There is a rare honesty about the way 30-year-old Daniel Donato talks about his music. It’s much deeper than just guitar licks and stories from the road. He speaks with a deep philosophical understanding of humility, connection, and faith—an old soul trapped in a young man’s body. As Donato prepares to release his fourth studio record, Horizons, on Friday, August 22, Grateful Web caught up with him to learn more about the album that he describes as his “highest frequency Cosmic Country album to date. One that starts on dry land and ends up in the heavens.”
During the interview from his cabin outside of Nashville, Donato reflects on the milestones and life lessons since his last release, Reflector, which catapulted his band to new heights. He shares glimpses of his songwriting process, discusses the art of storytelling, and shares vulnerable truths about his own struggles with suffering and burnout.
Check out the interview below to understand the philosophy behind Cosmic Country and how each newcomer to the fanbase contributes to the collective story that is being written at each Daniel Donato and Cosmic Country show.
Daniel Donato: How are you doing?
Grateful Web: I’m doing really good, man. I appreciate you taking a little bit of time today to chat with me. I've been a big fan for several years now and I'm excited to get to talk to you and give you the flowers that I think you deserve.
Daniel: Oh wow, man, thanks!
GW: I'm mostly wanting to learn about your upcoming album, but I’d also love to hear about the cosmic journey that you've been on the past few years. It's been a hell of a hell of a journey to watch from afar, so I wanted to hear it directly from you. Before we dive into the latter, let's get right into the new album, Horizons, which is due out on Friday, August 22. For starters, can you give me a short 30-second elevator picture of the new album?
Daniel: It is the highest frequency Cosmic Country album to date. It has three chords and the truth with 15 songs. It starts on dry land and it ends in the heavens.
GW: A handful of these songs have been road-tested before you took them into the studio and you've been incorporating them into set lists for a while now. When you wrote these songs, were you thinking about how they would translate to the stage or does that come naturally after the recordings have been laid down in the studio?
Daniel: You know, it’s really kind of something that happens when you’re writing a song. You can tell if it’s gonna be played on stage. I can definitely tell where in the setlist it would be great and see different dynamics that could potentially take form. Take the song Down Bedford, for example. That’s kind of a tricky song because it has such a dynamic story and it needed a whole composition in the middle… It needed to go somewhere dark.
I like to use the term “non-total,” which is kind of what we're trying to do with a lot of things these days. We’re trying to add a lot of things together and compress them so we can label them. You know, this is country music, or I see the world on the left side of things. I see the world on the right side of things. I think it's a good practice, but ultimately what I believe is going on in this world is everyone is such an individual that it's just too complex to reckon with and it's the same thing with songs or pieces of creation. They all just feel unique to themselves and I love taking the time to sit with things and try to see them as they are, you know? What is this song? What is it trying to say, and where can it go, and where is it coming from?
GW: I think that is something that is beautiful about artists like yourself and countless others that we know and love. They can take somebody else's song and give an entire new life and meaning and story to it. I think that's a beautiful thing about songwriting and interpreting.
Daniel: Yes, I totally agree.
GW: When you listen back to Horizons from start to finish, how has it taken a leap from your debut album, A Young Man’s Country, in terms of the sound?
Daniel: I think the band brings a lot to the table. I think our producer Powell brings a lot to the table and I think the most important thing is the experience of life. Between A Young Man’s Country and Horizons, there's been a lot of experience in that time.
GW: Are there certain themes that you're starting to explore with your music that you feel you are finally able to express with an appropriate level of maturity?
Daniel: I don't know if there's a correct level. My vocal coach Ron Browning totally added a new perspective into my life recently where he said, “You don't need to learn how to sing, really. You don't need to learn how to project. You just gotta learn how to be true with your voice. It's like when a baby is on an airplane and the baby is crying. You can hear that baby over anything else and it could be thirty rows ahead of you and you’ll still hear that baby crying. So, I think we're born knowing how to convey values on some level.”
When you say that word maturity, I think about grace. Ram Dass said, essentially, the more grace that you have in your life, that it is equal to the amount of suffering that you've experienced. So I’ve definitely suffered a lot in that time so I think I can touch on these values in a way that has more grace with them. I've suffered a lot and I've thrived a lot which means that it's a real experienced life when there's both the negative and the positive.
GW: So I've heard you state that the phrase Cosmic Country is as much of a philosophy as it is a genre. What do you think that this album adds to the philosophy of Cosmic Country?
Daniel: Great question! I think it adds that having faith in humanity is necessary and the only way to have faith in humanity is to have faith in yourself. And to have faith in yourself is a moral requirement today more so than any other time in history.
GW: Yeah, that message can definitely ring through for a lot of your listeners these days. You've spoken a bit about storytelling and using your music as a medium for storytelling. How do you specifically use your music as a medium for storytelling and what other storyteller musicians do you draw inspiration from?
Daniel: Well I love Marty Robbins. I love Tom T. Hall. I love Johnny Cash. They all have fantastic story songs. Some of these country artists back in the day used to put out whole story albums. A great story album by Merle Haggard that's worth checking out is Same Train: A Different Time. And another great story album by Johnny Cash that's definitely worth checking out is Johnny Cash Sings Ballads of the Old West.
