Dan Zalles shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Dan, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. What makes you lose track of time—and find yourself again?
If I lose track of time, it’s usually because I’m in the middle of a music project or skiing or hiking on a beautiful day in a beautiful place like my local Wasatch Mountains.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’ve been writing and performing songs since I was 16. I’ve also been in s bands since then, because I like the experience of playing with other people and performing live. Performing live makes you perfect what you’re playing because you then have an audience not try to impress . Currently, I play in two bands and we perform in local venues. One of the bands plays classic rock and the other plays Americana . I also perform sometimes with my son Ian, who’s a great piano player. t I started playing trumpet at ther age of 12 and guitar at the age of 15. I also sang in school choral groups, which is how I built skills in harmony singing. My earliest influences were the classical music of Dvorak and Chopin and the pop music of the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and The Byrds. When these groups and their peers started playing psychedelic rock, I got even more excited.
I just put out my 10th solo album, Harmonia, which you can hear on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and most other music streaming platforms. Other than the piano part on one of the songs, Leafblowers Lament, which Ian performs, I play all the instruments and do all the singing on the album. I love putting out my own albums because I can then do anything I want and take as long as I need on them.
I write them as productions. I start with just a sketch of an idea, which could be a piece of lyric or a drum and bass groove and use a multi-track digital audio workstation app to add vocals, instruments and sections. This is what I call the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” type of song writing. What I mean by this is that I record a whole bunch of different instruments and vocals and sections and then keep some and eliminate others. I totally lose myself in these projects. It is usually the only type of activity I can spend hours and hours on without distraction. Other than perhaps skiing, there’s nothing more fun for me than producing and recording these songs and listening back to them. The listening back part is critical because I write music that I would enjoy listening to. Of course, what I enjoy is rooted in my musical preferences and not everybody has the same preferences. So not everything I record is going to appeal to everybody. But what’s most important is that it appeals to me. I know that this sounds kind of self-centered but ultimately the motivation for my writing is that I the writer creates something that resonates with I the listener. If my primary motivation was to appeal to other people, I would miss the boat because I can’t read other people’s minds and the music would probably not be as good anyway.
Although I consider myself to be a musician with primary focus on the musical components of my songs, I also enjoy writing lyrics. Sometimes I try to be funny and perceptive in a gently sardonic way. There are several examples of that on the Harmonia album. The first song, Chasing Pollyanna, is a take on our caricature of hippie “flower children.”
The second song, Back and Forth, is about how bandmates interact to create uplifting sounds, but when they stop playing, they’re just regular people with ordinary humdrum issues and drama who have to get along not just as music mates but as mixed bag personalities.
Puff Piece is a spoof on influencers writing about themselves in self-congratulatory ways. People use the term puff piece to describe “soft” news stories like celebrity gossip or best restaurants.
Leafblowers Lament looks at the relationship between economically struggling landscapers who use loud gas-powered leafblowers on the yards of the affluent people who hire them, thereby infuriating all the neighbors and their pets who have to hear the noise and breath the fumes. I thought this would be an interesting theme because it gets at the tensions between environmentalism and social class.
Three-Chord Gal is a spoof on when music genres become too formalized; for example, blues or country songs that are expected to have no more than three chords to be authentic to their genres, and traditional English folk music is only supposed to be performed a capella. This song uses the premise of a guy in a romance with a bandmate who insists on only playing songs with three chords and freaks out if she doesn’t get her way. Most musicians know that “three chords” means the 1, 4, and 5 of a scale. For example, if the 1 is a C chord, the 4 is an F , and the 5 is a G. If the 1 is an A chord, the 4 is a D and the 5 is an E, etc.
Hanging With the Gods is about a celebrity-obsessed person who gets disillusioned when he gets to spend a weekend with the celebrities in person and has a rude awakening about how unlikable they are.
In Dog for a Day, I muse about what our pets could be thinking as they carry on their relationship with their masters. I’ve had dogs for most of my life, and my interactions with my current dog Scooter inspired this song.
Harmonia, the last track, is about bliss-searching people hoping they’ve finally found their Shangri-La. It was inspired by the TV show Pluribus.
Then, there are a few songs that are not gently sardonic. Sometimes I explore the theme of closing yourself off to your emotional core in order to cope better with life. “If You Don’t Have A Heart” is one of those songs. I was inspired to write it one day after listing to a podcast about Buddhism.
