Photo by: Isabella Santini

Danielle Durack will be performing with Hello Emerson at Rambling House on Friday, February 23. The show starts at 9pm and tickets are $10

A current Nashville resident, having grown up in Phoenix, Arizona, Danielle Durack tells me during a recent Zoom call that she’s on her own when it comes to booking shows. Though she had experience playing bars and restaurants in Phoenix during her formative years, the singer/songwriter has bigger plans these days which includes touring across the country and playing in proper music venues. Following a West Coast run of dates, Durack will be performing in Columbus later this week to promote her just released fourth album, Escape Artist.

Your Columbus show is a one-off, you don’t have other dates around it.

When I say I’m a one-woman show, I do all of these jobs. I’m not very good at all of them. When I routed this tour, the West Coast came together easily. Columbus was supposed to be part of the route to New York but I struggled to book anything in Pittsburgh or Philly so it just ended up being a one-off. And, thankfully, it’s only five hours from Nashville so I can do it in a day.

I’m playing with Hello Emerson. I met Sam from Hello Emerson at a jam night in Nashville that my boyfriend plays. I was just sitting at the bar alone and he was also sitting at the bar alone and we just started talking about music. He said he’s from Columbus and we exchanged information. He’s really, really sweet and I listened to his music and was like, “This is awesome.” That’s how it all came to be. 

When you tour, is it a full band or do you wind up playing a lot of solo shows?

In Columbus, I’ll be solo. For the West Coast run, I’m taking my band from Phoenix. We’re doing those dates together and then they are also flying out to New York to do the Rockwood Music Hall show.

And is the live band also the band that played on the record?

The drummer and guitarist, yes. My producer picked the bassist from Seattle, someone that he liked working with.

Having had the experience of playing shows as background entertainment at restaurants and bars in Phoenix, how do you approach playing club shows where people are there to actually hear you?

It’s always a treat to be able to play a room where people are there to hear you. On this coming tour, we’re playing at an artist collective space in San Francisco. Other than that, I think all the shows are at proper venues. That’ll be a first for me. On the East Coast, I’m doing a record store show in Baltimore and then a bar in North Carolina. So, that will be an hour-and-a-half slot where I can play some covers. I get a flat rate and that’s like most of the work I did in Phoenix.

Lyrically, Escape Artist is very personal and vulnerable. While it must feel like a bit of a relief to get the thoughts out of your head and into song, it also feels like it might be difficult to perform these songs live given the subject matter.

DANIELLE: I think the first time or two playing through a song can feel a little shaky in that way. For some reason, it doesn’t feel as scary as it should. The music helps me put my thoughts together in a way that I’m not very good at verbally expressing or even writing down. Music is my way of organizing my thoughts. I’ve played the song “Dean” off the new record a couple of times and that one is definitely really tough. My voice shakes and the emotions of that one are pretty strong. There’s enough metaphor in my music to mask things. I’m not calling anybody out, like, “This song is about this person and here’s their address.”

I lost my daughter nearly six years ago suddenly and unexpectedly to a freak medical situation. I don’t have many dreams about my daughter and, when I do, they are all sad dreams. “Dean” is about losing someone close to you and you sing about dreaming about Dean. You sing, “I got to see you smile again,” something I haven’t seen in my dreams about my daughter. I’m wondering if seeing Dean smile in your dreams is satisfying and a positive thing?

DANIELLE: I don’t think losing someone close to you is something you ever fully recover from. You learn how to live with the pain and the pain eventually comes in smaller waves. Dean was my stepdad for the formative years of my life. He moved away when I was 14, after they got a divorce. We stayed in touch and had a great relationship. He was a very troubled guy who struggled with addiction. I believe he was also bipolar so he had a rough deck of cards. As kids, thankfully, we never saw any of the really bad stuff. My mom took the brunt of all of it, for better or worse.

