Light from a Dark Room: an interview with Danah Denice

Light From a Dark Room is a 7 track collection of songs released by Maryland native Danah Denice. Recorded over a year and a half with songs composed over a five year span, this album boasts excellent performances and arrangements to support its strong writing.  Danah’s originals are fearless and disarming. Her lyrical style is intimate, handling heartbreak and heartache with vulnerability and courage.  Her originals are usually developed in one of two artist greenhouses: the piano, which she studied seriously for much of her life, specializing in romantic composers, and the guitar, upon which she’s cultivated fingerstyle techniques and open tuning tricks from the folk-rock pantheon.  This breadth of musical vocabulary yields massive, memorable sonic spaces for her poetry to occupy, creating powerful moments in the course of this short album.

In recognition of the album’s 2nd anniversary, Danah Denice sat down with Your Town Music founder Seth Mitchell to talk about the songs on the album.  What follows is a track-by-track examination of this stellar collection of songs featuring Danah’s own observations and insights.

1. Intro

The album begins with a wordless, atmospheric 25 second build up that crashes into the following song.  Vocal ‘oohs’ enter first, then are joined by synthy pads and strings to crescendo into a transitional chord.

Your Town Music: Where did the idea for “Intro” come from?

Danah Denice: I love the theatrics of music. I wanted people to feel like, “whoa, I gotta buckle up.” I was inspired by two things: Tori Amos’s song “The Pool,” which is largely just vocalization, just stacked vocals, and Hans Zimmer’s “At Wit’s End” from Pirates of the Caribbean 3, like the bell that I have going on in “Intro” and the wind. He is one of my favorite modern composers. I love Hans Zimmer. 

2. No Rules

In a Beethovenly C minor, with brooding pop strings and a dark and slow 6/8 feel, “No Rules” brings substantive musical drama to match “Intro’s” teased theatricality.

YTM: Tell me about “No Rules”

DD: This song is very big. It’s like my James Bond song on the record, my Skyfall, you know? 

YTM: It is that epic for sure, and a fascinating song.

DD: I co-wrote this song with Sally McGee, my bandmate from where she was the cello player.  “No Rules” was one of Sally's songs that she presented to us before we split up as a band. I had her blessing to take this to my record.  When I first got my hands on these chords and these lyrics, I thought “wow, this sounds just like ‘Since I've Been Loving You,’” my favorite Led Zeppelin song 

YTM: I was going to ask about that!  I noticed it's the same key and the way that you use the IV chord feels just like “Since I've Been Loving You”. 

DD: She let me come up with my own translation of the song musically. I wrote the melody and developed the piano part.  My brilliant friend Dan Ryan, who’s in a band called Super City wrote the string part for this particular song. We wanted to go as hard with this song as we possibly could. I felt like this song really lent itself to a build, like “Since I've Been Loving You” does.  Lyrically, I hope I'm not misquoting Sally on this one, but I was being stalked around the time that this song was written and I believe Sally was trying to write this song from the perspective of my stalker. 

YTM: It has a darkness to it, and there is a little contradiction in some of what's being communicated: no rules, just ownership. 

DD: Yeah, exactly. No rules, just ownership.

YTM: I love the bridge. That F major chord is just great, and then the vocal moment that happens on the repeated line at the end of the bridge is incredible.

DD: I recorded this record in so many different places, but that big note was like the only thing I couldn't recreate from the demo that I had. So that is the demo performance for that note, and then everything else around it has been re-recorded. I couldn’t replicate it, though I tried. I just could only do it exactly like I wanted it that one day so we kept it. 

YTM: It’s perfect.

DD: I also want to add that Sally had a stroke and is not able to play cello now. We recorded just a few months before she had her stroke and brain aneurysm. I'm grateful that she plays cello on this record and I'm glad that she wants me to put her songs out into the world because I don't want her musical contributions to be forgotten. It means a lot that she trusts me with her songs. 