Mystically Yours is about how wonderful it can feel to fall asleep. I wrote it because I wanted to create something soft and spacy to listen to at night.
Could Have Gone Better is about how I felt after my skiing accident last March, when my skis crossed and I broke my shoulder. It was a pretty traumatic event. My left shoulder got really messed up and I needed reverse shoulder replacement surgery to fix it. Fortunately, I’m much better now. I couldn’t play guitar for a couple of months. I wrote this song during those months, as well as Chasing Pollynanna and Leafblowers Lament.. So those songs have no guitar or bass guitar tracks. I performed all the tracks on a midi keyboard, except for trumpet parts. I play the trumpet then, I had to put a mic at floor level and could use only my right hand to hold it up and press the valves.
The music on the album contains my favorites genres. Chasing Pollyanna hearkens back to heavily percussion and cold synth songs of British New Wave in the late 70s and early 80’s. A classic example of this genre was Gary Numan’s song Cars. Back and Forth and Three-Chord Gal are bluegrass/country, with a lot of mandolin parts. I just started playing the mandolin a few months ago. There’s also mandolin on the title song Harmonia, which is more folk rock and gospel than country.
Dog For A Day is kind of funky in a Steely Dan/Grateful Dead sort of way. If You Don’t Have A Heart is written in a British music hall style that you can hear on some Paul McCartney –penned Beatles tunes like Your Mother Should Know and some Supertramp songs like Breakfast In America. Puff Piece combines prog rock, hard rock, and reggae. Leafblowers Lament and Could Have Gone Better are in a retro loungy jazz-blues style that Randy Newman also sometimes wrote in. Mystically Yours is psychedelic folk.
This album, like most of my other albums, has a few instrumentals too. Chamber Thing is my attempt at a classical piece performed on violin and cello. I have to confess that the instruments on this track are midi tracks, not really violins and cellos, but I tried to make them sound as authentic as I could. Then there’s Embers, a modal jazz piece with world music components. During the late 60’s and early 70’s, there was a flowering of this kind of music by artists like Miles Davis, John McLaughlin, and Alice Coltrane.
Thanks for sharing that. Would love to go back in time and hear about how your past might have impacted who you are today. What breaks the bonds between people—and what restores them?
Bonds are broken when people are afraid to express their feelings because they’re afraid of the consequences. Or, they go to the other extreme, which is to express confrontationally and impulsively. Unfortunately, social media makes it too easy for people to do that. All you have to do is hit the send button and it’s posted. The fact that most of us have too few face to face or voice to voice conversations in real time means that all communication is asynchronous and remote, which makes it all too easy to be impulsive. What restores bonds is when people summon the courage to express their feelings in ways that don’t intimidate those to whom they are expressing and being in the presence of that person reinforces the motivation to be civil.
If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
Compared to many of my friends, I was a pretty cautious kid. I tried to do well in school and be responsible and civil with people. That said, I did some pretty stupid things as a teenager, like smoke cigarettes, exercise too little, and discontinue taking school subjects that were hard for me, like math and science. That increased the burden I had later in life to learn on the job. Another mistake I made was not thinking about a career for too long, which amounted to more pain when I actually had to make those choices later.
Alright, so if you are open to it, let’s explore some philosophical questions that touch on your values and worldview. What’s a belief or project you’re committed to, no matter how long it takes?
Because I’m so passionate about music, I’m usually committed to any musical project I start and don’t mind it taking a long time to complete, because the road to its completion is the fun part – a labor of love.
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. What will you regret not doing?
I regret not currently having a band that mostly performs my songs, with the vocal and instrumental capacity to do the songs as I recorded them. This would be a fun challenge because many of my songs have complex instrumental and vocal structures. I don’t do this with my two current bands because to be successful getting gigs and pleasing audiences in my local venues, I have to mostly play songs they recognize, and that means other artists’ hits. It’s not that I don’t like playing cover songs, it’s just that I’d rather play my own if the audiences appreciated that.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://danzallesmusic.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danzalles_music/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61571646128043
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzxZubBpqeFfnawIpJ_pH6A
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-507094812
- Other: Newsletter Signup: https://mailchi.mp/11a825165c8b/dan-zalles-newsletter
Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/Schlep9?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=dd047c0e-2eda-4147-916c-605018b76965
Harmonia Album on Hear Now: https://share.google/5eFdU6Ue3hv6GqFEj
