Essential 8: Daniel Steinbock

Photo Credit: Bradley Cox, Giant Eye Photography

A folk singer-songwriter and guitar player heavily influenced by poetry, nature, and jazz music, Daniel Steinbock released his first solo album, The Blade, in 2012, and a self-released EP, Sea Inside, a year earlier. The bulk of his upcoming album, Out of Blue, due in 2019, was recorded live in the 100 year-old OK Theatre in Enterprise, Oregon. Here, ahead of the release, Steinbock took the time to thoughtfully answer his Essential 8 where he discusses songwriting, shares the story behind the album's title as well as the song, "Pine Needles," and much more.

Where do you draw inspiration from when writing?
I was born in Boonville, CA in the coastal mountains north of San Francisco. Growing up, I spent my free time playing in the woods and sailing with my parents on the sea. I think the comfort and sanity I feel in natural places mirrors my love for natural sounds and acoustic instruments. The land and sea, woods and rivers, show up a lot in my lyrics. Emotions can often feel too immense for one body and larger than any words can adequately capture. That’s when I tend to use symbols and images from the natural world, vast landscapes and forces, that somehow come closer in feeling to the inner emotional landscape.

When/where do you do your best writing?
About 1 in 5 of my songs are written in dreams while I’m sleeping. I might dream I’m playing a show or maybe I’m in the audience listening to someone play. I’ll wake up singing the song. Dream memories are so fragile, you can forget them if you just roll over in bed, so I might spend 30 minutes in bed rehearsing it to myself before I even move or open my eyes, then reach for my phone to record it. It’s hard for me to take credit for writing these songs. It’s miraculous when it happens.

Please choose one song and tell the story behind it.
I was playing a house concert in Mill Valley, CA, in a living room surrounded on all sides by redwood trees. The audience was sitting on the living room floor, all pressed together, their faces looking up at me as I worked my way through the set. Towards the end of the show, a voice shouted a song request from the back of the room and I froze, dumbstruck. There was nothing unusual about someone requesting a song, but the song he requested happened to be one I hadn’t written yet. All I had were a couple lines of lyrics — and so far as I knew, no one in the world knew that song existed except me. He had, in fact, quoted one of the lines. I replied that I hadn’t finished that song yet. After the show, I talked to him and it turns out I’d mentioned the line he’d quoted to a mutual friend of ours and he thought it was a song title. I went home and finished that song. A year later, I sang it at that guy’s wedding. The song is “Pine Needles,” on my upcoming record, Out of Blue.

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Is there a story behind your album’s title?
Out of Blue. It has three meanings to me.
1) The great mystery of the universe: that something appears out of nothing, like the Big Bang, light bursting out of the void.
2) My songwriting process, how new songs appear out of the blue, like a gift from the Muse.
3) The healing process and coming out of the ‘blues’. This is ultimately a break-up album but one that tells the whole story, not dwelling in the hurt. The first side of the record is about falling in love and the second side is about falling out of it. The whole thing is a document of my journey of making sense out of loss, getting angry, being sad, struggling out of the blue and into the light.

What has been your biggest struggle so far?
99% of creativity is confidence. I have great faith in my ability to write music. I intend to write until I am dead. But I have less confidence in my ability to sustain a livelihood in today’s music industry. I worry that either the economic pressure or the relentless pressure to self-promote will obstruct my creative source. I don’t want to mess with the Muse. She’s too precious to me. All the money and fame in the world would not be worth the price of losing that connection. On the other hand, I have it on good authority that it pleases the Muse when you go pro and give it your all, paycheck and Instagram be damned.

What’s your favorite venue and why?
I’ve played house concerts more than anywhere else. Nothing beats the realness of a living room. Most memorably, I played the cathedral at Stanford University, a show I put on with Ayla Nereo that we called ‘Mystics of Folk.’ For the final encore, we invited the whole audience up onto the stage like a church choir and sang the last song together.
I like playing any venue where the music is presented with integrity, where people are there to listen and to hear the words. I can’t play bars anymore; it’s too distracting. My release show is at the Lost Church in San Francisco, a beautiful, old-timey acoustic listening room where you can hear a pin drop. A lot of performers don’t even use amplification when they play there. I love that.

Which song of yours gets the best crowd response?
“Blessing and a Curse” on my last EP, The Blade, tends to be a crowd-pleaser. It’s a song about a woman leaving New York and moving out West to San Francisco. There are a lot of East Coast transplants in the Bay Area so I think a lot of people relate. But it’s also a song about making big life changes and the hopeful expectations that come along with that and collide with our lived reality, for better or worse. I think most people can relate to that.

Is there a recent release you cannot stop listening to?
I’ve been listening to Buck Meek’s new solo album a lot lately. (He’s the lead guitarist in Big Thief.) He has a truly original approach to songwriting and the guitar and both are just tickling me pink these days.

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