Danny Cohen announces new album details!
DANNY COHEN TO DROP THIRD ANTI- DISC ON FEBRUARY 6TH SHADES OF DORIAN GRAY BOLSTERED BY PAINTERLY APPROACH
(Anti- Records, Los Angeles, CA) - Singer/songwriter DANNY COHEN will release his third Anti- album, Shades Of Dorian Gray, on February 6, 2007. Recorded on a half-inch Ampex tape machine, a mobile garage studio and at Ralph Carney’s San Francisco facility, the disc plays out as the musical equivalent to an accomplished painting.
“We kept having these opportunities in the studio,” Danny says of the evolution of the equally cerebral and serendipitous Shades Of Dorian Gray. “And I kept coming back to the album to tweak it and re-do it, and it really gave it this painterly-like thing. Where you go back and add to what you already have. And it builds up a density.”
While one might assume from the title of the follow up to 2005’s We’re All Gunna Die, that Danny is an Oscar Wilde devotee, it’s not the case. “He’s not one of my favorite writers,” Danny chuckles. “And I think The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of his worst books. I used the title because the songs were pointing me in that direction. I felt like there were a lot of gray tones in the themes and musical sounds, whereas my last record had earth tones. This one is more subtle and musty and I liked the play on words.”
The ever eccentric Cohen – who is credited for fronting the proto punk group Charleston Grotto, and brought forth angsty numbers like “Kill The Teacher as early as 1961 – has been called “an unlikely bard who's just odd enough to be brilliant” by The San Francisco Bay Guardian. Elsewhere, The San Francisco Weekly called his songs “a darkly droll, bittersweet appreciation of life in all its pleasure and pain,” while All Music Guide observed, “his view of the world is harrowing, but recognizable and funny, and in its own way stunningly beautiful.”
Danny is quick to point out the parallels between Wilde’s famous novel and his own work on Shades Of Dorian Gray. Just as the main character in that tome, Dorian, stays young while his portrait reflects age, the musician says his own art has yielded a similar result. “I’m not only young in spirit and childlike,” Cohen insists, “But I’m physically 20 years younger than my chronological age. It’s the music and the writing and the painting I do that absorbs the mental and experiential aging.”
Counting titles like the haunting “Avian Blues,” the lilting “Drawing In The Dark” and the thought provoking disc opener “Prayer In The Black And White,” Cohen’s new long player – which was again produced by his alter ego, Sir Errol Sprague, is clearly in a league of its own.