It didn’t take long for Spitzer Space Telescope to establish himself as the pacesetter in London’s erupting folk scene. From the intimate fervour of late-night sessions, to leaving audiences of thousands breathless in his wake at high-profile shows across the capital and beyond, his rise has been extraordinarily rapid. And yet – it also feels inevitable. Having spent the last decade travelling across America and Europe, instigating collectives, delving deep into traditions but unafraid to shake them up, he arrived in England last year armed with the charisma, the intensity, the experience, the power, the presence – and the straight-up songwriting chops – to push things to the next level. Then, he went on to do exactly that.
The musician, aka Dan MacDonald, performs the kind of folk music that hits straight to the heart, that grabs you at the collar, that pushes you against the wall no matter how big the space – ask the thousand-strong crowd at Hackney’s Earth Theatre who were left thunderstruck by his performance there last autumn, for instance. He establishes, as he puts it, “this palpable, electric bond,” between him and his listeners. It makes sense, given that he’s taken the brash, soul-rattling singing of The Clancy Brothers as his model ever since encountering them as a teenager in an isolated Midwestern town. Just a 10-second snippet of the legendary Irish group in a Bob Dylan documentary was enough to transfix him, to teach him how to bombard early audiences at open mics by singing “to the back of the room,” as he puts it. “There were all these amateur college kids playing Devendra Banhart, not very well, then I get up there and I’m just yelling into the microphone – I remember them all looking around like, ‘Who is this kid?’”
Then, moving to Boston and then Chicago, cities rich in existing traditions, he came up against rigid ideas of how things ‘should’ be done, and set to work dismantling them. “These legacy places are very much gatekeeping. It taught me how to accept the fact that you’re gonna have to fight for every stage you get on.” Encounters with “hardcore old-time players,” ploughing their own furrows well outside of the mainstream, also taught him about a career beyond commercial ambition. “It opened up this whole new thinking about what community can be when it’s not pursuing commerce and stroking ego.”
Fostering a mentality more in common with underground punk and indie scenes than those staid traditional institutions, he became the central instigator of a thriving left-field Chicago folk scene in the form of the Old Lazarus’ Harp Collective. As that peaked and began to fade, he “knew the clock was ticking,” and so upped sticks to Dublin, just as Irish folk music was once again beginning to simmer. Working a parallel career as an oil painter and artist that allows him an itinerant lifestyle, now he’s instigating once more in England. He brings all he’s learnt along with him – the importance of a direct musical attack, the necessity of DIY work ethic, the folly of pursuing commercial ambition, a refusal to be intimidated by the legacy gatekeepers, the value of grassroots community. “I’ve accumulated these little wisdoms at every stop I’ve made. Every scene I’ve helped build has strengthened my understanding.”
It all feeds into his work, although he also refuses to get bogged down in the theoretical. This is music that, like The Clancy Brothers, gets straight to the point. It also shows MacDonald’s keen ear for an unforgettable hook – after all, he says, “Weezer taught me everything I know about writing music.” His first EP since moving to England, Spitzer Space Telescope II, kicked the door down by demonstrating the breadth of his abilities, from bracing stomps to rousing romance to joyous jigs, and now comes another, Spitzer Space Telescope III to consolidate that talent.
As with MacDonald’s live shows, everything he sings across both EPs – and the wealth of unreleased songs still sitting in the chamber – is completely original. “From day one I’ve always aspired be a songwriter. All I care about is great songs and who wrote them, and how the hell they came up with an idea out of thin air,” he says. “If anybody asks me, where’d you get that song that you played at the show? I can I have one answer. It’s all mine.”
That fact is more impressive still for the fact that Spitzer Space Telescope III contains such an array of different styles, and that it shifts so elegantly between autobiography and fiction. MacDonald is as comfortable delivering rousing shape note singing as he is a sprawling ballad, a hypnotic sea shanty, or a moment of cracked and tender sorrow. He’s unafraid of such dramatic shifts in style; in fact, they’re intentional. “I got introduced to this genre through compilation albums, so I have a lot of affection for a listening experience that jumps around different colours,” he says.
Opener ‘The Great Ascender’ opens the EP with a rush of stark, bold beauty. A self-set challenge to “write a secular hymn, and to celebrate shape note and vocal harmony singing,” it evokes a power to counter the divine, but “without having to endorse religious institution.” In MacDonald’s hands, the song’s central power is drawn not from religion but from the heroism of ordinary humans, “and the kinds of heroes we need right now. Even if you don’t get famous, if your deeds are forgotten or overlooked or uncelebrated – in a way that’s even more heroic.”
The next track, ‘All You Girls Ashore’, even by Spitzer Space Telescope’s eclectic standards, is an anomaly, “the only example of a melody I didn’t write,” the tune taken from a French whaling song called ‘Pique La Baleine’. “I liked the melody, and I wrote English lyrics to it.” His words, towing a curious and transfixing line between surrealism and straightforwardness, are not a direct translation. “I don’t even know what the French is talking about. That track is just a blatant love letter to sea shanties, one of my home base music traditions.”
‘Veritas’, meanwhile, toys with the temporal. Ostensibly, it is the story of Galileo set to a spry banjo tune, telling of his condemnation and imprisonment for refusing to renounce the truth of a heliocentric universe. Beneath the surface, however, “it comes from all the anti-medical, truly medieval stuff that we were seeing during Covid,” MacDonald says. Then, MacDonald boundaries – it’s shrouded in a hiss and crackle that’s uncannily close to that you might hear on a compilation of Alan Lomax recordings from the 1930s.
Then, with ‘Kayne In The Orchard’, comes the kind of wild, yet deftly executed, stylistic pivot that is typical of a Spitzer Space Telescope record, as the opener’s grand proclamations gives way to a long and sprawling tale of a real-life visit to Cornwall. The transcendence of shape note singing dissolves, as MacDonald shifts into a slow and sprawling ballad form typical of English and Irish traditions. As with so many such songs, not all that much happens beyond drinking and merriment, “but that’s what’s so amazing about those kinds of ballads,” MacDonald argues. “They’re snapshots of everyday life, and placing them in a musical form gives extra emotion to them, and attitude. It’s a homage to all those songs that I love about nothing really happening.” Its languid, beautiful ordinariness is irresistible.
‘Oh Misfortune I Know’, meanwhile, is an exercise in zipper songs – a gospel format where one line changes with each verse while the rest stays the same – set here to delicate finger-picked acoustic guitar and a cracked vocal lament for unrelenting hardship. As with everything MacDonald does, his ability to craft work indistinguishable from actual traditional music is uncanny, although there’s a nod to the present in the song’s direct mention of depression. “‘Depression’ isn’t a common word in traditional music, but it is very current,” he says. “I thought it would be cool to have a song where this topic of mental health was embraced.”
This modern twist is a subtle one – a little nod to the listener, indicating that although this record might feel like a compilation of material from a host of different traditions, it is – and could only ever be – the work of one man alone. Whether secular shape note hymns, enticing ballads, ethereal shanties, sorrowful zipper songs or searing cross-temporal banjo songs, EP III reaffirms Spitzer Space Telescope’s status as one of the new folk scene’s most towering creative forces.
Featured image by Kitty Handley.
SOURCE: Official Bio