Welcome To The World Of Daniel Knox... You've Been Here All Along

photo courtesy John Atwood

Daniel Knox is not of this place and time. He's a phantom, a shadowy figure occupying the most starkly contrasted recesses of the human psychology - or more appropriately - psychosis.

He traveled to Milwaukee to perform at The Riverwest Public House this past Thursday evening, to a room full of people who more likely than not had no idea what they were in for.

Knox took the stage singularly, all dressed in black,  his hair erratic and his beard grown wild, seating himself behind an electric piano and began to play... and the atmosphere began to change. Color in the room began to bleed away, shadows gained definition and overtook well-lit places, and a glance out the window saw asphalt streets turn to cobblestone, modern cars turn canvas topped and wagon-wheeled, and electric street lamps became ornately designed and looming Gothic gaslights.  Yes, it really did happen just like that. Knox's music uncompromisingly sets the time period to suit it, and not the other way around.      

His songs are nearly operatic, his voice the rich tenor of Luciano Pavarotti, meets Mel Torme, meets the irreverent lyrics of a madman, a sociopath, a dark comedic.  He seethes of violence, he unearths non-linear dream sequences that tell of the most sinister things.  Murderers, child molesters and whores -  he chortles at them, mocks them and calls their misdeeds the common behavior of us all.  His are characters you know, because they're the things you hide in the cellars and crawl spaces of your own mind.  From the things you don't want to think about, to the things you wish you hadn't - Daniel Knox will exploit them right before your eyes, play them out in unsettling, flickering black and white musical theatrics.  He gets into your head that way.  He's the devil on your shoulder, whispering unsavory little jokes into your ear that you can't help but listen to. 

photo courtesy H.P. Johnson

And you can't help but wonder where all this comes from, how such things take form and how Knox so tactfully, and in a surprisingly tasteful way, illustrates such horrendous subject matter.  "What I imagine when I write...." he says, "That depends on how much of the song I want revealed to me up front.  Some songs I'd rather keep vague, so I can enjoy something new in them down the line.  It's the better ones that do tend to have an image of some kind to start them off.  I usually want it to be somewhere in the middle of the story, so I can work my way backwards or forward."  He adds: "As for what makes a song fall out of my head... I only wish I knew."

The dichotomy in Daniel Knox's songwriting is that you too "wish you knew", but there's that other side of you that feels a certain content, a certain comfort, in not knowing.  It's whether after Knox's performance at the Public House you imagine him returning to a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment above a store front somewhere. Lying down on a rickety metal-framed bed in the corner, his pillow a rolled up old towel, his nightstand a damaged wooden crate, a photograph in a cracked frame atop it - the picture inside a blurred snapshot of a woman in a dress crossing the street... hurriedly.  Like she's fleeing something.  Enough of her features are discernible to see panic in her face. Distress.  She isn't someone he knows, but she's someone he's following.  Or, you imagine him returning to a mansion on a hill on the outskirts of town, overlooking the city. He eats his dinner at an ostentatious dining room table, one that could seat dozens, but has long since seen any company.  In the wee hours he paces the catacomb hallways in his bedclothes and nightcap, a candle in hand, pulling at his beard and rambling like a madman and laughing maniacally at everything et al .... and nothing at all.  These are the only possibilities for this man, whose odd and humorously warped submissions can only begin to be comprehended as nothing other than painfully creative.

photo courtesy John Atwood

While Knox's narrative perspective decidedly occupies the space of a stranger, a watcher and an unknown, the status he holds as a musician places him somewhere between being a rabid cult endemic, and a bona fide legend of Tom Waits-ian proportions.   In fact, on Knox's newest album Evryman For Himself, the one and only Ralph Carney provides some of his trademark, swing and big band fashioned, saxophone and clarinet work.  Yes, that Ralph Carney: "I met him in London when I was participating in David Coulter's production of Plague Songs." Knox reveals, "He was part of the house band, and I got on with him instantly."

Appropriately, the squeezed balloon squealing Carney provides as the wordless reactions of "the women and their kids" Knox croons about in the song "I Make Enemies", certainly indicates that his contributions to Evryman For Himself get on famously with Knox's work. The intermissions of it - in that song especially - make you, quite literally, laugh aloud.  It's then you suddenly realize Knox's insanity is airborne and contagious, and you're now as affected as you are infected.

Artists like Daniel Knox surface so infrequently, gain exposure so rarely, that when you do experience the kind of uncategorizable serenading he provides, you're left feeling a little like there must be some sort of musical subculture you've been missing out on.   Work like this defies all laws of contemporary music, laughs in the face of what you'd normally tag "alternative rock", and provides the sneaking suspicion that everything you thought you knew about music as an art form has hoodwinked you.  It can be as frustrating as it is exciting; and if there's any part of you that thinks you aren't prepared to be so challenged... then be wary of opening that door when Daniel Knox.

click on the album covers above to purchase Daniel Knox music