That these are straitened times for most musicians is no secret. Thanks to the internet, and the ease of illegal downloading, it’s probably never been harder to make money from music. So serious kudos to Finglas-born independent musician Daniel Anderson who decided that desperate times called for desperate measures, and attempted a more direct approach to music sales.
Upon last month’s release of his impressive debut, Patterns, the 34-year-old Dubliner went knocking on doors with an iPod and a stack of physical albums. Amazingly, he managed to shift 500 vinyl copies within a week.
“Yeah, it wound up being quite a good business plan to go door-to-door,” he smiles. “I sold them around Finglas, Tallaght, Leixlip, Lucan and Palmerstown. We got a real good reaction in those real working-class areas. I don’t know what it is with people there; they just seem to be a bit more open to sharing their life with you.”
Of course, the initial response to a headphone-bearing musician at the door wasn’t always so welcoming. “Some people threatened to smash my head in!” he laughs. “That aggression gets diluted as you break into their consciousness that you’re not trying to sell them a Hoover, you’re not trying to steal anything from them. Just putting the headphones on their head, bring it back to basics.
“Just going to the door, ‘Here I am, a human being just like you. I’ve made a record. I’m not better than you or worse than you. This is what I sell, this is what I work at’. Just getting their reactions, they almost became a conduit for whatever I wanted to get out to people. So they’re listening to it and they’re giving their reactions – it just resonated with people.”
We’re meeting in the Library Bar of the Central Hotel. An affably earnest type, with a mod-style haircut and neatly pressed threads, Anderson comes across as a man totally committed to his art. There’s a gig later this evening so he opts for a cup of tea rather than a pint.
He started his music career in his late teens as vocalist with Finglas rock band The Rags. “We did one album, two EPs and a load of other singles and stuff,” he recalls. “We probably could have had two albums. When we did the two EPs there was a real good buzz and a lot of demand, but I just didn’t think we had enough good songs at that stage. We probably could have cashed in on the buzz, delivered a mediocre album.”
Although The Rags never signed a record deal, one of their songs was used in an ad campaign, which kept them afloat financially. “We weren’t signed to anyone,” he says. “Sony were offering to take us on at that stage, put out the album. It was like, ‘Put the two EPs together and we’ll get something rolling’. One of our songs was used in an ad campaign with Campbell’s Soup and that really allowed us to think about doing it on our own, without needing the backing, you know?”
The soup deal was worth a lot of bread. “We got about €30,000 a year, and it ran for four years. It was a lot of money for what you’re in, you know yourself, and music’s not really renowned for making money. We had a few options. We had every label in with us and very interested in getting involved, but we were just a very dysfunctional band overall.”
By the time The Rags finally released their debut, A National Light, in 2010, they had more or less split up.
“See we had this really naïve, or some people like to call it romantic, idea that when you have an album people take notice,” he sighs. “We’d had these two Eps and we’d been away for about two years. It was just a hard lesson. To be honest, not many of the lads were interested in finishing the album. They just got tired, they had their own lives and they were moving on.
“I recognised towards the end that there was something worth putting out; it was worth finishing. I tried to finish it the best I could. When I was finishing with the band I had a very limited capacity on the guitar and my main thing in the band was lyrical and vocal. So, I was kind of the jackass in the corner and I had to try and learn a little bit of bass to finish it as best I could, whatever needed to be tied up at the end, just to get it out. That was how it ended.”
Needless to say, with The Rags in rag order, A National Light didn’t burn very brightly. Down but not out, Anderson decided to keep going as a solo artist. He knew it would be a difficult road.
“Well, the first stage was me trying to learn how to write without a band,” he reflects. “Sometimes when I was writing songs with The Rags, I’d come in with a very basic melody, guitar chords and then they’d build on top of it. My idea was, with The Rags I used to be able to depend on them to take it to another level, but the idea with this solo album was to write songs that didn’t need to be dependent on anything else – you could get them across on the acoustic.
