- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Caving In
- Dear Shark
- Life Line
- Through A Revolution
It’s not down the line, but there’s some kind of awakening, a slippery unraveling playing out in nearly every Dan Goldman song. There is very new light and rosy cheeks from the brisk morning, out-of-doors temperatures of an early spring just post-daybreak. There is the smell of fresh laundry wrapped right up in a smell of popping bacon strips, the sunny-side-upping of a half dozen eggs and the babbling pot of Folger’s coffee over in the corner, the machine plugged into the wall right next to the can opener. There’s a sound of a cage of pigeons still curling their q’s and coo-snoozing gently through the first hours of a day. There are too many yawnings and stretchings, an effort to be alert and wide-eyed and bushy-tailed for whatever may lie ahead. Everywhere you look, Goldman’s decorated the scene with his subtle little, plush amenities and trinkets, all of which add this just getting going and kicking out the dim grays and expired blacks of the evening, allowing for that sudden visibility that clicks on when the alarm clock has finally been obeyed. Goldman’s voice sounds like orange juice or a mimosa, just the right touch for someone struggling to, but open to the idea of getting perky after a long (or short) night. It’s the sort of light falling rain, with the right amount of drive and the right amount of aloof do what it will kind of ambition. He finds ways to bring the thrusting of curtains open into so many of the moods and tempers he brings to life. You can almost hear his music slowly chugging and rounding up the troops, then bursting over to the window and letting all of the light into the room – in one swelling avalanche. It’s a sly and patient demeanor that’s pulled off with inventive wordplay and amorphous meanings. He sings, “A frozen lake lies still between you and me/It took two years for it to freeze,” and that could be one of the prettiest way of saying that two people madly in love with each other grew miles apart and no longer know any shared warmth. Goldman is set to marry a Daytrotter favorite – Daniela Gesundheit of Snowblink – next month and like his soon-to-be wife, the Canadian is spectacular when it comes to slipping around on the floor between responsibility and uncomfortably coping with aging. It’s a shuffle, like a waltz with completely open-ended boundaries. It’s a fragile walk over the grounds and getting the feels, smelling the scents and letting the skin capture all of the new sensations and figure out how it’s going to react to everything now that it has to make so many more decisions than it did before. A body knows when it’s the lucky one, he comments in “Through A Revolution.” The second half of the line is about the proximity to the sun (particularly a planet’s), but it doesn’t have to be taken as a line vaguely about the solar system. It can be about the effects of that vitamin D pouring down from the fiery ball of heat, lighting all of us from the inside and the outside, making it feel as if there was some kind of Disney magic in the effects, even though we should know better. It’s okay to think optimistically though. It’s how we’ll get on and get by.