as when he busked in Nashville at 14. He was “making music for people I didn’t know and then we had a connection that’s really deep, something truthful and beautiful really happens,” Donato said.
“My main goal with every show is that something good and true can happen that brings, even to one person, a genuine experience that they can take with them. … The results of a moment like that are intellectually and logically incomprehensible in potential. It’s something that expands the possibility of what they thought was possible with music.”