“People would go, ‘There’s something in that’, if you just played it on the acoustic. I needed to figure out if I could write on my own first of all so I tentatively tried to start to write.”
He also needed a studio and rehearsal space. Again, his DIY ethos came to the fore. “My uncle said to me, ‘There’s a bit of space in the garden. If you want to build a place, you can build it’. I thought about that. So I let the whole thing just go through my head a little bit and in a way I think I was really still hungover from that Rags thing because I had expectations and, I suppose it’s hard to explain to people who think it’s only a band when it’s the thing you’ve lived with and for ten years and come through your teens into your twenties.
“Basically that’s what you think about every day when you go to bed and wake up. It’s only when you come out of a band that you realise how ridiculous the commitment is because sometimes it doesn’t add up.”
Anderson himself had no shortage of commitment and self-belief. So much so that he literally hand-built the studio from scratch.
“It took about eight months,” he says. “It was probably the most therapeutic thing I could have done because off the back of all that suddenly you’re digging foundations with a shovel, blisters on hands, getting up early to do that. You’re not thinking about music, but still ideas are coming into your mind. It tends to be when you’re away from it, you know?”
Did he have a day job during all this time?
“No, I was fully committed,” he says, shaking his head. “I was up at seven every morning and I carried that into the recording, mixing and writing. Get up at seven, get the train across to Leixlip and come home at 9pm. That was my agreement with my other half and she was supportive of that. They were long days.”
All his hard work paid off with the creation of Patterns – a soulful, deeply personal and beautifully produced sixties sounding pop record with oodles of charm. The strings aside, Anderson played all of the instruments himself.
“It’s basically a reflection of the things I was experiencing over the course of three years,” he says of the album. “I didn’t really start out with a theme, but a theme seemed to evolve naturally as time progressed. I was becoming a lot more aware of life and of how transient things are, although they sometimes seem like they’re going to be there forever and people are going to be there forever.
“My brother said a good thing to me, actually, he said, ‘You know there comes a time in life when it stops giving and it starts taking away’. It was one of the things that really struck me and I tried to take it and put it in one of the songs. The song ‘History’, there’s a couple of lines in it where it goes, ‘Days when life is ours to live and all it ever did was give’. That was trying to take what he said and put it into different words. I think that sums it up and I was observing all of these patterns happening in life.
“It seemed that even though life was changing for everybody the brickwork essentially was the same, the same family home, the same places as I got up to get the train every morning,” he continues. “Somewhere inside of all of that things are changing so drastically; you’ve got nephews and you’re losing people. Just the cessation of being a teenager and being that carefree, with the sense that life is there for the taking. Patterns is a reflection of that realisation, that life is moving.”
Reaction to the album has been phenomenal to date. The gigs are coming in, most major Irish radio stations have play-listed it, and he’s already appeared on The Late Late Show. However, until things seriously pick up, Anderson is determined to keep on doing things under his own steam.
“I deal with everything myself at the moment and that’s probably out of necessity,” he admits. “I spoke to some people. I got some guidance from some people. That David Byrne book, How Music Works, was a good insight for me. I suppose it extricates a certain amount of that naivety that you’re doing music for fun.
“I am primarily doing music, not necessarily for fun, because I don’t know how much fun I had, to be honest, making the record. I found it very difficult at times and there are a lot of other questions that come upon you due to the time you’re spending on something and not receiving a lot of money, or any money. I think reading that book made me realise that if I want to be serious I have to think of it in a business way.
“I have to be thinking that way myself because, at the end of the day, nobody cares about my business as much as me,” he continues. “Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had a little taste of things going well and everybody wanting to talk to you; it could easily get on top of you at that stage. I don’t think I need a manager up to this point; I can manage just about on my own. If things did a little bit better, and I suppose there’s as much chance of that happening as not happening, I’ll consider it then. On the whole, I’m going to press on myself.”