Music has been the driving force in Danny Ellis’s life since he was eight years of age, when he played trombone in an Irish orphanage band. His songs paint a graphic, emotional landscape, finding meaning in the most mundane events.
“In songwriting, I love when I’m led by ordinary things to discover that they hold the key to unlock the deeper layers beneath. There is a vital spark of reality running through everything we do and it clings to the back lanes and alleyways of our lives waiting for us to catch it. We know the poetry of hope is real, it touches us through art and nature but I love when I find there in the noise of the traffic and the old lady waiting for the bus,” Danny says.
Brought up in the infamously tough Artane Industrial School – “where they made you tough so they could knock you down” – Danny credits music with saving his life: “Certain melodies and words just grabbed me and pulled me through one day at a time. I hung on to them like a shipwrecked mongrel on a raft. Songs impacted me so deeply as a child; they were my parents, my teachers, my friends and sometimes – when the lessons were painful – even my enemies. Hopefully that allows me to access that same depth in my own writing and share it with others. I’m not ashamed to admit I want my songs to touch deeply. I want to make you feel – even more than I want to make you think.”
Danny’s songs elegantly straddle the borders of music from his Irish roots and the pop and rock that buoyed him as he grew up. With a voice that goes from “almost unbearably poignant,” to “so full of rage,” He worked for years as a session singer in London’s Abbey Road and toured as a trombonist with Graham Parker and the Rumor, The Foundations, and The Miami Showband.
His latest CD “800 Voices” depicting his life in the orphanage has been hailed by many – including David Wilcox, Beth Nielsen Chapman and Mary Gauthier – as a “masterpiece.” Danny says of this album; “Somehow, despite having music as a release, I managed to hide the language – the story – of my past, behind super-positive lyrics and ideas. Those buried feeling came through the melodies but the words never even came close to them till “800 Voices.”
The press reviews of this album have, without exception, been phenomenally positive; receiving a rare 4 1/2 stars from Ireland’s premier music magazine, Hot Press. That magazine’s editor, Niall Stokes, wrote; “’800 Voices’ is utterly, spell-bindingly beautiful and deeply moving. Full of marvelously crafted songs, packed with superb lyrical twists and turns and moments of wonderful insight. The astonishing accuracy of the picture it painted had me in tears of both laughter and devastation. An essential Irish Album.”
Danny won the 2009 Lyricist of the Year Prize at the Just Plain Folks Music Awards in Nashville, TN.