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Danielson and The Welcome Wagon
Daniel Smith, the eldest sibling of five, closely-knit, brothers and sisters, has released music under a handful of different monikers since 1995. Originally creating "Danielson" as an art school project for his senior thesis, the idea quickly started to grow into the aptly named "Danielson Famile." There's no avoiding that what began as a senior thesis project more than a decade ago has evolved into a world so rich with musicality and merry-making that the first seven albums and 15 years of touring pomp alone could nourish the most scrutinizing of thrill-seekers. Hailing from suburban Clarksboro, New Jersey, it is difficult to separate Danielson from their gooey visuals (costumes and graphics) and the spirited music, regarding which, Daniel says, "One enters your heart through your eyes, one through your ears." In the past they have sported hand-made, old-fashioned doctors' and nurses' uniforms while performing as a "visual reminder of the healing taking place." As Br. Danielson, Daniel has worn a nine-foot tall, hand-made nine-fruit tree to "bear the good fruit." For the upcoming tour in support of the album "The Best of Gloucester County", you'll just have to come to see what Daniel Smith is coming up with this time.
The Welcome Wagon observe a musical tradition conjoined with marriage that pays tribute to a long line of iconic couplesJohnny Cash and June Carter, Sonny and Cher, Ike and Tina, Captain and Tennille, and more recently, The White Stripes. The Welcome Wagon also reside in the fussy category called "church music," where family and theology have long accompanied the musical deeds of married partners: the Original Carter Family, Bill and Gloria Gaither, and Mom and Pop Winans are a few examples. You'd be hard pressed to call the Welcome Wagon a groundbreaking supplement to the genre of gospel duos. They are not flashy performers. Their hymns when stripped of a producer's vigorous arrangementsare modest, understated, and idiosyncratic shrugs compared to the furious pathos of Blind Willie Johnson and his wife Willie B., or the bluesy emotion of The Consolers. But the apparent lack of hyperbole and didacticism, the absence of rhetorical drama and religious fervor are what make the music of the Welcome Wagon so fascinating. It doesn't impose its religious pitch on the listener with hyped up garnishes of sound; it merely conveys the deepest of convictions with the deadpan verdict of a surgeon. Sure, their debut album unveils showy guitar riffs, piano codas, harmonica solos, a rowdy chorus, and an imposing flourish of brass instruments like wartime canons. But at the heart of itif you really listen carefullythere's really just a pastor and his wife tentatively singing in the quiet privacy of their own home.
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LocationThe 930 Art Center
930 Mary Street
Louisville, KY 40204
United States
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