New Jersey based singer, producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Danny Danzi released his third album, entitled “Tribulations”, through Escape Music on 24th September. The album is his first in about 18 years, following on from two well received albums called “Somewhere Lost In Time” and “Danziland”. I linked up with Danny over Facebook and we arranged to record an interview on 28th September via Skype. We chatted for about 40 minutes about the new album, his recording studio, the previous albums and much more. That interview and four Danny Danzi tracks can be heard on the Friday NI Rocks Show from 1st October which is available now on our MixCloud page - https://www.mixcloud.com/NIRocks/interview-with-danny-danzi-on-the-friday-ni-rocks-show-1st-oct-2021/
The interview will be typed up and posted here later.
Check out Danny’s website - http://www.dannydanzi.com/
Playlist
STORMZONE – This Is Heavy Metal
NO HOT ASHES – Glow
WAYWARD SONS – Joke’s On You
LAST IN LINE – Starmaker
PLANET FATALE – Talking To Myself
MADAME MAYHEM – Afterlife
AD INFINITUM – Afterlife
DANNY DANZI – Do Me A Favor
Interview with DANNY DANZI Part 1 (11 min)
DANNY DANZI – Restitution
Interview with DANNY DANZI Part 2 (10 min)
DANNY DANZI – American Dream
Interview with DANNY DANZI Part 3 (16 min)
DANNY DANZI – Carry Me Back
VAN HALEN – Unchained
WOLFTOOTH – The Voyage
TEMPERANCE – Pure Life Unfolds
LORDS OF BLACK – Bound To You
TEMPT – Living Dangerous
JEFF SCOTT SOTO – Don’t Let It End (with Dino Jelusick)
THE GRANDMASTER – Lunar Water
NO HOT ASHES – Good to Look Back
NI ROCKS – Hi Danny. Thanks for taking some time to talk to us at Rock Radio NI. You’ve just released a new album called “Tribulations” which we’ll talk about shortly. The track we’ve just played is called “Do Me A Favor” and it’s a new track which isn’t on the album. What can you tell us about that track?
DANNY - I'd been out of the game for a long time, and I just wanted to see how this whole streaming thing worked. That was a song that I wrote that I really wasn't sure what we were going to do with it. It was me and the two brothers, Joey and Guy DeFalco. They're my writing partners. I perform everything, but they did all the writing. We just wanted to just test the waters. Let's see what happens. I hear, aahh streaming is terrible, and you don't make any money doing it, and do I need a record label? I wasn't even signed at the time with Escape. I said, Can I do this myself? Is it really possible? Let me see what happens with streams. It was kind of like a throwaway. We wrote in probably, I don't know 20 minutes, you know! Lyrically it was the hardest but, the song itself just came right together and let's just see how we do and if it gets my name back out there. It's kind of like an introduction to what's to come so that was really the purpose of that.
NI ROCKS – The new album “Tribulations” was officially released last Friday. It has been 18 years since the last album was released in 2003. Has it always been a matter of when the third album is released rather than if?
DANNY - The biggest problem is I was broken hearted after the whole MTM (Music) thing went south. I mean, I heard on a message board that MTM went chapter 13, which is total liquidation. So we made next to nothing on “Danziland” (the 2004 album), and I just took a little look around me and I said, what am I doing this for? If I'm going to put my blood, sweat, and tears into something, and something like this can happen at any time, I don't know if I want to do this anymore. I had other things in my life that were going on. I'm actually talking to you from one of the control rooms in my studio right now. But I got into my business very heavily. I produce and all that stuff. And it's stuff that gives you real money in real time. At my age now, I need to survive. It's not like you're in your 20s and 30s. I can go parading around and I hope I make money at this and I hope. The time that you put into this takes away from your survival time and you know as well as I do what the world is now. You've got to be very selective with what you put your time into. So do you... Invest the time, love, and your heart into something that never comes about, or do you go for the sure thing? And I was kind of in the middle. And I said, I'll never go with another European overseas label. You've got to get an attorney in that country to fight that label if there's a ... It's a nightmare. Khalil (Turk from Escape Music) was fantastic to me in everything. We have a total partnership and trust, and I said, You know what? Let's do it. So that's really what the holdup was. I've been writing. I've never stopped. I've never stopped playing. I have so many songs. It's almost like Eddie Van Halen's vault. If you've ever seen, he's got all this reel tape. I have hard drives full of stuff that I could release. You want to do it the right way, and sometimes time is the factor.
NI ROCKS – The album is out now, but no doubt there have been a few highs and lows along the way. You mentioned some there. What have been the biggest challenges that you’ve had to overcome?
DANNY - The biggest challenge was - let me just give you a little background on the album. I'll try to make it short because I don't want to take up all your time. I can sit and talk here an hour about this.
NI ROCKS – We’ve plenty of time.