He moved away and we kept in touch and then when I was probably 21, he called and he had told me that he had taken some pills and he was on his way out and he just called to say goodbye. I obviously was not trained for that. I was 21 and had no idea what to do, I was just sobbing. Luckily, at the last minute, he called for help. That happened a couple more times. And then, in 2021, I got a call from a coroner’s office. He had finally done it. I think that as a result of his addiction issues and his mental illness, he had alienated himself a lot from his family, from most of his loved ones. I think I was privileged to have the relationship that I had with him and to see pretty much only the good stuff for most of our relationship. I was very hurt. It felt like most of our family and his family weren’t grieving. It seemed like almost a relief. That sounds cruel and I know that’s not how they felt, but I really took it all on. I was like, “I’m going to carry the grief for everybody because everyone deserves to be missed.”

I was in such a hole for months. I had this dream where I was in a plane with my mom and I was going through this photo album, it was pictures of the four of us, my brother and her and Dean. And I was like, “Where did you get this?” And she said, “Dean gave it to me.” And I was like, “Dean gave it to you?” She’s like, “Yeah, he’s alive.” And suddenly I’m on this beach by this lake house, and I run to the window and I look in and he’s standing there. And I run out of the house and he’s just the brightest, most healthy, happiest version of him that I’ve ever seen. I run up to him and I give him a hug. And I remember it feeling warm in the dream. I don’t remember what exactly he said, but it was something along the lines of, “You don’t have to carry this anymore. I’m okay and I’m happy and I’m so proud of you.” They were just kind words and I had a true feeling of him saying, “I’m better, things are good.”

I really do feel like that dream allowed me to let it go. It didn’t make missing him feel any less painful but it gave me the feeling that I didn’t have to worry about him anymore. It’s like he was saying, “I’m good.”

The album is full of stories but it doesn’t sound like it’s sequenced in order from start to finish but, rather, these are short stories that make up your life but not presented chronologically. Was that difficult to tell a non-linear story as you sequenced the album?

DANIELLE: It’s usually pretty easy to decide what songs go where. I feel like for this album, it was a bit harder. Samuel Rosson is the producer and he and I had differing opinions about what song should go first. We settled on “Shirt Song” because, narratively, it felt like the obvious transition from No Place into where we are now but I feel like “Shirt Song” is the sonic anomaly of the record. Nothing else on the album really sounds like it, which is fine, but I think I knew that I wanted “Moon Song” to either be first or last. Once we decided it was going to be last I was like, “I want ‘Dean’ right before it so that we can end on this song.” It goes from dark to knowing things get better.

I imagine that when you start playing these songs live, people will come up to you after your show to talk about “Dean” and tell you their stories of loss.

DANIELLE: I don’t play “Dean” very often. It’s in a weird tuning. That’s my main excuse but, yeah, whenever I play that one, I get people coming up to me to share their stories. In the past, with my breakup record, people were like, “I needed that. I’m going through that exact thing right now.” This is why I do this. It’s the best compliment.

I saw a behind-the-scenes photo on Instagram from the “Good Dogs” video and it looks like you shot the entire video using an iPhone.

DANIELLE: The video for “Shirt Song” was filmed on a decent DSLR camera. “Good Dogs,” the hot dog video, was definitely shot on my iPhone.

It’s great that you can make videos that look good without having to spend a ton of money like artists had to do back when MTV was so crucial to an artist’s career.

DANIELLE: I was born in ‘95 so I caught like the tail end of when MTV was just doing music videos in the morning. I definitely spent money on videos in the past. It doesn’t feel like everything in this little career of mine is very expensive. Music videos are less and less of a priority especially with TikTok. It doesn’t seem like there’s a huge demand for long-form videos which is kind of liberating and exciting. I just get to make something fun that I think is cool. It’s a different way for me to express my creativity without having a high pressure feeling like somebody’s got a gun to my head about it.

Read the full interview with Danielle Durack at BigTakeover.com.