3. The One I Learned From

Into the silence that follows “ No Rules”, a series of gentle piano arpeggios sound, signaling a shift in direction.  “The One I Learned From” is a song about awakening.  If “No Rules” was illuminated by a theater’s stage lights, creating dark pockets behind and around the subject, “The One I Learned From” is lit by the natural light of dawn.
YTM: I love how this song exists in a quasi-timeless introspection space until 2 minutes and 32 seconds. Then it feels like the song “begins” but the heart of the song continues. There’s not a key change, it's not like a head fake, but the full ensemble enters in the recording and it is the awakening moment of the song. How did that idea come about? 

DD: Well, this might seem like a lazy answer, but it's really the truth. I don't write much with intention. I sit down and I kind of let... This is where I get very woo. If you don't know me personally, I am a very woo-woo person, a very spiritual, witchcrafty type of person. Writing music for me is usually like a channeling situation. I feel like I personally, when I write the songs that end up coming to fruition, I'm getting out of the way. I'm moving myself out of the way and whatever's coming through gets expressed. The way I write music is a very intuitive, feeling-based process. It's not like a conscientious choice thinking “I want to do this chord,” or “I think I want to do this,” It's largely all by ear or like I feel overtaken by some creative energy.

YTM: There's a lot of great lines in this song. Just to pick one in the final act, “now you're alone with the person you didn't become.”

DD: Yeah, that's my favorite line. 

YTM: That just came to you?

DD: Yeah. Well, I wrote this about someone. 

YTM: It definitely suggests a relational context. 

DD: It is though it's evolved for me in its meaning as time has gone on. I had written this initially for a partner I was with who was still very much in love with his ex. And I wrote this to say “dude, do you want to be with me or do you want to stay hung up on somebody in your past that you know that you can't be with?” Ultimately, as the song progresses, the line “So you run from the safety of someone that you swore couldn't be outdone, but you never really knew them,” is about the fact that he didn't really know me at all. He had me on this pedestal, but wasn't obviously actively walking in love with me because he was still hung up on his ex. Though, as time has gone on, I realized that I had written this almost to myself as well. 

YTM: That's how I interpreted it, as an internal dialogue and the process of individuation and growth. 

DD: Especially at the end, “now you're alone with the person you didn't become” sitting with the weight of your unrealized potential.

YTM: But that potential is still there. 

DD: Yeah, you have a choice. Your life isn't over. It's either sink or swim, basically. That’s how I ended it. 

YTM: Also a good line.

DD: Yeah. So for me, to the man I was with at the time, it's like “you feel very stuck, you're still hung up on your ex and there’s a whole lot there, but you can choose to make something out of your life or you can remain a victim,” which is the same conversation I've had with myself more than once. 

YTM: That's good writing.

DD: That's kind of the way that I look at this song anyway. This is one of my favorite songs on my record. 

YTM: One of mine too.

DD: I'm really proud of the arrangement, musically - the instrumentation. 

YTM: It's brilliant and, I think, bold, putting off all of that arrival as late as you do. It gives so much space to the stuck, liminal feelings of the first act.

DD: Yeah. There's parts in it where if you listen to it, it sounds like there might be some guitar swells happening in the beginning. It's actually not. It's just the natural harmonics of the piano that I used. 

YTM: Is it really? 

DD: It's really neat. I had so much fun making that song. The low end, Sally's playing cello, but I also ended up using this really fat synth sound on the end. That's just me with the modulation wheel. I like to give it the most THX sounding big tone that I could find.

YTM: That’s probably why I thought it was bowed upright bass.

DD: Yeah. It's subtle, but it's in there if you listen with any kind of sub. That one was a lot of fun to build, for sure.

YTM: “Drown or finally learn how to swim,” is that the album art?

DD: It's so funny that you said that. That was not intentional.  I knew I wanted to try and get in the water. I live on Kent Island, surrounded by the Chesapeake. My father is a waterman, he's worked the water my whole life.

YTM: I like the light and dark in the picture. 

DD: Exactly. And part of it is conceptual, me emerging from the depths, the deep of the water, I don't know if it's necessarily Jungian, but with water representing the subconscious, the unconscious. There's a symbolism of emergence with my album. So that's why I ended up choosing that picture. 

