A true American eccentric, Dan Reeder has remained stubbornly self-sufficient across his career. Now based in Nürnberg, where he splits his time between music and visual art, he writes and plays all his own music, designs and creates the cover art, even builds the instruments himself. Reeder had built guitars, banjos, drums, basses, cellos, violins, clarinets and even a saxophone (an experience he sums up by saying “I’ll never do that again”), as well as microphones, computers and other recording equipment. The endeavour lends his music a conspicuously authentic tone, something rubberstamped by someone who should know. Because when, in the early 2000s, Reeder sent a CD to the legendary John Prine, he ending up signing with Prine’s Oh Boy Records.
Since then, he has become a cult hero with his unique, renegade folksinger style. Reeder’s songs are frank, unpredictable, wryly humorous and often strangely emotive, even at their most absurd. Clocking in at just under a minute, one of his latest singles, ‘Smithereens’, is a wonderful introduction to the Dan Reeder ethos. A brief snapshot of a tinderbox of a relationship that lands like a sucker punch to the solar plexus, both partners biting their tongues to avoid an eruption.
she ain’t saying what she’s thinking
and neither,
neither is he
’cause they both know
that if they do
this whole thing
gets blown all to smithereens