Dan Horne

You know Dan! He’s everywhere, especially this year. He’s produced, played on, or written on so many favorite albums – to name just a few from 2020 – Circles Around the Sun’s self-titled, Mapache’s From Liberty Street, Trummors’ Dropout City, Pacific Range’s High Upon the Mountain, some badass tracks from Mojohand, and now, his debut solo EP, The Motorcycle Song EP, is officially streaming everywhere.

Tell me a little bit about the The Motorcycle Song EP. You play and sing everything by yourself, which is a stark contrast since so much of your work is so collaborative. How was it?

I had been trying to find the time to do something that was just me for a while.. and then all of a sudden, tours got canceled and my studio was empty and I didn’t know if it was safe or okay to have people come over and record, so I decided to just stay by myself. It was songs and ideas that I had floating around in my head for a while. So I was planning on doing something already, but it was definitely a result of the whole quarantine thing. It was nice to have that solitude to concentrate. It was also an escape from reality. I’ve done commercials and stuff for film by myself, commissioned work, but this is really the first thing when I was just doing it for the sake of doing it.

A full-lenght album is also in the works, hopefully I can finish it soon. I think the first thing, the EP, was an experiment to set parameters and see what I could get done by myself. And for the full length, I wanted to invite over a bunch of the people — you know, the obvious players in the circle, try to showcase that. We’ve done a couple of rehearsals and we recorded a show that we’re going to try to put out soon. So yeah, we got some stuff in the works.

You grew up in Palo Alto, so how did you become so central to the LA music scene?

LA is a big city, but it has a pretty cool centralized scene where everybody knows each other. A lot of it’s stationed in Echo Park and Silver Lake. I randomly, luckily moved to Echo Park. We had this house above the House of Spirits, which most everyone knows because they have a cool sign. And so I lived there since I first moved to LA around 2004. It’s a cool, close-knit community where everybody knows each other and looks out for each other and helps each other out finding cool bands to play with and projects to work on. So LA is an interesting city where you can get lost really easily, but also if you’re looking to hustle and work a lot, you can. It’s like… a small fish in a big pond? A big fish in a small pond? What’s the saying?

I got here and started to record. I met Brent Rademaker and Aaron Sperske from Beachwood Sparks around the same time. Brent was looking for somewhere to record, and he’d been playing with my friend Bobby Rodriguez. He came over and we started recording together. And then at the same time, Aaron Sperske and I met at the Little Joy bar where everyone used to hang out. We started doing this jam session night at Spaceland. It was a cool introduction to all these people. When I first moved here, I remember one night it was raining in that LA torrential way, and only ten people came out —which was great because all the musicians kind of laid their set lists by the wayside and got to jam and do their thing. I met a lot of cool people that night.

I think I read a story about how Brent told you that if you learned to play pedal steel, then you could join Beachwood Sparks.

They were recording at my studio one day and Brent said, “Hey, Farmer Dave can’t make it. You should play pedal steel.” I said, “Well, okay, I don’t have one.” So, I knew I’d better get one. I crammed and learned how to play a little bit. Pedal steel is this mystical instrument that I always wanted to learn, and back then, I didn’t really know many people that played it. If you wanted pedal steel on a song, you’d have someone record, send them the tracks, and they’d send the recording back, that type of thing.

There weren’t that many people around that played in LA that I knew. And so I thought, “Well, this is a good opportunity to figure it out.” And then maybe I could be that guy. So I did that. I don’t really play in a very traditional way. So sometimes if you want me to play straight-up country, it doesn’t always work. But you know, I think the main thing is to figure out your own style and make it sound like you, or me, in my case. 

You play so many instruments. There’s bass, obviously you’ve been doing a lot of pedal steel, and on this EP you’re playing guitar solos, electric sitar, etc. Why are you so good at everything?

Well, my musical inclination is that I pick something up and figure out how it works and how to make it sound cool. And then I get bored of it and go try something else. I’m not that great at any one thing, but I have a knack for figuring out what makes this instrument similar to another instrument that I know how to play, and I find similarities or parallels between those.  I feel like as long as you’re still playing music a lot, it doesn’t really matter which instrument you’re playing.

I’ll play drums for a while, or I’ll play bass for a while. But I see people who are really studious on one instrument, and it kind of blows my mind and I am envious of that. Like Scott Metzger, on the guitar — you see him practicing while everyone’s setting up gear, doing soundcheck, and he’s over there, like out in the theater, somewhere out in the seats, practicing guitar. And I admire that because being able to focus on one thing is a talent in itself. I get lost and I can never focus on one thing for too long. I think that’s where my style comes from. I mean, bass is the one thing where I think the reason why I gravitated towards the bass is because it became an in-demand thing people kept asking me to do.

What’s the weirdest instrument that you play?