With Cosmic Country, we tell stories both with words and harmony as well as with sounds and rhythms. With country music, especially older country music, it would lean so heavily on the word and the story, and I love that element because it is such an inclusive and invasive form of a song. And if you combine that with the kind of storytelling that you get, say, nine minutes into Playing in the Band from 1973, that is storytelling too.
And I was always able to be inspired by both those forms of storytelling, and what I'm hoping we can do with Cosmic Country is take those two forms of storytelling and bring them into one sound.
GW: If this album were a movie, what would be the plot of the movie? And I’ll give you bonus points if you know who would play the main character.
Daniel: Oh, I mean we gotta do Tom Holland. He has to be the character because everyone says I look like him! But what would the storyline of the movie be? His character would be someone who starts out in a simple place with a very complex goal and has a plan to follow that goal and has faith to see it through. He starts somewhere that is known to him and then he has to go into the wild and the chaos of the unknown horizon. And he walks through it with faith and he finds sacred grounds and he finds monsters and he finds love and he finds misery. And then he returns home transformed and he has both who he was and who he is now with him.
GW: I love that. Earlier you gave me a couple of album recommendations, so I'm gonna toss one out to you. You may or may not be familiar with it, but what you just described seems very similar to the story of another album. Are you familiar with the band Lotus?
Daniel; Yeah, I played with them a couple times.
GW; They have an album called Monks. It's sort of a hip-hop concept album that tells a story of a monk and almost the same journey that you just described from Horizons. So I'm gonna give you some homework and recommend that album to you.
Daniel: Oh, right on brother! I’ll listen to it today on the plane. That's fantastic, thank you.
GW: So I know that your lineup has changed since the last album, Reflector, came out. How does the addition of your new drummer Will (Bronco) Clark impact the overall album and the band’s sound?
Daniel: Well, he is his own person. He has his own authentic experience. It's psychologically, spiritually, and physically. He's built differently than our old drummer so he plays the drums physically differently. You can kind of take the Trinity of the spirit, the mind, and the body altogether. I see it as more or less a triad or Trinity of those three things in every human. Bronco has a really unique way of thinking about music and playing music and I really respect his discipline for what's fundamental, and I really admire his imagination for what might be more abstract and improvisational. He has a refined way of colonizing those two polarities.
GW; Ever since Reflector came out, things have taken a significant leap for you and the band. You have played some very historic venues and you have supported some insanely notable acts. I'm curious what all of that has taught you about yourself and your role as a musician in the scene that you find yourself in?
Daniel: Whatever words or symbol anybody uses to denote the personalization of what's divine… Karma, God, Universe… I'm not interested in what anybody calls that. I'm really interested in how it infuses their action and their spirit. It has definitely assured me more that there is a very great reciprocity that it delivers to us when we faithfully work and use our life as a vehicle for service.
GW: As more people start to discover Cosmic Country, and as newcomers project their own ideas of what that philosophy of Cosmic Country means, does that impact your vision of it and your understanding of it?
Daniel: To a degree, yes. I'm just happy that it means something to other people. I think on a very specific level that it is supposed to mean something different to everybody. I think everybody that is on our frequency is in our community. Generally, we have unity. We don't have uniformity because everybody is different, but we all have spiritual unity and that's really important. Uniformity and unity… One thing is forced, and the other thing is natural.
Do you know back in the ’60s when LSD was something that was happening all over? There was this belief that every trip added to a collective consciousness that any individual could tap into, that it was a shared mind of all these experiences. I believe that just happens in sober life as well. So I say all this to say that everybody who loves Cosmic Country and brings love to it is adding something that is significant. They’re not just coming to our show. They're adding gas into the tank. I think, I just think it's invisible, spiritual gas, but it is gas nonetheless.
GW; Between the last album and this one, did you get to take any periods of intentional stillness where you stepped away from the grind and you focused on you and the spirit that you mentioned earlier?
Daniel: I have to just take it every day. I don't think we do well with long breaks, so I just try to do it every day, all the time, whenever I can, you know what I mean?
GW; And what does that look like for you?
Daniel: Oh man, I sit down and I journal. I meditate and then I ask and I pray for safety, grace, truth, and wisdom for people that I love. For people that are alive, people that aren't alive. I pray for my fans. I pray for everyone that I can think of. And then when I'm on stage, I try to do that too. I try to enter into a state of prayer when I'm on stage and I try to stay connected to that. I'm getting a lot better at it. It's a great way to wrangle the mind and get the mind on a leash so I can be at a higher level than otherwise.
GW; So where is the Cosmic Train stopping next?
Daniel: We have Ryman Auditorium coming on Friday. After the Ryman, the Cosmic Train is going to work. We're embarking on the Horizons Fall Tour, which is a very intensive tour that goes all the way to the Northeast Coast all the way to Denver, Colorado, for two nights at the Ogden Theater.
GW: Fantastic. Well, Daniel, I feel privileged to have had this conversation with you. It's been an honor watching you guys grow and I can’t wait to keep watching. Thank you so much for your time and I look forward to catching you guys next time you're in my area.
