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The spring of 2020 found Danny Golden sheltered at his parents home in Pittsburgh, PA — a place he had not lived since ten years earlier when he left for Colorado, then New York, and finally his home of the last five years, Austin, TX. He was putting the final touches on his most recent collection of recordings, and as the world fell apart outside, the uncertainty of the future weighed heavy. It had been a year and change since his last release. A listless year filled with one big break up, a million late nights on East 6th Street, lots of strangers, and very little music making. What remained as a postcard from that period was Changes, a collection of four songs, very different in sound, but all part of telling a story. 

The record starts with a cymbal crash from Jeff Olson (White Denim, Balmorhea) and a wall of electric guitar sound courtesy of guitarist Ben Brown (PR Newman). It’s at once abrasive and inviting, like a friend pulling up with the aux at full volume. Your senses are a bit overwhelmed, but you know you want to get in, and that you’re bound for a good adventure. That first track “I Can’t Change” is the real time processing of a breakup. “I was toying around with the chords and lyrical motifs for a few years, knowing it was going to be something important to me,” Golden says. “Think of it like a truth in some fable, that can only be seen when the hero is ready. Then it will reveal itself.” 

The title and chorus are somewhat ironic: it's a character pleading, convinced that he can’t change. It seems impossible. And suddenly, half way through the song the band walks down the scale and modulates and the change has occurred. The big scary wave has come through, and instead of drowning you, it’s picked you up and carried you, and you’re surfing on it. 

“Initially the chords sounded to me like they lent themselves to a Neil Young and Crazy Horse style arrangement,” Golden explains. “But the emotionality of the material was more turgid and nuanced, and a shoegaze-influenced My Bloody Valentine-style emerged in the studio.” It’s expressionistic, where the lyrics and vocal lead, the instruments continue expressing to paint the picture. Like Jackson Pollock hurling paint at a canvas, to give form to feelings that were too difficult to deal with inside and abstract. It’s a real time manifestation of feeling. 

“In the past my song writing was more literary, more exact, more academic. I write and refine and try to distill concepts and stories into their truest form with highest fidelity. This was a completely new process for me. I wasn't functioning. I wasn't high enough on Maslow's hierarchy of needs to be able to wax poetic about lofty concepts. I was bubbling with this swelling inner world, and the process of writing and recording ‘I Can’t Change’ was the way to digest it. It was a catharsis forever frozen in carbonite on this track.” 

“The next song ‘Alien’ was dropped into my head by some extraterrestrial intelligence,” Golden says. “I think creativity comes from some external mystical source, artists simply figure out how to tune our radios to the frequency and transmit the messages. I was flying back to Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving in that groggy twilight feeling of an airplane nap, 20,000 feet above the earth at 11pm after an extended layover. Airports are such a liminal feeling, you are surrounded by thousands of people all day, yet don’t recognize a single one. A steady stream of people all on very important missions to get to their important place and live their important life. It can make you feel really insignificant.” He woke from a dream on the plane with the “Alien” chorus virtually complete playing in his head. “I liked the feeling of it, so I threw a jacket over my head, opened up my voice memos and sang it to my phone,” Golden says. “I still have the recording, you can hear the flight attendant announcing our descent in the background. The chorus came to me complete and the rest of the song was figured out from there. It’s a song about the power of love to give your alienated existence meaning. Plus a little bit of an indulgence in my fascination with UFOs and life elsewhere in the universe. We tracked it with Sam Pankey (Balmorhea, Mother Falcon) on bass and Mary Bryce’s (Smiile) amazing vocals.” 

After the release tour for his last record, 2018’s Old Love, Danny returned to Austin exhausted, heartsick, and lost. “I needed to do something, but I wasn’t sure what,” Golden says. Without much thought, he got in his trusty Nissan and drove west eight hours until he ended up in Marfa, Texas. He found an Airbnb and settled in. “I stayed there alone for a week or so, seeing the sights, drinking at the Lost Horse Tavern, making some friends, having a brief tryst, and writing,” Golden says. “Being on tour hadn’t left much time for a real self check in. And Marfa was the start of a reconnection with myself. I had made a playlist for the trip of things that were really speaking to me at the time. Jonathan Richman, Terry Allen, Lucinda Williams, Tom T. Hall, among others.” The house had a record player and only two LPs — Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and David Ramirez’s We’re Not Going Anywhere. Danny’s playlist and those two records acted as a sort of soundtrack to the trip. Some of the chord changes and writing styles of those artists found their way into the song “L.A. County,” which was written during this time in Marfa. 

Golden returned to Austin to record “L.A. County.” But he didn’t love what they ended up with. “The sound wasn’t right. I was about ready to scrap it when as fate would have it, I ran into David Ramirez. He had some production ideas. We went back into the studio with Ramirez at the helm, added Mike St. Clair (White Denim, Okkervil River) on piano and bass, and together made the song what it was always supposed to be.” 

“Cigarettes and Sunburn” came from another trip away from Austin, which seemed to be swallowing Danny up. “Montauk in August is a magical place,” he says. “This thing that kept happening to me throughout the course of that summer. I would meet someone and have an incredibly passionate connection, but it would be gone just like that. Either I was on vacation or they were visiting or moving. Three or four days of magic and then poof. And it offered all the romance. The thrill of new love and attraction, the pain of loss, none of the boring stuff that actually constitutes relationships. This was a whirlwind weekend high on the beauty and secondhand chainsmoke of a French girl. On the last night of this affair, as I was hoping to change my pattern and find a way to make this thing work in the long run. I turned to her and said ‘I’m really going to miss you when you leave.’ She shushed me and said ‘it’s like a sunburn, you know? Enjoyed getting it, felt pain after, and it peels off, all gone.’ I hated that she was right. We tracked it with Spencer Garland (PR Newman, Black Pumas, Matthew Logan Vasquez), who’s played every instrument imaginable on my work, this time accordion. We added a dash of French and a smokey Tom Waits sound and we kept it loose, recording it in one take.”  

A fall and winter of mixing and mastering went by, and then the pandemic derailed all the EP release plans. It did, however, also break some patterns in Danny’s life and send him home for a reboot. “I started running, stretching, and working out again. I was meditating. I was tearing through The Artist’s Way course. I was writing again. I was full of inspiration and hope, even as the pandemic was bearing down on the world. I was feeling a peace that I had not known since I could remember.” 

“I didn’t set out with an overarching concept or theme to connect all of these songs,” Golden continues “They all emerged isolated from one another as I was going through this lost year. Yet as I listened to the four together, it told me a story. I had always thought I Can’t Change would be the title of the EP. Because I had convinced myself I was bound to my condition, that things wouldn’t change and neither would I. Yet, there I was on a beautiful Pittsburgh spring morning, admiring the fresh sprung leaves feeling equanimous. I picked up a guitar and began toying with a new musical idea and refining some lyrics from the day before. I realized that Change is exactly what I had done. My struggles had been a result of a reluctance to embrace changes dealt by the world and to allow changes in myself. And these songs are all different stories of the dynamic tensions of changes in the world, and they were my path to change in myself. Later that morning, unprompted, my dad gave me a piece of advice that had been given to him by a mentor. ‘Don’t be afraid to change’ he said. Changes, I thought. It’s all about Changes.” 

Now back in Austin, Danny Golden’s new EP Changes comes out April 23rd.