"I can always go play in a country band or something awful like that," laughs singer-songwriter Daniel Ellsworth.
It's not that he hates country music—that much is clear as early as the second track on his new EP, Daniel Ellsworth & The Great Lakes—but when it came down to a choice between pursuing his muse and taking the proverbial paying gig, Ellsworth, now 24, opted for the former. For most artists just starting to write their own material, such a decision comes easy because they don't have a choice. Ellsworth, however, had an offer on the table. He knew he was viable thanks to the jazz performance degree he'd just acquired from Belmont University, along with the classical piano training he'd had since the age of 9. For him, the temptation to sell out early was real.
"I'm about to graduate college and somebody's offering me a salaried gig," he recalls. "It was good money."
Ellsworth largely attributes his decision to meeting upstart producer Mike Odmark, who helmed Great Lakes, as well as Ellsworth's debut, Between the Sea and the Sun, and also plays in Ellsworth's band. Both moved to Nashville in 2004 and attended Belmont, where they connected instantly over a shared love of artists like Simon & Garfunkel, Ray LaMontagne, Randy Newman, Mason Jennings, Wilco and Al Green. While Ellsworth and Odmark each have a soft spot for 1970s production values, neither has any qualms about being poppy. Ellsworth's work sounds so bright and shiny at times that one imagines what a destitute—but happy—Ben Folds might have sounded like if he'd been stranded with a piano on a California beach in 1976 trying to approximate the AM soft-rock of the day.
On the other hand, as newcomers to the area, neither Ellsworth nor Odmark identified at all with Nashville's pop-country establishment.
Odmark in particular has managed to forge a career working with independent, roots- and folk-oriented talent, but he brings earthy grit and dynamics to his recordings that instantly sets them apart from anything you're ever going to hear on corporate radio. He has great finesse as an engineer, and a seemingly innate awareness of arrangement. Everything, he stresses, must serve the song, and songs should often be pared down to their most accessible elements. It should, Odmark believes, take no effort to listen to music—even if it's filled with hidden subtleties that require patience to discern. Ellsworth, an avid fan of pop music and blues since childhood, agreed, but it took Odmark's help to get him out of a classical composer's mind-set.
"I had never really had any feedback about my music," Ellsworth explains. "Mike was like, 'If we keep all these instrumental parts you've written, we're going to have 12 eight-minute songs—and that's not going to fly.' "
Ellsworth willingly obliged. The rare example of a child who wasn't forced into classical training, Ellsworth actually requested it. But he always had a vague sense that it wasn't his calling.
"I don't know if it was conscious," he says, "but the study of classical music was always a means to an end for me."
Thanks, he says, to his extended musical family, joy and expression go hand in hand. He jokingly describes his family's typical holiday gatherings in his native Twin Cities as "disgusting," in that over 20 relatives will sing, play and harmonize all at once. And growing up active in the Catholic Church, it was the music that made it meaningful. Today, Ellsworth's music remains almost startlingly upbeat, even as he delivers a line like "no one wants to die, my dear, but everybody does," or confronts religious dogmatism and what he once described on NPR as "the bad stuff going on in the world."
While he says he "really has no choice" but to write about such topics, Ellsworth proves that music can address difficult subject matter without actually discouraging the listener.
"Those are things that really affect me," he says, before adding with a laugh, "but personality-wise, it's tough for me to write a dark-sounding song."
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
