Daniel Knox - Daniel Knox (2015)

Daniel Knox is a songwriter, composer, filmmaker, arranger, and piano player living in Chicago. On Daniel s eponymous third album, some of the previous dark humor has been been replaced by a weightier and welcome gravitas, a lyrical emphasis which is mirrored in a meticulous new instrumental rigor. Knox also seems to have harnessed his vocal acrobatics to serve this subtle stylistic shift. While Daniel s work fits somewhere amidst the broader backdrop of American Popular Song, in recent years his compositions and arrangements have grown increasingly more informed by film score and opera, perhaps owing to his longtime job as projectionist at Chicago s eighty-five year old treasure, the Music Box Theatre. Lyrically, Knox has been known to twist a small, sharp knife from time to time. For this new LP, he seems to have found his muse in Springfield, and many of the songs feel like slowly moving cinematic shorts set in his hometown. Another turning point in Daniel s recent musical growth occurred while in residence and collaboration with photographer John Atwood at Robert Wilson s Watermill Center. 'Everything that came out of that, and the work that followed it, seems rooted very thematically in the past, but the structures and arrangements felt like something new that had been there all along like finding a hidden room in the house you grew up in,' says Knox.