Bro. Danielson

Although he probably shares his name with no less than a few thousand people across the world, Daniel Smith has never struggled to distinguish himself from his relative ocean of namesakes. As the leader of the unflinchingly avant-garde Jesus-freak carnival known as the Danielson Famile, Smith and his merry band of hospital-scrub-wearing siblings have defied categorization at every turn by weaving a truly unprecedented patchwork of psychedelic folk, performance art and overt Christian spirituality. Still, even in our polarized modern era, when faith seems to be anathema to art, Smith has done the improbable, uniting listeners on both sides of the theological fence with his decidedly joyful noise. And just as we were starting to get a handle on who he was, Smith has ushered in phase two of the Danielson story. For the first time, he’s doing it by himself as Bro. Danielson (pronounced “Brother Danielson”).

“Danielson started out as me, Daniel,” explains the Famile’s eldest son, known as much for his profoundly surreal Christian imagery as he is for projecting his piercing falsetto from inside a cardboard tree during live performances. “And I invited my family along to back me and join when Andrew, the youngest, was 10, and everybody was in high school, and it slowly, organically has become a band.”

But family responsibilities have grown since Smith recorded the ensemble’s 1995 debut for his senior project at Rutgers, and Brother is to Son begins a new era for the Danielson franchise. A slightly less-Technicolor incarnation of the Famile’s gloriously prismatic sprawl, Smith strips his music down to its template and lays his esoteric muses over the top, unifying the more disparate sonic and thematic elements of previous Famile albums into a similarly exhilarating mix. “The album is very much about identity, which is also why it’s very appropriate that it’s the first Bro. Danielson album. [It’s about] our singular and personal identity and how they are connected in one huge identity, which is that we are all sons and daughters of God. But it just came through living life and learning those things daily.” No doubt, the fact that he continues to do carpentry in his native New Jersey puts him even more in touch with the tangible mystery of the everyday that becomes the album’s thematic backbone.

“There is this one side of just waiting to go into fulltime music, and this other side of me supporting my family,” he says of the album, which is less a departure than a distillation of everything he’s done to this point. “I’m realizing that I seem to write my best songs when I have a hammer in my hand, because now I’m at a place in my life where I’m going through periods of a day job and periods of touring. I realize I tend to be most inspired and creative when I’m in different places and working on people’s homes.”