Can You See The Real Daniel Romano?

GUEST POST: David Laing

Daniel Romano’s Outfit

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David Laing wrote an excellent essay about the many connections between power pop and country music for Remember The Lightning: A Guitar Pop Journal, Volume 1. In many ways, this deep dive on Daniel Romano is a companion piece to that essay.

If you’re new to Romano, like I was, get ready to discover one of today’s most versatile and talented modern guitar pop chameleons. —S.W. Lauden

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Take a trip upon the magic swirling ship of Canada's pop poet, who tells the truth even when he's lying.

Daniel Romano is an enigma wrapped in a Rickenbacker wrapped in a riddle that asks the question, ‘What would we have got if Bob Dylan joined The Who in 1966 rather than picking up The Hawks?’ Or at least that's what he is now. Maybe. What the Canadian singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, poet, graphic designer, filmmaker and leather worker most definitely is though is prolific, eclectic and someone who really knows his way around a tune.

Daniel Romano makes pop art for now people. His sound these days often comes across as a 21st century version of Pete Townshend's ‘60s vision of power pop, or Greg Shaw's '70s vision of it. With some old school country and a bit of that thin wild mercury sound in there too—in Romano’s hands, it's all pop. And poetry. 

Like the Riddler suit-wearing Nick Lowe of 1978 who wore many guises on his Jesus of Cool/Pure Pop for Now People album cover, Romano knows his way around multiple styles, and has a voice perfect for any sort of confection. What Lowe put on an LP cover and into a period of short creation that reflected a musical flux around him, Romano has put into a career.

Which is not to say he sounds like Lowe; that cypher-like ability to inhabit multiple guises, musically and sartorially, over a long period is something he shares with Bob Dylan, and he has something of mid-'60s Bob Dylan's nasal voice and gorgeous sense of melody in his music as well.

Like a young Dylan—or a young Bowie—Romano also has an authenticity that is based on his own creation of himself. His authenticity is of his work, and the reality of his background or his circumstances doesn’t matter. 

Who the real Daniel Romano is, no matter what he’s wearing, is hard to tell, but his music is never less compelling, and always sounds true to himself. Just as Dylan once noted “To live outside the law you must be honest,” and Johnny Thunders once sung of himself, borrowing from Scarface's Tony Montana, “I tell the truth even when I’m lying,” Romano has a keen ability to show us himself in his music, even despite, or perhaps because of, his delightful sleight of hand.    

From an indie rock background (he's an associate of City and Colour), Romano dove deeply into a country and folk thing at the start of a solo career in his mid-twenties, around the end of the first decade of the millennium. The sound on his first couple of records is earthy and sometimes acoustic-based—sort of like early Eric Anderson, Jackson C. Frank or a '60s Townes Van Zandt. He then moved into classic George Jones/Johnny Paycheck ‘60s countrypolitan territory. Things quickly became odder and more cinematic in a Lee Hazelwood sort of way. His sound was as colorful and dramatic as his rhinestone suits, and gorgeous self-designed album covers.

A few years later, something changed again; the brooding 1968 Waylon visage look gave way to '66-meets-‘90s disheveled Dylan look—2016 shots of Daniel wearing an Adidas tracksuit top over a very Dylan polka-dot shirt illustrated that overlay and reminded me of seeing Dylan in ’91 come on stage wearing a hoodie. Dense production pieces and a richer melodic palette (including brass) encroached on his country sound, changing the emphasis, and reflecting rarely explored connections between the different musics. Soon, his voice followed the changes; the emotive yet youthful country drawl became a high, flexible, nasal wine. 

Harder to pigeonhole than the earlier stuff, it was the start of another shift around which Romano would soon really stake his own ground. Of course, as he was doing this, he was also making records like 2018's Finally Free, something of a return to acoustic folk roots, albeit more detailed, with avant-garde leanings.

A year or two before covid hit, a switch went on in Daniel's brain and he has struggled to turn it off.

He dropped two albums simultaneously and unannounced in 2018 soon after the release of Modern Pressure. He'd already started a few side-groups/projects; Ancient Shapes pushed the punk/power pop side of things with more consistency, although with wild variation within that basic framework, and increasing overlap with his solo work. Indeed, Ancient Shape's great “A Flower That Wouldn't Bloom,” which is as perfect a power pop song as you'll hear, seems to be a current favorite in Romano's own live set. Subsequent side-projects included Spider Bite, in which Romano took on early hardcore in his own recognizable style, while a couple of other projects involved longer material and prog-y tendencies.

Throughout the covid lockdowns, Romano was unstoppable. Across 2020 and 2021 he released something like a dozen albums and other bits and pieces, and he's released a handful more since. At the same time his music perhaps became more obtuse, bursting with ideas, poetry, and playfulness. Which is another Dylan thing. Indeed one of his 2020 releases was a track-by-track cover of Dylan’s Infidels album, performed in the same style Dylan performed a few tunes on Letterman backed by West Coast punks The Plugz back when Infidels originally came out.  

Peter Jespersen, a Romano superfan and his former A&R guy at New West, told me around the beginning of Covid that Romano's live shows had, of late, been “positively explosive, like The Who meets The Rolling Thunder Revue.” More recent YouTube footage of Romano and his current band the Outfit, suggest maybe The Who came out of the meeting laughing, with their jackets torn and their knuckles bloodied.

Throughout it all Romano's sense of authentic artfulness, stunning melodic abilities, and impeccable taste in stealing the best bits from a wide range of music have remained. One of his most-loved tunes “When I Learned Your Name,” from 2017's Modern Pressure, is indicative of his writing strengths—recorded and usually performed as a bouncing and swinging pop tune, YouTube sessions reveal the song works equally as well as a heart stopping country-folk ballad.

