DANIEL ROMANO’S OUTFIT

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Can you describe your song-writing process?

DR: In order to bring about the good song there is a certain amount of magic to be summoned. Though there are a variety of ways to achieve it, allow me now to break down one of my favourite methods: Without food, take to your post with the hungry wonder of the morning. Getting down to it, allow everything to begin slowly– thought, breath, moment– until you’re buried, little by little in a celestial blackness where all common ideas dissolve into ash and all that didn’t serve you is gone. It’s in this original darkness that the virtues of your heart begin to ignite.

Come hither dialecticians! Come into the darkness to discover light! Creativity is technique, study, and process, and above all, a commitment, to the self and the self’s relationship to the world. So, too it is an opening, or the result of an opening, to the gifts the world and the world cosmos bring. One conceives as one receives. Magic, yes, but magic summoned actively. 

Daniel Romano has been busy. Count the many hungry mornings at the post. Since the release of the massive, singular, La Luna in those long ago days of autumn 2022, full brilliant albums have been made and set aside (maybe two, maybe more), vast landscapes have been crossed and re-crossed, the maps redrawn, songs remade nightly with passion and gusto.

Now here, in the depths of northern winter, arrives Too Hot To Sleep, simultaneously a transcendent document of the spirit, and a swaggering, street level blast of power-pop and Stone’s derived rock ‘n’ roll; a surprisingly direct shout down of the corrupt politicians and techno fascists that police our bodies, pollute our world, assault our connections; a reason and occasion to dance, to sweat together at one of The Outfit’s legendary live shows wherein everything comes faster than the next, no breaks, no outside, there is only now, there is only all of us here together, alive. A public offering of each to each.

Count the many hungry mornings. Count the many and the one. Here the rock band is a self-contained creative unit: making music, design, art, and film. Making image and sound at its most primal, immediate, and sophisticated. A synthesis of influences from in and out of time. See the videos the band has created, for Field Of Ruins (wigs and costumes), Chatter (props and close-ups), Where’s Paradise (skateboarding and landscape), State Of Nature (symbol and story). See the icons and emblems emblazoned on T-shirts and jackets, secret signs for those who know, declarations of membership and understanding. Hear the blend of voices in service of the song. 

See the darkened barroom. The stage lights rise. Here we are, together, go!

You become the mediator between the abstract head of creation and the bearer of individual consciousness. You both assert and deny your emancipation from nature. The streams of your hemisphere mind begin to cross and a third dimension arises in their synthesis. The life-giving thought takes its fiery manifestation. Observe then with awe the golden song as it cools and hardens in your hand… Ta-dah! 

Though this is but one of many ways to bring about the good song, it’s a classic.