Daniel Donato
Daniel Donato has played near the Ryman — a lot.
He cut his teeth as a teenager busking on Lower Broadway, performing outside the old Hatch Show Print shop and the old location of Gruhn Guitars. He would sometimes play on the steps of the storied Mother Church of Country Music, where he caught the attention of tourists with a Johnny Cash cover or his take on a Bill Monroe song. He religiously studied The Don Kelley Band, a steadfast honky-tonk band that for decades held court at Robert’s Western World. He describes the group as “my Led Zeppelin … the greatest band I ever discovered.”
Eventually, Donato joined his Zeppelin onstage. He graduated from the streets to regularly playing with Kelley and company at gigs, despite not being old enough to order a Pabst at the bar. A few hundred feet from the Ryman stage, he performed 464 shows with the band.
Ten years to the day after his last show at Robert’s, Donato returns to downtown Nashville to headline the Ryman. Set for Friday night, the show celebrates the release of his new album Horizons, which hits streaming services and record store shelves that day.
“I would stand behind Robert’s, and I would just look at the Ryman and get lost in thought,” Donato says of the nights before he turned 21, when he waited outside the bar to get paid for the show. “I always wanted to play there. I always wanted to sell it out. I wanted to do it right and play the music that moves my soul and moves other people’s souls, in that building.”
The show comes billed as a night of “Cosmic Country,” a nod to the name of Donato’s backing band and a community he’s building by merging improvisation and jam influences with his knack for classic country storytelling. It’s a place for people who may love the twang of a Willie Nelson tune and the freewheelin’ spirit of a Grateful Dead bootleg in equal measure.
The band has quickly caught on with fans hungry for Donato’s take on honky-tonk psychedelia. Earlier this summer, he brought Cosmic Country to Bonnaroo, playing a fiery set the night before heavy rain caused organizers to cancel the rest of the fest. From there, he took off to Colorado for a show at Red Rocks Amphitheater with String Cheese Incident. Later this year he’ll play tastemaking jam festival Suwannee Hulaween in Florida, and in early 2026, he’ll set sail as a performer on the Outlaw Country Cruise.
Daniel Donato
What can showgoers expect from a night of Cosmic Country? “It exists in the past and in the future, all within one set,” Donato says. “We’ll go all the way back to the early 1950s, and by the end of the night, we’re in a jam that is in a different time signature from when the song started. We’re trying new sounds … that are on the cutting edge of what we can do with live sound, with instruments. We try to exist in as many points of time as we can.”
Horizons is Donato’s third LP and second studio collection of original tunes. The 15-song album straddles influences from working-class country (like on the honky-tonkin’ single “Broadside Ballad”) to bluegrass ambition (heard subtly on instrumental jam “Hangman’s Reel”) to keep-you-guessing progressive sounds (such as the the kaleidoscopic 11-minute “Chore”).
Donato cut the album at Berry Hill studio Sputnik Sound with producer Vance Powell, whose credits include Chris Stapleton and Jack White. He worked quickly on Horizons, not wanting to dedicate extensive time to overdubs and other production techniques.
“There is this constant opportunity to go back and edit yourself, and there’s not really a threshold on how much you can do that,” Donato says. “You have to set it for yourself. One of the main values behind this record is to have faith in what’s human and what’s instinctual, what’s intuitive. To achieve something like that, you have to put yourself in a place that is really fast. You don’t have a lot of time to think. You just have time to act and feel.”
The Ryman show won’t be the only chance to catch Cosmic Country in Nashville on Friday night. After doors close to the Mother Church, Donato plans to play an encore gig across the street at Robert’s. He’s recording both shows for a forthcoming release.
“We’re going to do somewhat of a tribute to what I used to do at Robert’s. We’re gonna play all those old-time country Western swing and bluegrass songs and make a record out of it.”
