Project Description

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Have you always wanted to be a musician? When did you get the song writing bug?
Not always; I remember having other aspirations as a kid, like becoming a professional football (soccer) player or a lawyer, stuff like that. I did start playing music at a young age. My parents are both professional musicians and there was always music around in the house. When I was nine years old they told me to pick an instrument to start learning. For some reason I choose the accordion, but I didn´t stick to it for long. After two years I switched to drums and that was a good decision.
During my high school years, when I was around fifteen years old, I became really passionate and serious about music. Together with my oldest brother and some friends from school I started my first band and we gigged in hotels and restaurants in the area. It was a great feeling to share music with an audience (even though they weren´t always listening) and earn some money doing what we loved. Around the same time I got into playing guitar and into songwriting.

How would you describe your sound? Why do you think fans resonate with your music?
My sound is a mix of cultures and styles, coming together in the pop idiom. During my career as a bass player I have played all sorts of music with different groups and musicians from around the world. I have always been interested in learning about new styles and this curiosity has influenced my writing and sound.
I think fans resonate with my music, because it is accessible, yet fresh and a little bit exotic, due to all the ´worldly´ influences. At least, that is what I hear from people that listened to Out of Shadows.

How has your formal music training assisted your current music creatively?
My formal music training was in classical music first. When I was nineteen I discovered the double bass and I knew immediately that that was my instrument. After some years of learning how to play, I got accepted to the Conservatory of Amsterdam for classical double bass. This studies gave me a good technique on my instrument and knowledge about a lot of incredible music, which has helped me a great deal in my creativity. On my debut album those classical influences are heard in certain harmonic progressions and in the way that certain songs are shaped and arranged.
After my Amsterdam adventure I continued studying at Codarts, Universtity of the Arts, in Rotterdam. That school has many different departments (world music, pop, jazz, circus, music theatre, dance, you name it) and in Rotterdam I could develop myself as a versatile musician. I started collaborating with people from all those different departments and this gave me a lot of creative input and musical baggage on which I can still rely today.
Recently I finished a master in contemporary performance at Berklee College of Music in Valencia, Spain. There I could focus even more on creative collaboration, because the course really revolves around writing, recording and performing original music, together with your colleagues. I gave the individual musicians who play on my songs a lot of freedom in terms of what they wanted to add to the music, which resulted in an album full of character.

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Which artist’s music and/or performance, past or present, inspires you today? 
There are so many artists that inspire me. For my debut album I got to know a lot of new music, thanks to my producer Shakthi Prasad. He introduced me to Indian bands like Parvaaz and Avial and some of their influences are heard in the compositions and arrangements for my album for sure.
Other influences of mine are Israeli bassist, composer and singer Avishai Cohen, Thom Yorke and Radiohead, Coldplay, The Beatles and Sting.

Your latest album ‘Out Of Shadows’ was released late last year! Describe its origin and evolution. How hard was it to assemble all those different musicians?
The album got released recently, actually! On April 7, 2023 to be exact. I started writing material for it in the summer of 2020, while on holiday in Bulgaria with my girlfriend at the time.
One year later, in the summer of 2021, I moved to Valencia in Spain for my studies at Berklee College of Music. I wanted to spend the summer months, prior to the start of the course, developing the songs I´d written a year earlier. Other than that I didn´t have much of a plan for the music.
Things started to move for the project after meeting producer Shakthi Prasad during that same summer at a musicians-meetup in a park in Valencia. We had a great connection from the start and eventually we started collaborating.
When I met Shakthi he had just returned from assisting Grammy award-winning producer Nic Hard on album recordings for a band called Bokanté, a world music/pop formation led by Michael League from Snarky Puppy. Shakthi´s head was still full of world music and the sound of instruments like oud and oriental percussion from those sessions and when I told him about my background and affinity with various world music styles a vision for the music became clear, which was to create a world music inspired pop album.
Once we had that vision figured out, assembling all the different musicians was fairly easy. For each song Shakhti and I thought of a possible instrumentation and I would suggest musicians that I´d met throughout my career up until that point. We would contact the people that seemed the most fitting for each track and all the musicians we approached said yes.
The fact that there are so many people playing on the album seems rather crazy, but most people play on one or two tracks only, which spread the workload and gave the album a more diverse sound.

Which tracks are the signature pieces, and which tracks do you like playing live most?
To me Closer, Don’t Hold the Line and Circles are signature tracks of the album. Closer for its raw and tribal energy. Don´t Hold the Line for its minimal approach to arrangement and focus on the lyrics and main vocals. Circles for the heavy world music vibes (it features oriental percussion, oud, diatonic accordion and bass clarinet). All these elements give a good impression of the full album.
Live I love playing Fly Away, Out of Shadows and Mother Earth the most. I just finished a tour in The Netherlands with my band to celebrate the release of the album. We got to play the music from the album in a lot in different settings, and it was a great chance for us to figure out how to approach the music live in bigger and smaller venues. Those three songs shaped up in a great way and became very different to the album versions, which I like.

Any tours or events coming up soon? What are you looking forward to, and what can the fans expect?
Currently I am working on my second album. The plan is to record all the music this year still. On the tour front I am planning concerts in the fall in Brazil and in the United States. Fans can stay updated via my website.

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How has COVID affected you to date? Did you introduce anything to balance the losses from missed events? Is it still affecting you today?
The COVID situation has been an interesting one for me personally. Before it I was an active freelance musician. I enjoyed doing that, although I did feel I missed something. And that missing thing was a lack of creative output. When everything came to a halt during COVID I had time and space to reflect on some things and this gave me a chance to figure out what I really wanted to do. I realized that what I really wanted to do was make my own music again and I started working on the album. In a way it is partly thanks to the COVID situation that I am doing what I am doing today.

If you could perform with any music artist, Alive or Dead, who would you choose? And why?
I would say John Mayer. I love his approach to songwriting, his particular guitar sound and his incredible musicality. And he seems like a genuinely interesting and smart guy.

Do you have any long-term aspirations as a music artist?
Yes, I do. I would love to build my project: make more records, do more shows, more collaborations. By making the Out of Shadows album a collective of musicians and other creative people started to form and to me that´s a beautiful thing. The process connected people that didn´t know each other before. I´m all for having more connection in the world and make beautiful art together and this project is doing just that.

What is the best thing about performing to a live audience? What’s been the career highlight so far?
Great shows are like a collaboration between the performers and the audience. The audience feeds off of the musicians and vice versa, which results in a great flow of energy.
One concert from the recent album release tour had this sort of flow for me. We played in a small venue in my hometown and the atmosphere was very intimate. When this sort of energy is there it is easier to take the audience on a journey and keep them engaged from the beginning of the concert until the end. It was an emotional and honest moment of music.
Another career highlight for me is not related to this project. In 2017 I had the chance to play with Israeli artist Asaf Avidan and the Ricciotti Ensemble in Het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. That was pretty cool.

Finally, a few questions for some quick answers –
FAVOURITE:
Album – Gently Disturbed, by Avishai Cohen
Artist – Sting
Movie – The Best of Youth (La Meglio Gioventù)
Place to visit – Valencia, Spain
Venue to play – Paradiso in Amsterdam
Food – Italian
Drink – Beer
Person in History – Rumi
Tattoo – (If you don’t have one, what would you get?) – Not into tattoos so much, debated getting one with bandmates in the past. Happy I didn´t ;)

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Follow DANIEL DE BOER
Website – Instagram – Facebook – YouTube

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Press Release 1st May 2023 (below) HERE

Dutch musician
DANIEL DE BOER
released his new album
‘OUT OF THE SHADOWS’

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AMNPLIFY – DB