4. To Say Goodbye

Danah intros this song with her Joan Baez-informed fingerstyle guitar playing.  “To Say Goodbye” has a sweet, delicate melancholy, with Danah’s clever guitar part weaving in and out of uncertainty behind sirenic ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’.  Her harmony vocals are particularly striking, as they appear and vanish like sunspots through a forest canopy.

DD: I'm really proud of this song. I was listening to a lot of Lianne La Havas at the time that I wrote it. Two other songs specifically come to mind when I think of my inspiration for it, one is Gordon Lightfoot's “If You Could Read My Mind” That was one of my inspirations for the instrumentation. The other inspiration was Father John Misty's “I Went to the Store One Day”, which is the last track on his I Love You Honey Bear album. Both of those influenced how I wanted to tackle this song from an arrangement standpoint.  This song started with a bunch of oohs and ahs, no words yet. The words came as the arrangement developed, which often happens when I'm writing. I felt that this song needed to be this airy, fairy, Joni Mitchell-esque kind of ballad. 

YTM: I think that explains why the ‘oohs’ are so organic within the form. 

DD: The ‘oohs’ and the ‘whoas’ were already there at the very beginning and I decided to make it my chorus, I guess. I don't usually try to stick to a song format intentionally. Sometimes I don't end up ever having a chorus and that's fine.

YTM: Your songs tend to have a very, I think, sturdy, organic form. Even if it's not in a strict, Nashville-like way where you can tell this where the verse stops and the pre-chorus starts, they're formally very sturdy. 

DD: I appreciate that, because it's easy to wonder “am I doing this right?” Which is such a silly question.  But this song was really fun to develop. I arranged the strings on this. 

YTM: I like the strings on this. 

DD: I'm very proud of these. I arranged them and Amy Shook played them. (Thank you, Amy Shook!) She's amazing. We did the string session virtually. I was at the beach and we did it over Zoom. It was very strange, but we did it. I had arranged everything with my voice, just like I did with the oohs and ahs, and their crescendos and decrescendos. I asked her to replicate the parts on her instruments and she did a phenomenal job. She used two different bows to give it a fuller sound. 

YTM: I wouldn’t have been shocked to hear that these strings were some software instrument out of a box or it was some ensemble. One talented person is a little bit of a surprise!

DD: Yeah. just one talented person. She also played viola, I believe. But that's how some of those ‘oohs’ stayed in there and kind of filled out the string parts. Some of them became strings. Some of them stayed in there to build up that almost symphonic sound that I wanted. 

YTM: My favorite line in this one is, "I'm not asking you to lie to me, I'm asking you to tell the truth." I think that points to the depth in the storytelling there, that somehow those things could be conflated, where they are, at face value, the opposite. 

DD: Yes, most definitely. And then the following line, "because the anticipation always leaves a bruise." 

YTM: That's also a great line. 

DD: It’s like “just tell me what's on your mind,” you know? I wrote this song about being in a relationship that was long past its point of expiration and neither party wanted to leave, largely due to sunk cost.  But the song tries to acknowledge the resentments and feeling of lack that are the undertone for that relationship. There's a sense of grief while still in the relationship, and then obviously the end is, "I never got used to the part where you're supposed to say goodbye." That was just me talking about my struggle to walk away from things that aren't suiting me. We could have a whole other interview about that.

YTM: I think the musical environment makes the difficulty clearer, because it's such a beautiful musical environment, but then all of the glimpses into the relationship that the poetry contain show that there's trouble.

DD: There's trouble. It's kind of the undertone of my album in general.

5. I’m Alright

That trouble comes to a head on track five, a song about not being alright but saying “I’m Alright” anyway.

YTM: “I”m Alright” has a bit of an edge to it compared to the previous song. 

DD: I say the F word in the song, guys, so yeah. Just saying. That's the edge. 

YTM: [laughing] Well, there's a whole attitude, too. That bridge is a particular highlight, the percussion coming in like bones rattling. 

