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Hi Daniel, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?
I’ve been great, thanks. Back in NYC after a really nice summer in Amsterdam working on the next record. Always trying to stay a bit ahead.
Can you talk to us more about your latest single “Light Lab”?
A few years ago, I was fortunate to spend a bit of time on a very generous friend’s boat off the coast of Italy. I’d never experienced anything like it and it was glorious: long, lazy days spent looking at the sea and reading and swimming off the back of the boat. And though I didn’t have a guitar with me, there was this melody that kept running through my head, a kind of earworm. And so that melody – which turned into “Light Lab” – came out of those lazy and wonderful days.
Did any event in particular inspire you to write this song?
Aside from the beauty of the Ligurian Sea, it was inspired by some memories of a long lost friend, someone I knew a bit when I was living in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. She had an interesting and strange way with words and it always stuck with me.
How was the filming process and experience behind the video?
Videos are funny to make. My day job is shooting and editing videos, so I’m fairly familiar with the process. But doing my own videos can be a struggle mainly because there’s nobody to bounce ideas off of. But for the “Light Lab” video, the initial idea was to have a few versions of me lip-synching the song – in a kind of emotionally detached way – and stack one in front of the other. So I shot a bunch of takes and started editing and it seemed a bit flat, a bit boring. Then the idea of a sort of animated approach, with the same footage, using After Effects. That was cool but seemed a bit out-of-the-box, so I ended up doing something that allowed me to treat each layer differently with regards to color, and also nudge a few of them out of sync. So what began as something simple and straightforward ended up being less simple and straightforward and I think it’s better for it. It ended up with a slightly enigmatic quality that wasn’t there when I started.
The single comes off your new album Cartoon Babylon– what’s the story behind the title?
That song is about a guy living a version of what he thinks is a decadent life – living in a kind of Babylon – but it’s really just a G-rated version of one, a cartoon version of a life of materialism and decadence. He’s a caricature, a kind of guy you see around downtown Manhattan – where I live – on a Saturday night.
How was the recording and writing process?
I had the same issues as everyone else who was making a record during a pandemic – just trying to keep everyone safe and all that. But it all worked out fine. The biggest challenge was getting the strings recorded. Alex Wurman, who wrote and conducted the arrangements is a busy dude, so finding a window that worked was difficult enough but then finding a window when Alex was
free and we weren’t in the middle a COVID wave – when you could safely get a dozen string players in the same room – was really difficult. In the end, those string sessions were the very last things that we tracked and hearing the brilliant work Alex had done was kind of overwhelming. But, as that session ended, I just had this massive feeling of joy and relief.
What role does Amsterdam play in your music?
Amsterdam is the place my wife and I live in the summers, when we try and get NYC out of our heads for a few months. For me, it’s where I do just about all of my songwriting. That said, I can’t honestly say that Amsterdam as a place has a big influence on the finished product, but I know that being there – and it’s a place I love – puts me in a creative headspace that I find it difficult to get to anywhere else. In other words, I don’t know what of Amsterdam ends up in the songs, but I think it says something that it’s really the only place I can write on my own.
Where did you find the inspiration for the songs and lyrics?
Everywhere. Old memories (sometimes very old memories), new memories, other songs, books, newspaper stories. One of the songs on Cartoon Babylon came after re-reading Slaughterhouse FIve. Another came from just wanting to be in Los Angeles – a place I have very fond memories of- again. So…all over the place.
What else is happening next in Daniel Carlson’s world?
Just trying to get the record out there and into peoples’ ears. As I mentioned before, I’m already thinking about the next record and hoping that the gap between releases won’t be so long this time around.