I’m into weird percussion, like, clicking, click-clack sounds and whistles. And you know, the cuíca is one of my favorites lately. That’s the thing that sounds like a dog barking or someone going “whoops.” You can’t tell what it is, but that’s the cuíca, It’s a friction drum that has a piece of wood stuck through the middle of it that you pull on and it makes that weird sound. And there’s a guy, Airto Moreira, from Miles Davis’s band that is like my hero.

He just gets up there with Miles Davis and, and all those dudes, and he just goes from one weird percussion instrument to the next. And it sometimes seems super random, like right in the middle of someone’s solo, he’ll switch from the cuíca to the shaker or something. And it makes the song for me. It’s so crazy how he does it. And it’s just so random. And I just love how it’s the randomness of it mixed with it — you can’t tell if it’s actually totally random or if it’s perfectly well thought out. That weird percussion is a big inspiration for a lot of the stuff I do. I need those elements of chaos in there. You know, kind of the way that certain venues have a unique clatter —glasses clinking, that sort of particular venue din — it becomes sort of melodic after a while.

My favorite project you’ve been involved with is the Skiffle Players. How’d that come about?

That’s one of my favorite projects too — maybe my very favorite. I met Cass when we did this thing with Matt Sweeney. It was a staged concert for Levi’s to unveil their new vintage 70s, like bell-bottom jeans or something like that. And it was a fake festival where they hired models to walk around and then they had real bands to play. And Matt and Jonathan Wilson both did it. Matt’s band was me and Cass, Blake Mills, and Jimi Hey was on drums. The festival was up in Topanga somewhere, and it was on this cool, old farm compound thing like in that “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” movie.

That was my first time meeting Cass. Neal was there, and we all hung out. After that, Cass had a gig in Big Sur at the Hipnic or maybe another folkYEAH! festival things, and he didn’t have a band. Beachwood Sparks was playing, so he said, “Why don’t you guys be my band?” I think we called it McCombs’s Skiffle Band or something like that and that’s where it started. That show was so fun. Britt Govea (Owner of folkYEAH! And label Spiritual Pajamas) saw it and thought it was great. He paid for some studio sessions here in LA, we went in and recorded, and that’s how it happened. We recorded something like 30-50 songs in the first session, and so after we released SKIFFLIN’, we put out the EP, Piffle Sayers, which was more tracks from that session. The songs on the EP weren’t afterthoughts, it’s more of a companion piece. And then, we did  a separate session for the second full-length, Skiff.

I put on those records, and they both really are nostalgic for me. It was a cool time. I think the concept behind the Skiffle Players from the beginning was to be super spontaneous and not have any rules or hold back. So that’s the idea, and it comes out, I think.

You released The Motorcycle Song EP on Bandcamp first, and now almost two months later it’s going to be available on streaming platforms. I think this is a really great release strategy I see artists adopting. What was your thought process behind this model?

Bandcamp is really cool and it definitely became super relevant in the last year, based on a need. Musicians are not getting their fair share obviously with the streaming services. But on the flip side, I listen to Spotify all day long every day. I love it. It’s amazing. It’s like our dream come true as music fans and music lovers, you know? So how do you kind of toe that line? I think Bandcamp is cool and if people want to contribute to their favorite musicians and have a little bit of money to give out, they can get the album a few months before or a few weeks before. I think that’s a cool thing, and that’s a valuable thing. I remember waiting in line to get the Guns’ Use Your Illusion record at Tower. Now you can skip the line.

Everyone wants as many people as possible to hear the music they make, so you don’t want to limit yourself by not putting it out there. But it shouldn’t be free, and most people understand that. Bandcamp is great. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. You go buy your favorite old record on discogs, Bandcamp, record stores, and Spotify. It’s like with TV — you can watch Netflix and pay $10 a month, but if you want some ultra deep cut vintage thing, you’ve got to pay extra. 

What are some favorite things you have worked on lately, and what have you been listening to?

The Mapache record was pretty special. They’re cool to work with. It’s really just us three, collaborating. They trust me as much as I trust them; we just bounce ideas around really freely. Once we’re in the confines of the studio, everyone says and whatever they want and has the space. We’re all really opinionated outside the studio, but inside, it’s like “let everyone do their thing and breathe.” I love listening to stuff I worked on. I’m not ashamed to say it. I listen to it when I’m doing it and listen back later, and I’m, like, “yeah.”

As far as what I’ve been listening to, I’ve been really enjoying the cathartic chaos of electric Miles Davis stuff, a lot of instrumental music like that. It’s soothing, it’s not really about anything. The whole point is to break up your preconceptions of what music is supposed to be, what the world is supposed to be — it’s super fitting with this messed-up world we live in now. Breaking norms, showing listeners you can create cool music and beauty out of chaos.

Get The Motorcycle Song EP on Bandcamp!

Photo by McKenna Kane