DD: I chose that! I played it initially too, then I had a real drummer come and do it. 

YTM: The creativity of that choice was striking to me. Tell me about this song. 

DD: Most of my bandmates say this is their favorite song. I actually have a really hard time playing this song out because this is the most personal song on the record for me.

YTM: I’m curious about your creative process. I imagine that you tuned your guitar to open D, it's a magical feeling, and suddenly there's a song coming…

DD: Yep. 

YTM: So when you're writing a song like this, is the first line the first line most times, or was it in this case? 

DD: This was a situation where I felt like my lyrics were happening before the song. Most of my lyrics are written in tandem, as I'm singing. I already had this on my heart at the time, which is why it's my most personal song. And I just wanted to find a way to express it. This is the oldest song that I have on my record, I was 20 when I wrote this. Honestly, looking back on this song and still even feeling fragments of the pain of this song eight years later, I still feel like this song from a delivery standpoint doesn't encapsulate how I felt, which is weird. So I feel like when I play this song live, aside from it being really personal and being nervous to share that with folks, I feel like I always have kind of a compulsion to want to rearrange it a little bit, at least vocally. I did a little bit of that in the studio on the fly, because I just felt like the melody wasn't as intense as I wanted it to be, and it was lacking in some way.

YTM: Wow. What part of the melody are you thinking of? 

DD: In the studio I rewrote the melody in the bridge to climb more. It's very angsty now.

YTM: Very angsty. And the pattern of the lines falls away, which I think heightens the drama. There's a vulnerability and like an almost ruminating quality to the verses that lead up to that. Then when you hit the bridge, it feels like you're stepping into things more fully. I just love the way that the lyrics don't conform to the pattern of the verses.

DD: Thank you. I think my struggle with delivering it live is that it is angsty, and it is extremely vulnerable, and I am singing from a much more angry place. Most of my music is very polished. 

YTM: I see, so if it's beautiful outside and you're having a wonderful day, then you gotta sing this bridge…

DD: Yeah. You know, it's like I can be afraid to be perceived as being raw. Most of my music is, in my opinion, relatively polished.

YTM: There's a literary quality to your writing. It's first person, it feels very authentic, but it doesn't feel like a purely unfiltered confessional. There's an artistry to it that is how you deliver your themes. With this bridge especially, it feels like some of those layers fall away a little bit. 

DD: This is all based on a true story. I was dating someone much older than me and I was doing a lot of drinking at the time. At that age you’re trying to find yourself, trying to find your group of people. I just started coming to play music in Annapolis, and I wanted to fit in. And so I was doing a lot of partying, and I didn't really understand the difference between a friend and a drinking buddy until the rug got pulled out from under me. 

YTM: Great little wordplay there with “stand up” and “falling over drunk”. 

DD: I'm proud of that. I was proud of that when I wrote that. I didn't literally keep photos of us in the trunk, but he always kept song lyrics and stuff that he didn't want to share with anybody in the trunk of his car. So I kind of just spun off of that idea. But I feel like he enjoyed watching me suffer, which is why I was saying in a lot of these, would it help you to grow, like knowing that I'm in the same old spot? It felt like my first real love, my first real adult relationship. And I was doing the codependent thing like, ‘oh my God, I can't stay away from you but this relationship is so unhealthy.’ We were just doing this dance, this back and forth. I'm pining for him through the song, like I'm going to grow old alone waiting for the chance to grow old with you, staring forever at my phone waiting for a call that will never come.

It's really hard for me to play this song live and it means a lot to me that so many of my friends that I care about love this song so much. I feel like it's kind of my responsibility to keep being vulnerable and keep letting myself be seen, you know, even if this is an old wound. People have come up to me after my shows and said that this song really struck them because they experienced something similar.

6. Grace

At the end of “I’m Alright”, when all’s been said, the music quietly transforms.  After the open-tuned guitar’s last chord fades, a repeated keyboard figure intimates a coming change before a sudden fade.  

DD: I would like to talk about that segue.

