South African artist Daniel Gadd shares title-track from forthcoming album 'About Strange Lands and People'
New album About Strange Lands and People out November 3rd
"Absolutely lovely"
- Mark Radcliffe, BBC Radio 6 Music
“a similar impact on me as Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago: a songwriter isolated among the elements with his memories who emerges with a mesmerising collection of songs.”
- MOJO
“The track takes a variety of influences and packages them neatly in an acoustic-driven, folky parcel, with the sounds of Bob Dylan and Bon Iver floating in the background.”
- The Most Radicalist
South African-born and London-based alternative singer/songwriter Daniel Gadd is set to release his second studio album About Strange Lands and People on November 3rd.
Today, Gadd has shared the album's Dylan inspired title-track. “The stream of consciousness lyrics in this song are meant to draw you in and hopefully take you on something of a journey. I remember feeling a sense of total wonder the first time I heard a recording of Bob Dylan’s Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie. Even now if I ever feel really low, that’s the recording I turn to,” says Gadd. “'About Strange Lands and People' is a very different song, but it's my small tribute to that incredible poem by Dylan. It’s also a nod to the raconteuring style of singers like Arlo Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, which never fails to make me smile and feels like a bit of a lost art these days. The ticking of the church clock and the birdsong that you hear opening and closing the track were both recorded in the small Northamptonshire village where we did our original recordings of the album."
In 2015, Daniel Gadd was 25 and living in a small fishing village on the coast of Cape Town. With only a guitar, harmonica and a couple of borrowed microphones, he recorded a set of eight intimate songs. That first album, As If in a Dream I Drifted at Sea, would go on to be described in Mojo Magazine by writer Sylvie Simmons as having had “a similar impact on me as Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago: a songwriter isolated among the elements with his memories who emerges with a mesmerising collection of songs.”
About Strange Lands and People is a new collection of songs — soft-spoken, warm, nostalgic and dreamlike. Much like his debut, the album was originally recorded solo back in 2018, in a beautiful old church in the Northamptonshire countryside. “On the second morning, a local woman walked in with her family and cheerily asked us what we were up to. It turned out to be Geri Halliwell and when she left she said “Good luck with your music.” So in a very real sense this album has been blessed by a Spice Girl… in a church,” says Gadd.
“Though I loved those solo, acoustic recordings, I felt that the songs were calling out for more players. So I somehow convinced my producer Jonjo Keefe to do it all over again, but this time in the studio with a band. In 2022 we produced the record together, adding to the arrangements and shaping the songs into their final form,” he continues.
Recorded at The Premises Studios in London, the folk influences and gentle, reflective nature of Gadd’s debut album are still there, but they’ve evolved into something a little less fragile and sparse. Each song is a kind of vignette — a window into a different place, time or personality. This album is the work of an artist who observes things, who uses music and poetry to try and find his own place in the world.
Musically, as well as Dylan, on About Strange Lands and People Gadd draws influence from artists such as Leif Vollebekk, Laura Marling, Adrianne Lenker, The Tallest Man on Earth and Leonard Cohen. Thematically, there’s a sense of “wandering” woven throughout the album’s 10 tracks. Whether it’s about a relationship, a friendship, a feeling of being out of place or even a feeling of being in the right place, each track in its own way seems to deal with the fact that the search has to continue and never really ends.
Tracklist
Can't Stop The Leaves
The Painter
Shepherd's Star
First Goodbye
A Statue Part-Concealed
April Sky
At the Edge of the World
Things Always Break
About Strange Lands and People
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