DANNY - Great and I do as well. I dedicated this part of the day to you. I thank you for everything that you've done for me, your promotion, everything. In 2010, me and two brothers, Joey and Guy DeFalco, decided to put an album together, or just to write. We said we're going to get together one day a week. You know, let's just see what happens. Now, you know, things come up, they have a very busy construction business, which is why they didn't play on the album. I actually have them playing on the pre-production. But, you know, 2017 rolls around, and we have about 25 songs. We chose 15, and we decided to do this concept album of everything we wrote about. 2018 rolls around when we're about to really start recording the album. And the brothers are just so busy with their business that they couldn't commit to coming and recording anything. So they said, we can come every day at night for a month. And I said, but I have to run my business at night. Nobody comes to my recording studio during the day unless you're unemployed, you work nights, or you're a starving musician. I said, I can't afford to do that. So they said, well, that's all we can offer. I said, then I guess we can't do this. And that was December 23, 2018. 2019 rolls around; during the holidays, my fiancee says to me, you do it; you can play all the instruments. I say I can't play like these guys. So in getting back to your question, that was the challenge. January 2nd, 2019, I started tracking the album. I made-up my mind. I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do it better than “Somewhere Lost in Time” (the 1999 album), and I'm going to get good at these instruments, and I'm going play where people think this is a band. And that's why it took me a year and nine months, and that was the biggest challenge, was to play bass like Joey, play drums like Guy. So, I was about 90% accurate, so their spirit is all over this album. I physically had to ready myself to play everything that you've heard. There's no programming, there's no trickery or anything. That is physically playing every instrument. So, that was the hardest thing. And some of this stuff along the way, I lost both of my parents within the last time that I released an album, and many things, businesses I was a part of, we've sold and gotten out of, and you know how life goes. But the toughest was reproducing what Joe, Guy, and I had done as a unit, and that was the toughest tribulation.
NI ROCKS – You mentioned Escape Music there. The album is released through Escape Music. How did you make the connection with them?
DANNY - I've been friends with Khalil for probably, and everybody calls him Khalil with a K, I never knew it was an H sound. I had to correct myself, but I met him in 1998 when I had first tried to shop “Somewhere Lost in Time”. I had seven songs, and a good friend of mine, you may have heard of from Sweden, his name is Daniel Staracina. Daniel said to me, hey, listen, your stuff is good. You ought to send it to this, this. He sent me all the label information, MTM, Now and Then, Frontiers, Z Records, and Escape. And I sent all my packages. I had seven songs. And all of them got back to me. They were interested. And Khalil was just like the sweetest man. He was the first to call me, but he didn't really offer a great deal at the time, and Mark at Z Records had offered. Bastille, which is why I went with them. So, I had known Khalil since I shopped my first album, and we've kind of kept in touch over the years. I contacted him again to see if there would be any interest, and he loved the album. But again, the deals today, you know how they are; they don’t offer you much. Finally, he gets back to me after a couple months and he says, what if we did this, that, this, and this? I said, really? He says, yeah. He says, listen, I really want to work with you. You have something different here. It's not like the same AOR rock that everybody's doing. I want to invest in you. I want to believe in this. I said, all right, let's do it. That's how we came to be. He's a sweetheart of a guy. He has total trust in both of us. I couldn't be happier right now. Considering the way things are.
NI ROCKS – You mentioned that there are fifteen tracks on the album. When did writing start? You said you’d been writing for twenty years, so are those tracks from the last twenty years or have they all been written fairly recently
DANNY - All the songs that you hear, with the exception of “Frozen in Time”, all the songs were written from 2010 when we all got together. “Frozen in Time” is, I think, maybe 2006, if I'm not mistaken, or earlier. That was a song I wrote for a site called Guitar War, where we would get together and play as a bunch of guitarists. We had meetups, and I wrote it about my experiences there and all the guys and their screen names. And one day I woke up, I said, this song is great. I gotta get rid of the lyrics and write something more serious. And it was really hard because I was so used to the fun way, writing about all the guys, and now I'm trying to write something serious about it. This song is about being pretty much crippled by fear, something you see, something you experience.
NI ROCKS – We’re going to play a track from the new album now. Can you pick a track for us and tell us something about it?
DANNY - Oh boy, they're all my babies. (Laughs) I used to have a friend, we would call each other - dude, I just had a baby - written a new song. I like “Restitution” because I think it's got a hint of modern and a hint of something that you're familiar with. Basically, believe it or not, a few of the songs on here bash what it's like to live in the United States. I'm proud to be an American, but I'm not happy about some of the decisions that my country has made in government. I'm not one of those Americans that everybody hates. I'm the same as you. I'm just paying rent here!. “Restitution” is pretty much telling the government, you know what? Stop it. Take up for what you've done, for those that you've hurt. I just think it's a really good song. It's very powerful, lyrically, and I think the music just has a great groove and just takes you somewhere. That would be my choice. I actually wanted to do a video single of that.
NI ROCKS - Will you do a video for that track?
DANNY - I'm hoping. I don't know now. See, you guys are playing different stuff. I got somebody that's playing the death out of “Help Me Out”, and then I got somebody else that's playing “Don't”. They love Don't. So it's all different. So I would maybe like to take something that everybody's gravitating towards. That might be the better idea.
NI ROCKS - Yeah. Okay. We'll play that one.