YTM: Yeah! Tell me about the segue. 

DD: The segue out of “I'm Alright” into “Grace” is one of my favorite things about this album. And I have to thank Greg Wellham of Super City. Greg did an amazing job with that segue. He is a classical guitar player and I think he used a nylon string guitar for that. 

YTM: Sounds like it. 

DD: We wanted a really dreamy outro to take us to the sparseness of the next song that's about my grandmother. He had a janky keyboard like I had a janky keyboard and we plugged it into one of his jingly guitar pedals, and then that's like how the sound happened. 

YTM: Nice. 

DD: I love that segue. I think that segue is awesome. But now we can talk about the actual song. 

YTM: What tuning do you use on Grace? 

DD: Drop D. 

YTM: Cool... I made the mistake of trying to figure it out after I'd figured out the open D song and all my strings were in the wrong tuning... 

DD: [laughing] No, it’s drop D and it's just two chords. 

YTM: There's a lot in this one. This is another favorite. This one shows off your upper register really nicely in ways that are surprising. We've heard a lot from you already, and it's like you've still got tricks.  And we need to talk about the outro of this song, but tell me about this song first, and then we'll get to the outro.

DD: Well, buckle up for another ultra-personal song. It's hard for me to play this song out without crying. Firstly, Grace is my grandma's name. I dedicated my record to my grandparents who paid for my classical piano lessons. I credit them with recognizing my passion for music early on so that I could ultimately do what I do for a living now. 

My grandmother died in 2022, and my grandfather died in 2019. My grandparents had a huge hand in raising me. I spent a lot of time with them and from age 19 up until my grandfather passed away, around 21, 22, I helped take care of them. My grandmother had Alzheimer's, so I would help her get dressed and help with the not-fun caretaking stuff at times. I would go grocery shopping for them.  It was a lot but it was a privilege. One of my goals in life was to make sure that my grandparents got to see me on TV before they passed away. And my grandfather got to see me on TV three weeks before he died, which was really cool. 

YTM: Wow!

DD: He got to see me on Channel 11, which was really neat. I just wanted to say that because I love talking about my grandparents and I wanted to do that before I go into the song. ‘Grace’ is my grandma's name, hence “funny you’re named for the thing I never learned to show myself as a kid.” 

YTM: That's a very good line. There's a lot in there. That use of the word funny and even that sentence construct is a little bit surprising and it's disarming in a song. 

DD: That's me. That's me in general dealing with heavy emotions. 

YTM: Then as we come to realize how much is attached to that, I thought that was very poignant. 

DD: Thank you. I hadn't written a song in about a year and a half. When my grandmother died, I feel like her gift to me when she left was to crack my heart open enough that I could write music again because I had really shut myself down. 

After the relationships that have been chronicled through this album, you can see where that would wear away at somebody's belief in themselves. And all of that faded away in the massiveness of this loss, like none of those things mattered that were previously holding me back because I was just so overcome with grief when my grandmother died. I just needed to get that shit out. And so I look at her loss as a gift for me in that way. That year I had a vocal injury, I had to go to court, I was being stalked, all within just a few months. I was in the process of my fifth or sixth move that year when she died. It was a moment where I felt ‘I need to go sit down and get some of this out or like something bad might happen.’

So I had my PA system on me because I'd been gigging a lot. I plugged it in and cranked up the reverb like I used to do when I was like 18 or 19 going to open mic at the jetty. And I hadn't played with my voice in quite some time because I had been dealing with this vocal injury and so many self-limiting beliefs and hating how I sound and the shit that stops you from wanting to work on your craft.

So I finally plugged my freaking guitar into my PA, plugged my microphone in, cranked the reverb up and just started singing. These words fell out of me. It felt like I was a channel, like it rolled right out of my heart. I wrote this song in about an hour, maybe. 

YTM: Wow.

DD: A lot of these songs are all these actually all these songs are one-sitting songs because I take years sometimes to let myself sit with the weight of those emotions. Then when I do write, it's like the gloves are off. This is a song where I only have two chords because it wasn't even about the music. I just wanted to fucking sing. This melody came to me, just hit me. I was like, I want to do it this way and I have these words. I'm going to deliver this. 

