March 30 at 7:30 pm
There are a lot of musical influences and sources that Daniel Donato has drawn on during his career and that inform Reflector, the Nashville guitarist-singer-songwriter-bandleader’s first all-original album. But within those Donato has carved out a unique and individualized spot for himself, one that speaks to the deep American music heritage that inspires him — and that he’s pushing towards the future with inspired, intentional vigor. He calls it Cosmic Country, a moniker that’s both self-descriptive and a statement of purpose. It’s an organic rock band aesthetic with plenty of roadhouse twang, a showcase for Donato’s instrumental virtuosity and facility for songcraft. Bridging Nashville and the Great West, Kentucky and mid-60s northern California, tie-dye and plaid, it’s a world of his own, and a wide world of musical adventure at that. This is their SMF debut. This event is standing room only.
This performance is sponsored in part by Becky & Bill Keightley
Partial support provided by Jessica Carter & Family, Savannah Magazine and Thomas & Hutton
Daniel Donato is in search of that one true thing
For music lovers seeking a spacious community, Nashville guitarist and singer- songwriter Daniel Donato opens the gates wide to his interpretation of cosmic country.
By Amy Paige Condon
Cosmic Country, in the inimitable parlance of wunderkind guitarist Daniel Donato, is more akin to a unified field theory of music, where soul rather than quantum physics connects the past, present and future. His oeuvre is not a throwback to the Cosmic Cowboy-era of 1970s Austin, Texas, where bluesy honky-tonk swagger met hard rock thrust and progressive country vibes for a generation-defining sound—although Donato professes mad respect for its standard-bearers Willie Nelson, Michael Martin Murphey and Jerry Jeff Walker, and drinks from the same well, musically speaking.
Donato, instead, is in search of transcendence with every note.
Case in point: He shares a memory of playing “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleloo” with the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, in 2023. Two bars before the chorus, Lesh hit the E chord, and “then I see a smile come up on his face. He’s taking this breath and a big old smile. He’s 84 years old and…I saw 50 years of joy that song would bring him. He was singing it to the people, and the people were singing it back to him…
“I remember leaving and thinking, the only thing you have as a musician when you leave this planet are your songs and the recordings of the shows you played.”
‘My prayer is that we get one good moment a night on stage’
Whether he is writing his own tunes or picking a guitar, Donato is trying to find that one true thing. Now nearly 31, he has been playing professionally since the age of 14, yet Donato still gets goosebumps as he rhapsodizes over lyrics written 50-plus years ago by Bob Dylan and even longer ago by Hank Williams:
“The silence of a falling star/Lights up a purple sky/And as I wonder where you are/I’m so lonesome, I could cry.”
He shakes his head. “If I could get one stanza like that, I’ll leave this earth happier than I am.”
He, like Dylan, has no idea where the songs come from, but Donato believes it all — the music, the lyrics and performances — is in service of something greater.
“On a physics level, music is a unifying mechanism. That’s literally what it does — like gears within a watch that unify in sync to move the timepiece along. It also unifies light and darkness. You have major chords that are happy and sad chords that are minor or dark. They both exist within music, fundamentally, with an equal charge, even if people weren’t there to hear it.”
But the audience only amplifies the equation, creating a reciprocity between player and listener that creates ultimate unity. “That’s why I think music is reflective of life itself. It literally is a coordination of time within space. It’s way more cosmic than I think anybody understands. Certainly, it’s more than I do.”
To those in Savannah for the music festival, he offers an invitation to anyone who is looking for community through music. “We’re very much focused on being a high-frequency group of people. Everyone has open arms, everyone loves each other, everyone holds space for each other.”
That’s a message worth hearing.
Tickets $47 Mezzanine / $37 Floor (General Admission, Standing Room Only)