Here, after months of delays, is the second half of my interview with Danny! It’s not something I’m proud of.
This year, I’ve watched site traffic spike several hundred percent. Honestly, it’s something I never thought would happen. Now, I admit that I’m just a mere flea on the big dog that is New Music Cartel and a few other hip hop Internet goliaths. But I can guarantee you that Plug One gets more traffic than many better known blogs and websites. Much of that credit is due to smart manipulation of Google’s search algorithms a rising interest in alternative and underground hip hop. Happily, it seems that I’m getting more returning visitors, too.
Unfortunately, I haven’t done a very good job of posting interviews. Often, I’ve talked with artists, promising to post our conversations, and then taken months and sometimes years to do it. One of the worst cases is Danny Swain.
Danny emailed me in the summer of 2007, around the time that he put out Danny is Dead EP. I already knew about Danny, so I was flattered that he wanted to do an interview for my site. It subsequently took over a year, nearly a dozen email conversations, a few CDs he graciously mailed to me and even a second interview before I posted the first installment at the end of October. I wrote in the introduction to the installment that I would post the second half a week later. That was nearly six months ago.
Even worse, Danny is only one of many interviews that I’ve conducted since this site began and never posted. So as a result, I am calling this series April Dues. Not only will I get all of these interviews posted in April, but I will do my best to update this site on a regular basis from now on. No longer will I just rely on Google search gimmicks to generate traffic (though I reserve the right to use that strategy as well).
In some ways, this has worked out for the best. When I last checked in with Danny!, he was commiserating over a Definitive Jux deal that was going nowhere. But since our last conversation in November, the label has released his debut 12-inch single, “Just Friends.” It also included the track on an iTunes compilation, Time Travel Vol. 1. It appears that things are finally moving forward for him.
Much of Danny’s music concerns success, or the lack of it. His most recent album, 2008’s And I Love H.E.R., plays on Common’s famous acronym for hip hop (Hip hop in its Essence is Real). Like so many rappers, he imagines hip hop as a woman just out of a reach, forever seducing him and nearly always breaking him. Both And I Love H.E.R. and 2006’s The Charm end with a romantic breakup, and while Danny says that this is a metaphor for his seemingly music career, it could also serve as a metaphor for the end of his dreams.
Part of the fun is watching Danny develop as an artist and wondering who he’ll eventually become. Will he mature into a Kanye West-sized ego tripper, turning his life into an opera and responding to criticism as if it were gunshot wounds? Or will he let his dreams mature into a working musician’s life, a series of peaks and valleys to navigate? Of course, I’m assuming he’ll become a major artist — he could simply drift into the blogosphere like so many once-hot rappers turned zShare over-sharers. In some ways, the jury is still out.
Personally, I prefer the Danny Is Dead EP because it’s short, succinct and concise. Meanwhile, his full-length albums, particularly the hour-plus And I Love H.E.R., tend to ramble for too long. Stocked with too many extraneous tracks, they sprawl and lose focus. However, it’s clear that he puts a tremendous level of creativity into his work. Yes, H.E.R. is a played-out metaphor, but by merging it with a fantasy based on the Beatles’ swinging London soundtrack A Hard Day’s Night, he gives it new life.
Regardless of my opinions over different aspects of his work, I believe that Danny is a prodigiously talented artist whose best work is yet to come.
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