David Karsten Daniels – The Teacher

We’ve featured Dallas, Texas-based songwriter David Karsten Daniels before here at WTD, when we were very complimentary about his cyclical and meditative album The Four Immeaurable Minds. Daniels has carved a niche that’s all his own, a mish-mash of genres and philosophical tendencies which his bio describes as “inhabit[ing] a private imaginary place where American folk, rock, jazz, ambient and field recordings bleed into each other seamlessly underneath musings on family, death, religion and love undeterred by distance and time.” Daniels is now back with his eighth full-length album, The Teacher, which he released recently. The album has been gestating a long time, a collage of of fifteen years worth of audio, comprised of iPhone demos of songs as well as personal field recordings. It’s intended to illustrate the story of a new father struggling with what Daniels refers to as “the new-found interdependency of family life and the unavoidable – but much needed – death of self.”

Opening track ‘The Secret Thoughts of Housewives’ begins with crackles and pops and snippets of ambient recordings, before plaintive acoustic guitar frames a sad-sounding song that is explained pretty well by its title, and comes with a lovely video directed by S. Cagney Gentry.

“Oh I want to be gone when you get home tonight, alright
No I won’t be home when you get home tonight, alright
I want to be flying away into the night
When the baby is asleep, I will slip out in(to) the early morning light”

‘When You Were Out on the Lake’ is a lo-fi folk song which sees Daniels shred away on the acoustic guitar and produce something that feels empowering and almost spiritual by its close, when a personal choir of other voices and horns join Daniels’ own. ‘Baby Teeth’ is a short and poignant piano piece, before ‘The Leaves in Our Mouths’ pairs strummed guitars with vocals that describe the pure, soul-warming joy of little everyday things, of the things that you do for a loved one (a child?); the tending of a garden, the filling of a bathtub,the collecting of small and individual treasures. ‘When I Sleep I Dream of my Father’ proves a change of tone, a bluesy shuffle of a folk song about a plucky musician of a father and his search for riches:

“Poppa got a dream gonna leave this Alabama
Said to mama ‘gotta get’ she said ‘No!’
Jumped in his camino, said ‘I’m off to California
Come and find me when you ready’ she said ‘No!'”

‘Postpartum Blues’ is a short (and actually devastatingly sad) song about the hidden darker side of starting a family, while recordings of family life permeate ‘When I Was an Island’, with its dream-like imagery and vocals that sound like I imagine Justin Vernon’s later records would sound if he would only abandon the autotune. ‘Om Family / The Death of Self’ sounds like a family meditation session, an incensed-scented mantra interrupted by the sounds of a child, which approaches the death of self that Daniels mentioned head-on.

‘I Take What I See With My Eyes’ has a slow and considered rattling drum beat and snaky electric guitar, adding layer upon layer as it builds towards its conclusion, hitting the closest thing to a crescendo on the record, a gloriously messy marriage of all the elements used so far. The penultimate track is an interlude of pure field recording, again self-explanatory titled ‘Anna’s Whistler Windchimes’, before finale ‘We Go Into the Ocean’ begins with a touching recording of a father and son being silly but also creating a pretty convincing ocean soundscape. Daniels then sings a song about the ocean to the accompaniment of his son’s seaside sounds, before they swap duties and Daniels’ son sings a (much more irreverent) song of his own.

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It’s a beautiful end to a beautiful album, deep and ambitious but also somehow natural and organic, as if these songs were born from the picture they paint and not the other way around. You can buy The Teacher now via the David Karsten Daniels Bandcamp page.