DG Solaris – Tellisford Loop

Certain singer-songwriters have fingerprints that you can discern everywhere in their compositions, as if they have hands that are always stained by the ink of the sheets, the dust of the recording studio, or perhaps the substance with which they shape their songs. Sometimes it is a particular inflection of the voice that you find exactly as it is in a new composition, other times, that certain way of leading the melody and placing it on the harmonic fabric of the song. Each time, it is nice to glimpse them, recognize them, and find yourself in them, especially when that author was a secret that you kept without jealousy, but rather trying to spread the word to as many people as possible.

This is what we did, for example, on this blog with Daniel Green, to whom we have dedicated several articles to pay him back for all the beautiful music he has given us over the years. We therefore had no choice but to also deal with his latest work, in his name DG Solaris, and titled Tellisford Loop. A work that actually could also have been called DG Tuesdays, given his habit of devoting himself to music writing only one day a week, and precisely on Tuesdays. Yes, because Danny Green is one of us, with a life to carry on between family and work, and who, in addition to the drudgery of the daily grind, probably has to cope with the guilt, longing, and frustration of not being able to give full vent and devote proper time to his true essence, which would be that of a musician.
After being an active member of the Wilkommen Collective, playing drums on the road for several artists (including Laura Marling) and, most importantly, starting the Laish project with which he released four records (including the splendid Pendulum Swing and Time Elastic), Danny Green met his current spouse, Leana Green, with whom he started the DG Solaris project, which made its discographic debut in 2020 with the valuable Spirit Glow. After the arrival of the children, the project had gone on hiatus: Mr. and Mrs. Green moved to a village near Frome, Somerset, where Daniel began organizing, under the Night River label, a series of concerts described as “magically intimate,” where he often duetted with the more than 100 artists on the bill.

But something didn’t work… Danny needed to get back to recording his music, almost as if not doing so meant betraying his nature as a songwriter, that is, everything he had always known deep down that he was. To write to publish and let others hear, what could be more beautiful? In short, the compromise Danny found between daily commitments and artistic needs was precisely the so-called DG Tuesday, which the singer describes this way: Every Tuesday morning is my time to get in the studio and work on whatever I feel like. The main focus was on finishing songs. Some days, I would sit at the piano or guitar with a blank page and write a song from scratch and quickly record it. On other Tuesdays, I work on a song’s arrangement, adding new parts.

So what came out is this Tellisford Loop, which is delivered to us with all that sense of relief and peaceful necessity that only music born of the desire to assert oneself can have. Then again, it does seem that Green wants nothing more than to continue to leave his fingerprints all over those fantastic musical artifacts that are songs. 
In this case, we have ten new ones, plus an instrumental track. 
It should be said right away that, for this work, Green chose a peculiar mode of release: instead of publishing the entire record, he preferred to release at intervals of about two weeks one song at a time, accompanying the track with a short introduction about the song itself. A method that reveals all the craftsmanship and loving care with which the British singer-songwriter devotes himself to his creations. 

The first song to be released (and which is perhaps not coincidentally about having faith in someone) turns out to be paradigmatic of the entire work: in fact, I Believe in You traces the coordinates of a soft sound on which Daniel posess his restless and gentle lyrics, accompanied by female counter-songs, by Rosana Schura, which emphasizes the roundness of the refrains; as is the case in the following You Will Know, where the doubling to Rosana’s voice manages to create an enveloping spell, or in Yearns To be Free, where the female voice flutters around Danny’s restrained singing.
It soon becomes apparent how Danny sings mostly about his own everyday life as a father and musician: if the already mentioned one Yearns To be Free longs for sleep as a need dramatically impossible to fulfill in the presence of a newborn, in Lovely To Sleep the singing seems to wobble, but goes on undaunted because sometimes it’s good to even get carried away by fatigue; Roll Around it is a lullaby thar however seems to want to lull you to entertain and not to push you to sleep, while A Gentle Man stops just short of a whisper, with its noise of birds in the background, as if it were being sung in the early morning, lightly so as not to wake the sleeping child in the next room or perhaps, who knows, to lull him back to sleep after one of the many nighttime awakenings.
We also have to talk about Paulette, A Black Cat, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful melodies that Danny has ever composed, and the instrumental Tellisford Loop which intertwines keyboards, acoustic guitars and a slide that takes you elsewhere, perhaps towards Hawaii, although the female voice that seems to caress you gently makes it clear that it is only a dream, of a very sweet sleep.

If the previous album Spirit Glow, declined the joy of love in all its nuances (from the sensual one of physical abandonment to the sentimental one of understanding and complicity), celebrating the family dimension as a starting point (or perhaps an arrival point), Tellisford Loop represents its ideal sequel, recounting the moment afterwards, when family commitments bring you back down to earth again. Further confirmation of Green’s way of living his art, unable to detach himself from the biographical moment.

Tellisford Loop confirms the quality of Danny Green’s writing, even though it is perhaps interlocutory, but certainly necessary work, with which the author first and foremost reaffirms to himself his quality as a songwriter.