Tuesday, October 21, 2014

CMA CLOSEUP NEW ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: DANIEL LEE

Photo Credit: Lyn Sengupta

By Bob Doerschuk

© 2014 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

Daniel Lee isn’t the first young Country artist to write about trucks, beer and ball caps. But he’s found a few fresh perspectives on these tropes.

Consider “Hell Yeah,” one of five solo-writes on his debut album Roots, available now from Average Joes Entertainment. This is a flat-out exercise in braggadocio. He hollers out that he’s a “throw-down fighter,” a “Mason jar sipper” and “one crazy S.O.B.” His litany owes less to Music Row than to Mike Fink, the frontier riverboat legend who informed the patrons of countless saloons, “I’m a Salt River roarer! I’m a ringtailed squealer! I’m a reg’lar screamer from the ol’ Massassip!”

Whether consciously or not, Lee invests his lyrics with a kind of folk eloquence and delivers them with swagger, sensitivity and/or pain, whatever is most appropriate. Another self-penned song mirrors “Hell Yeah,” this time conveying adoration to his true love through more-than-clever metaphors: “I’m a freight train ready to go off any minute and you’re the track that keeps me in line,” he assures on “To Me.” And a third solo composition, “For Sale Sign,” turns prosaic want-ad copy into a confession that the object being sold is “this heart of mine.” Sounds corny, yes, but it also feels real and works beautifully.

This Winder, Georgia, native is already writing and performing like a truck-bed, bar-brawl poet.

For more on Daniel Lee, visit www.CMACloseUp.com.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

MUSICAL HERO

“It's a tie between Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.”

SONG YOU’D LOVE TO COVER

“‘Iris,’ by the Goo Goo Dolls.”

PET PEEVE

“Being hung up on.”

ACTOR WHO COULD PLAY YOU IN A BIOPIC

“Whoever is crazy enough at the time!”

LUCKY CHARM

“It’s a little piece of metal that I engraved ‘luck’ into. I wear it around my right boot.”

On the Web: www.DanielLeeOfficial.com

On Twitter: @DanielLeeMusic

No comments: