Friday, 02 October, 2009
It has been three long years since 26 year old Daniel Merriweather swapped the streets of Melbourne and his native Australia for the cosmopolitan bustle of Manhattan, downtown NYC. The road to the release of his debut album 'Love & War' however, stretches back even further, across continents, decades, relationships, moods and struggles.
A few of you may know Daniel as the emotive voice on his producer Mark Ronson’s chart-busting cover of The Smiths ‘Stop Me’. He is however, anything but a set of rent-a-pipes and 'Love & War' will rapidly tear up any pre-conceived ideas of what and who he is, as will five minutes in his company. He has wolverine like tenacity and possesses a sense of humour and self awareness, articulateness and worldliness that belies his tender years.
In Love & War, Daniel has shaped a record informed by the juxtaposition of these two cultural metropolises which is both complicated and equally carefree without ever being schizophrenic. Here shiny pop production and the temptation to make a slick and smooth contemporary neo-soul record have been wavered in favour of space, stark emotional intimacy, sonic expansion and crackling introspection. The results are extraordinary; an anthemic psyched out acoustic folk record fuelled by the fires of Motown & Stax, with a heart the size of Alaska. It is every bit the classic debut one would have hoped & more, filled from start to finish with thrilling hit singles to boot, and is a long, long way from busking on a street corner in Melbourne, just to earn a buck.
Born and bred in a blue-collar area in Melbourne's outer east, Daniel Paul Merriweather was one of three boys born to teacher parents. “I lived in a town at the end of a train line on the edge of a forest - childhood was about getting by. It was a humble sort of lifestyle. I spent quite a bit of time on my own as a kid, I used to travel long distances on my own and over think things." Indeed thinking and over thinking is a running theme in the youth & young manhood of Merriweather: "I imagined a lot as a kid, and I was really interested in philosophy".