This reminds us that power pop has deep country roots; the song “Love Hurts", as recorded by the Everly Bros in 1960 and as performed live by the Who in '67 (check their version out on YouTube), is an early illustration of how such great material can work in different settings, which is something that Romano clearly loves to explore.

At the moment, much of Romano's recorded music comes across like some sort of plasticized freak beat—meaty, beaty, big and bouncy, but in a sort of knowingly prefab way.

Prefab in that there is a homogeneity of sound running through it, in the same way that those early Ramones records (the first and Rocket to Russia in particular) each had their own consistency of tone. Which is not to say that Romano sounds like the Ramones, although he was known to perform "Swallow My Pride" some years back and the great song "The Pride of Queens” from Modern Pressure nods in their direction. What I mean is that the sound on Romano's recent records is not a natural sound; everything sounds processed but in a very pleasing kind of way. It's violently compressed yet dynamic and makes me think of Tupperware. Mod Tupperware.  

Throughout it all, going back to his early days, Romano has often recorded by himself. Until the formation of his current band the Outfit at least, he has not only written, sung and played guitar on almost everything, he has played almost all instruments required, including drums.

Of course, he produces the records himself too. These days (and early on, before a long mid-career dalliance with LA's New West label) he also releases them on his You've Changed label. He is also a published poet and visual artist—as mentioned he designs his own record covers (and man does he have great taste in fonts!)—and makes most of his own videos. As also mentioned, he works leather and has made decorative guitar straps for many of his contemporaries. If we could, we should all get Romano to design and direct our lives—they would look freaking gorgeous. 

On the live front, the Outfit, which Romano now fronts with a Rickenbacker in tow, has become an explosive unit, and increasingly Who-like. He always has a great drummer—sometimes it's his brother Ian Romano. The Outfits’ secret weapon though is diminutive backing vocalist Julianna Riolino, a fellow Canadian and You've Changed recording artist (she’s also featured prominently on Romano's records of late).

Not content to just highlight choruses, Riolino sings the entirety of every song along with Romano, all the while living out her own Roger Daltrey fantasies beside him on the stage. Riolino is a fine country/folk singer-songwriter in her own right, and clearly as versatile as Romano himself.

Of late, Romano's life partner Carson McCone has also joined the band, adding more conventional-style backing vocals and banging on a tambourine. When circumstances dictate, the Outfit, with Romano on guitar, flip to serve as McCone's backing band, in which guise they are equally adept. Romano produced and played on McHone's 2021 Still Life on Merge (he also made the videos, of course) and it's a stunner—a step away from the Texan-style country-folk she began with towards a more eclectic folk-rock sound, sort of like an indie rock early Fairport Convention. A recent Texas Public Radio Live at the Lonesome Lounge Sessions YouTube clip has both Carson and Daniel sharing the Outfit is worth your time.

So, where does one start with Daniel Romano's catalogue?

Yes, there is a lot to work through. Romano has made it easier (or harder, depending on how you look at it) of late by taking a lot of his self-released stuff out of circulation. Indeed, some of it seemed to disappear as quickly as it appeared. (I don't know the reasons for this.) Best bet is to get onto his Bandcamp and have a listen.

• 2017's Modern Pressure is great and shows early hints of power pop.

• 2015's If I've Only One Time Askin' is maybe his best country record.

• 2016's Mosey was a great transition record.

• 2019's Ancient Shapes' A Flower That Wouldn't Bloom includes the pop perfect title track and host of likeminded (and some more punky) goodies.  

• 2020's Visions of a Higher Dream features what may be Romano's finest recorded moment “Where May I Take My Rest,” which hangs on a stunning shift of both tempo and texture which, like that in Nancy & Lee's “Some Velvet Morning,” could only have been achieved by editing two pieces of music together. 

• Also from 2020, the Super Pollen EP features the clever-funny and power pop-perfect “Electricity's Allergic To You.” 

• And there's two live albums—2020's Okay Wow, and 2021's Fully Plugged In, that cover a lot of ground material-wise with a pretty constant Who-like attack.  

Then there's YouTube, where there's a whole host of super live stuff—radio and online sessions as well as fan-shot stuff.

For high voltage power pop look in particular for some great versions of “Where May I Take My Rest” (including seamless tempo shifts) and “Anyone's Arms” (in which Romano drops the cranking riff of the Creation's “Making Time”). Then, for contrast, go back a few years and listen to acoustic solo versions of some of his classic heartbreakers like “The One That Got Away,” “More Love From A Stranger” and “She Was The World to Me.”

With an overlying playful and poetic mystery a constant thread in his songs, Romano has maintained a dedication to songcraft that has seen him build a catalogue of song that is perhaps unparalleled in both quantity and quality over the past decade. 

In a musical climate in which categorization is more rife than ever, where authenticity is gauged by proximity to the centre of one's niche, and artists routinely make a career of working that niche to death, Daniel Romano is a rare breed. Part artist and part stylist, part joker (well, Riddler at least) and part thief, Daniel Romano provides plenty for all music lovers to get excited about. 

Most importantly, for anyone who reads Remember The Lightning, he is a consummate guitar pop artist par excellence and if you haven't discovered him yet, you've got a wealth of joys to unearth.

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Hailing from Melbourne, David Laing discovered power pop via Adelaide’s Young Modern when he was 14. He runs the labels Grown Up Wrong! and Dog Meat, is a regular contributor to Ugly Things, and has compiled and/or annotated compilations by the likes of the early Bee Gees, Fleshtones and Roy Loney, and various artist titles including Do The Pop! and Down Under Nuggets.

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Remember The Lightning—A Guitar Pop Journal

A new semi-annual music journal featuring some of today's best music writers on modern guitar pop, and talented modern artists on the music/genres that inspire them.