Dan just released Harmonia, his 11th solo album on Jan 15 2026.
You can hear it on whatever platform you use to stream music, or at this Hear Now link.
Here are Dan’s “liner notes” about the album:
ABOUT THE LYRICS:
The first song, Chasing Pollyanna, is a 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.
ABOUT THE MUSIC
The music on the album contains my favorites genres. Chasing Pollyanna hearkens back to heavily percussion and cold robotic 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. I probably spent more time on this song than any other on the album. I kept changing my mind about it. 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 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.