YTM: So you wrote this with the PA's help? 

DD: Yeah, the reverb. The reverb inspires the shit out of me. 

YTM: That’s awesome

DD: I practice with it at home a lot, just covering other songs, but having a little bit of technical help. 

YTM: Do you feel like you can hear the end product better? 

DD: Yeah, and I also just feel like I can play with my voice more. I don't have to sing as hard because I have amplification. So that's largely how I practice at home, because I sing with amplification at all my gigs. So that's how I write too. It makes me feel more creative when I get to ‘verb it out, like I'm Enya or something. 

YTM: That's great. I love the bridge - do you consider it a bridge, the “how can I take solace” part? 

DD: Yes. 

YTM: It’s a great build. There’s so much heart in it. 

DD: Thank you.  The way that my grandparents loved me is different. I love my parents, but a grandparent's love is different, you know? I felt like I couldn't do any wrong in my grandparents' eyes. They supported me so intensely and were always there. During my most terrible relationship, which was written about in this album, even during my most intense, awful relationships, I could go to my grandparents' house, pick up Mission Barbecue for dinner and sit down and watch Jeopardy and feel like nothing was wrong with my life. They were just salt of the earth people. I feel that nobody's loved me like they did and nobody will because they're them. People have loved me in ways that remind me of them for sure but, that absence is hard. I feel their love and care through the ether, but it's different, not being able to go to that place anymore to receive that. 

The lines “I pull out of the drive, I see the look in your eyes. I feel you waving goodbye for the last time.” This is about my grandfather. Our last meal together was Mission Barbecue. That was no exaggeration. They loved the salmon. It was Easter weekend. FinArt Gallery was having their last hurrah party that weekend when they were still on West Street and that was the next night. I had gone  to my grandparents house to get them some groceries and have dinner with them. I had been going to their house at least once a week and had been taking them to a lot of appointments. My grandfather was 97 and I noticed he hadn't really been shaving his face. He was always a very kempt person. He expressed to me that he was dealing with some health stuff and that he was really tired of feeling bad. They were sleeping in late a lot, and I had noticed that he was starting to decline.  Every time I'd go over to their house I would play for them on their piano. We had a nice dinner together, and I played “Stormy Weather” which they always danced to and “You Don't Bring Me Flowers” by Neil Diamond.  Afterwards I watched my grandfather wipe a tear away from his cheek.  I had never seen my grandfather cry in my entire life, he was always very jovial, very wise.  He was just an amazing man. We had plans to go to my aunt’s house for Easter brunch two days later and I remember hugging my grandfather goodbye and saying “all right, grandpa, I'll see you on Sunday, right?” And he said “Um yeah, I don't know. We're gonna have to play it by ear.” I said “what do you mean? You got a hot date? Like, what are you doing?” And he looked at me and he said, “I'm getting really tired, Dane.” And I knew what that meant. And so I looked at him and said “well, I hope I'll see you. But if I don't, I love you and that's okay.” He died Easter morning. One of my consistent memories of my grandparents is that they would always wave from their window at the door. But he was too frail to get up and wave from the window that time. So my grandmother waved goodbye to me, but that's what that line is about, our last visit. Because I knew. I just knew.

YTM: And you have a recording attached is the outro. That's your grandmother's voice, right? 

DD: Yeah. That's a voicemail she left me, just being her adorable little self, asking me to call her back. I wanted people to know her. 

7. Lover, You Should’ve Come Over

The album concludes with its only cover, a version of Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” with Danah’s piano replacing Buckley’s acoustic guitar on the intro’s signature suspensions and resolutions.

DD: I have a whole story about Jeff Buckley. 

YTM: Does it belong here? 

