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Summer of Love
Jennifer Daniels’ music reflects her life in progress
by Paige M. Travis
It’s a good day to be Jennifer Daniels. The 31-year-old singer-songwriter is six years happily married to her touring partner Jeff Neal, and her new CD Summer Filled Sky is poised to remind her fans across the country why they fell in love with her in the first place.
Daniels was born in Knoxville, where much of her family still lives, but she’s called Lookout Mountain home for many years. On one recent weekday morning she’s finding amusement in her husband and brother-in-law, both of whom are hobbling around on sprained ankles. Neal somehow twisted his ankle the previous weekend during the two-show CD release party at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur, Ga., a club that has served as a kind of incubator for Daniels over the past 10 years.
She started out as a participant in the club’s Monday night open mics, which are renowned for bringing out the best singer-songwriters from across the Southeast and beyond; the roster can be booked solid for weeks in advance. While the competition is friendly, eager and respectful, audiences know to expect serious talent.
In November 2000, Daniels won the venue’s famous Acoustic Open Mic Shootout, a twice-yearly contest featuring winners of previous open mic nights. The prize is $1,000, but the residual attention from fans can be worth a lot more.
Eddie Owen, the club’s namesake and former owner, is “one of the most generous men in the world,” Daniels says. “I guess you could say he took us under his wing.”
She remembers that after one open mic gig, Owen, always aware of the physical and financial challenges of getting to shows, offered to pay for a hotel room rather than have her drive back that night. Playing open mics opened the door to booking her own shows at the Attic, which is now owned by Todd Van Sickle, husband of folkie and past Shootout winner Jennifer Nettles.
Daniels has developed a solid following in the Atlanta area, hence the two shows heralding the release of Summer Filled Sky—an early, all-ages concert and a later, over-21 set.
“We outgrew the one show,” she says, pleased to see fans returning and bringing their friends, new converts to her songs and engaging stage presence. Daniels makes a direct connection between her success and these folks who share her music with their friends and family.
“I appreciate them so much. They give us our life and career,” she says.
Many of those fans were introduced to Daniels via her 2001 CD Dive & Fly, a lushly produced example of the singer’s vocal feats, her thoughtful and literate lyrics, and the folky strumming of her 12-string guitar. Dive put Daniels on the acoustic music map drawn by independent radio, magazines and newspapers. Neither famous nor completely unknown, Daniels exists in territory familiar to many singer-songwriters. She’s not actively looking for a record label to release her music to a wider audience. She’s released all her CDs on her own six-year-old label called TNtrees.
“It’s gone really well being independent so far,” she says. “We have all the control, and we keep all the money we make.” But she wouldn’t say no if the right label came a-courtin’. “If the deal was right, we’d take it. And we’d still want to make the best CD we can make.”
Summer Filled Sky includes at least four songs from previous projects. “Day to Live” recurs from her 1997 EP The Invitation, and Dive and Fly. She says they wanted to give the song, a frequent request at shows, “another chance.
“Really, if there’s going to be a radio-friendly song, that would be it,” she says, joking that fans who pick up the record might be exasperated with yet another incarnation of that number.
The clean, pop production of Summer gives the song and its catchy brethren a folk-rock update, taking Daniels further from comparisons to Sarah McLachlan that have been applied to Dive; as Daniels’ voice matures it resembles Dar Williams’. Dive’s Celtic, somewhat New Age-y, treatments created a romantic atmosphere for her ballads but didn’t allow her to rock as much as her live shows proved she could. Summer’s acoustic roots are boosted by Hammond organ, a full range of percussion and dense rhythm section, supplied in the studio by their friends, Atlanta musicians Gerry Hansen and Marty Kearns.
Lyrically, Summer treads spiritual and personal ground.
“Tattoo” is a tender story of a woman who considers her C-section scar a God-given mark of love. “Mary’s Song” and “Conversations with Magdalene” consider the views of significant women of the Bible. And “In My Coat” is Daniels’ tribute to her husband. It’s the first song she’s written about her marriage to Neal.
“I don’t usually write songs for him. It’s such a private thing,” she says. “It really does feel like the world beginning,” she adds, quoting the song’s lyrics: “All this time I felt a sense of the world beginning.... There are other worlds to you that I cannot wait to know.”
Daniels is reflective about the progress of marriage. “Where’s that adolescent desire to know more and be more?” she asks. “There’s so much to find out about somebody. It’s never something that should be dull. It’s so arrogant to think that you know everything about someone.”
Long-time fans can hear progress in an artist’s work, but how do the creators themselves chart their advancement? Fame and fortune are popular marks of success, but songwriters are lucky to meet those landmarks. In lieu of those signifiers, they strive to create works that measure favorably on their internal gauges, instrument panels whose needles can swing wildly from project to project.
Daniels and Neal aren’t waiting to be discovered or longing for some next level of success or fame.
“Our number one deal with each other is that we be content where we are,” she says. “We want to enjoy the gig we’re doing in the moment. This is music: it’s alive, it’s reaching people. That’s the key.
“We want it to count. We don’t want to feel like we’re wasting time.”
But just because they’re happy in the present doesn’t mean they don’t have goals. With this summer’s series of CD release shows, which will take the couple from the Southeast up to New England, Daniels hopes to make contacts that lead to bigger and better venues. With its attentive audiences and supportive management, Eddie’s Attic sets the bar pretty high. She knows other venues like these exist—in Knoxville’s case, the former Bird’s Eye View, now inhabited by the New City Café, where Daniels will perform July 23—that draw fans of quiet, thoughtful music who themselves match a similar profile. In such settings, Daniels sets in motion a well-honed but mostly unconscious display of her character that turns objective observers into gung-ho fans. She’s a folksinger, after all, delivering parts of herself to the people through her voice. She catches an audience member’s eye and smiles. She tells stories—sometimes funny, sometimes touching. And she sings with a voice that seems capable of anything, from growling depths to angelic highs.
Writing songs, playing guitar and traveling from town to town to perform—it’s not a mere phase or a fancy for Jennifer Daniels. She’s in it for a lifetime. Although she’ll probably play to her dog Bob Marley if no one else is around to hear, an audience makes the whole experience more enjoyable.
“That’s what fulfills us when we sing and play music: that give and take from the audience,” Daniels muses. “It’s actually a relationship. When there’s that connection and banter you play that much better.”
July 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 30
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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