Via my Facebook Page:

Hey guys, I feel like I owe you an epic update. 

If you’ve been following my music for the roughly two years I’ve been producing, you know I like to “crank them out”. I’m constantly working on new tunes, and I love sharing them with you: between 2010 and now, I’ve posted some 95 songs on my Soundcloud. This constant trickle of music has been very symbiotic: I’ve been able to hone and improve my craft in a shorter timespan, and you’ve gotten front-row seats to my artistic progression and a steady supply of House Music content. It’s a nice relationship.

When I launched Dance Is A Feeling Records a few months ago, my plan was to release 2-4 songs a month, spaced out roughly every two weeks. With that, I turned up the heat internally, working on new music with even more fervor than before. As you can imagine, spending all that time making new music and learning about making new music (I try to carve out time each day to read books and mags on my craft) has made my stuff sound better—but it’s also making me a bit of a curmudgeon! By that I mean that I’m getting pickier about what I’m putting out, which is great (higher quality!) yet dangerous (lower quantity). Suddenly, the 150+ unfinished songs sitting on my computer aren’t “good enough” to my ear, and it’s almost like I’m going back to the drawing board. It’s easy to become your own worst critic.

Where does that leave us? Well, my release schedule has slowed a bit, and I’m not happy about that. Yes, I want the music I release to sound as good as possible, but I also don’t want to become a perfectionist to the point where I don’t release new material often enough. Did you know that, to date, my highest-downloaded and highest-played songs are my Doobie Brothers and Aaliyah recreations/remixes from 2010 & 2011? People love those tracks even though, pound-for-pound, the songs I’m making now blow those remixes out of the water in terms of sound quality. So I need to remember that holding back my content too much isn’t the way to go; I need to find the middle ground between my opinion of quality and your implicit desire for quantity. I get that :). 

Another thing I want to mention—because it’s relevant to what I’m going to say next—is that I sometimes have a bit of “artistic ADHD”: I’m constantly flooded with new ideas and I tend to act on them on-the-spot: WolfpackWMC, DancetipsHD, ABetterDancingDay, Dance With Me, my various Tumblrs, and a ton of websites and Twitter accounts you have no idea about all come from my crazy attention span! As a one-man operation, that’s ultimately dangerous to my craft, because my #1 goal is really, truly, overwhelmingly to make great music. Make great music —> travel the world —> get people dancing —> spread a great message. That’s the dream that gets me up each morning (or keeps me up at night). That’s what I want to do for the next ten years of my life. But it means I need to first and foremost MAKE GREAT MUSIC. And that takes time and talent, both of which I’ve been diverting amongst my dozens of ideas and side projects. 

So here’s the kicker: I need to take a step back to really focus on the music. Will the dance videos keep coming? Well…look. I’m not a professional dancer. I’m a guy that makes music and also likes to dance, because it makes me feel free and it makes me happy. A lot of people in the House Dance community don’t think I should be teaching through my videos because I don’t know the history or the movements as well as the pioneers do. They have a point—I’m not a professional and I don’t have the time to become one. But I also think they’re wrong to assume that only pioneers or advanced experts have a role in spreading the message in this dance. At the end of the day, we all dance because it makes us happy and is one of the few places where we don’t feel judged. So will I keep my videos coming? HELL YES. Just be patient about that aspect of my story.

So you know, here are some music projects I have on my plate or will be working on soon:

-Dance Is A Feeling Records releases
-a “Danny Does Defected” bootleg mixtape of classic Defected vocals snapped onto my own beats
-a reimagination of “Message In A Bottle” by The Police
-a song inspired by the soundtrack to one of my fave childhood movies, “Bloodsport”
-I’d like to sample a bunch of Disney movies and put out a mixtape…
-I’d like to sample a bunch of Sigur Ros, Stars of the Lid, and other movie-esque sad songs and make a mixtape out of that…
-I have more 70s disco records to sample than I know what to do with…hmmm….
-a Motown Xmas 2012 bootleg EP ;)

I have my work cut out for me haha! Thanks for supporting my brand and our story and this feeling! Thanks for reading this update.

Dance Is A Feeling, baby!

-Danny