DD: Yeah, sure.  I'll tell you about how I found Jeff Buckley and I'll tell you why, which is part of why I chose this song. This is my favorite song of all time. I recognize Jeff Buckley is kind of making a comeback amongst us young women right now, which is cracking me up and Ii'm like “fuck you, I found him first! You weren't suffering in your bedroom in high school listening to him, you don't deserve him! You don't understand him like I understand him! I have a longstanding and devoted parasocial relationship with this dead guy!”

YTM: It is kind of the songwriting aim, to achieve immortality in some way. You're just helping him do it. 

DD: Yes! So when I was in high school I had crippling depression, and anxiety, and OCD, you know, all the fun bipolar things. And I had a lot of sleepless nights, especially on the medicines that I was on. I love music videos, and I love going on YouTube. I actually spend every single night before bed on YouTube. And I remember finding his cover of “Hallelujah” when I was learning fingerstyle guitar and I wanted to learn it because it was so beautiful. I remember being completely shocked and blown away, so inspired and wondering “oh my god who is this?!”  I was listening to a lot of Bon Iver at the time, and early Coldplay, Noah Gunderson, and Damien Rice so I was in that realm of emotional music but I was also finding grunge. I was you know I was a very angry person (still kind of am, I just hide it) but I was an angry kid because life was crazy. Jeff Buckley was the perfect middle ground for me in that.  I heard “Hallelujah” and it was so beautiful and I immediately wanted to learn his version.  Then I was like “I gotta find more of him!” It was like 5 a.m. and I was filled with adrenaline like “who is this?” It was such an intense experience hearing him for the first time, and I hadn't felt anything due to medication quite some time. It’s a big thing when music can move you when you're numbed out, you know? And so I remember going on this dive and then I heard “Grace,” his title track. I was like, “Oh my God, this is incredible!” And he's talking about dying, you know, and not fearing his mortality because he's found true love. But, um, I didn't know he had died. 

YTM: Oh no!

DD: And so then I see this interview of Chris Cornell talking about Jeff Buckley. And I'm like “Chris Cornell and Jeff Buckley knew each other? Oh, my god. That's so amazing” because I was new to Soundgarden too. And then he's commenting on his death... And I felt like nothing in the entire world mattered anymore. “He died? This guy's dead? Are you fucking kidding me?” And I wept. This man I'd never met… I cried and then I proceeded to listen to that entire record. 

“Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” is my favorite song of all time. And I listened to that during that little span of finding Jeff Buckley, finding out he died, and then grieving him. I'm still grieving him, I think, after all these years. He's a huge influence on my songwriting. I also feel he's a big influence on me vocally as well. I credit him as one of my biggest inspirations and I wanted to pay homage to him. I started recording my record on what would have been my grandfather's 100th birthday. I brought my Jeff Buckley guitar pick, one of his picks from a tour, and my grandfather's reading glasses with me to the recording session, because I wanted all of these objects that were sentimental to me to kind of bolster me. I wanted to do this song because his album has been there for me through so much. 

YTM: It's a wonderful version of this song. 

DD: Thank you. So yeah, I’m a big fan of Jeff Buckley. Any Jeff Buckley fans out there, please make sure you check out the brand new documentary of his, It's Never Over, which is a reference to this song. It's incredible. I watched it at the Charles Theater in Baltimore in August and cried my eyes out. It's amazing.

YTM: You did it in his key. 

DD: I did. I wanted to. I like a challenge. 

YTM: some of the verticality that your voice brings to it, like in the end of the song, it's like you can just keep going vocally. You sound great.

DD: It's originally a very perfect song, so I was intimidated trying to make this different to me. 

YTM: I don't think you did any massive remodeling

DD: Just a change in instrumentation. There’s a mellotron, there's strings. Dan Ryan, also of Super City, did the strings for this as well. He was on tour with his other band, Bodega, in a van writing the string parts for this because that's how Dan rolls. He's insane. I played it on piano. My bass player, Matt Everhart, played fretless bass on it, which was a fun 90s kind of sound. My drummer, Elias Schutzman, played drums on it because we're both big Buckley fans. 

YTM: Thank you so much for talking through this masterpiece.

DD: You are welcome.

Light From a Dark Room was released on January 31st, 2024.