Daniel Land

Hello everyone!

I'm happy to announce that some new merch is now available online from my Bandcamp. We have…

NEW T-SHIRTS

There are three new unisex T-shirts available at my Bandcamp page:

• "Dream Pop Cult Hero" — a repress on black of one of our most popular designs, for all you guitar-slinging, reverb-loving dream pop cult heroes out there 😉
• "Love Songs for the Chemical Generation" — variant of one of my most popular album covers on white
• "Cobalt Blue" — based on one of our favourite songs, featuring a shot of light on water that I took in Dana Point, California, the same day I wrote most of the lyrics.

Some of the T-shirts are leftovers from our tour and will be dispatched immediately; others are pre-orders and will ship within approximately two weeks. They are printed on good-quality Fruit of the Loom® material.

The pre-order window closes on Monday 27 April, so if you want to guarantee your size, please get your order in soon!

"LOVE SONGS FOR THE CHEMICAL GENERATION" ON CD!

You asked, I delivered! This album is available on CD again.

These CDs use the same audio as the original 2009 edition; the album has not been remastered. The discs themselves are from the original run, with black text on a clear silver background. However, I've taken this opportunity to revise the artwork and fix a few printing issues from earlier runs. 

The booklet is four pages with credits, and the cover uses the slight artwork variant that has appeared on all digital and streaming editions since 2021. Beneath the tray, there is also a previously unused pink image from the original artwork sessions.

Those are also available from my Bandcamp page.

A vinyl reissue is currently planned for the release's 20th anniversary, so if you'd prefer vinyl, it may be worth waiting!

Thanks

Daniel
 

We’re just about to head out to our last rehearsal before these shows, but I wanted to get ahead of a couple of questions that often come up when we’re on the road!

First: tickets will be available via my events page until around 2pm on the day of each gig. After that, I’ll close the link and any remaining tickets will only be available on the door.

The Manchester show now has only 15 tickets left. The last time we played the same venue, we sold out and had to turn, perhaps, five or six people away, so if you’re thinking of coming, I’d strongly suggest booking in advance. 

It’s also worth checking the website on the day (Sunday) to see if it’s sold out: I’ll clearly mark it if so.

There’s no support act for either show. We’ll be playing a fairly lengthy set, with an interval and a few solo interludes and chatty bits.
 

■ DOOR TIMES ■

▶ Holt, Norfolk — Saturday 18 April — Doors 7pm, show approx. 7:30pm–10pm.

▶ Manchester — Sunday 19 April — Doors 7:30pm, show approx. 8pm–10:15pm.

We’ll have some lovely merch with us, and I’ll be stationed at the merch table at various points, hawking my wares.

Please don’t be shy about coming over to say hello! There are lots of people who regularly buy tickets who I’ve never actually met, and I’d really love to change that.

Looking forward to it—hope to see some of you there.

Hello everyone

Thanks so much to everyone who’s bought my new charity single, “Snowdrops”, so far.

I’m especially grateful to those of you who’ve picked it up despite usually preferring physical media, to those who’ve gone over and above by paying more than the asking price, and to those who bought bits of merch alongside it—I must be honest, it feels a bit icky to make sales off the back of this, so I’ll donate that money too, and do the same for any merch sales over the next few days.

🎧 Listen, Download and Donate at my Bandcamp Page

I was also really touched by the kind messages of support around the themes of the release. I’ve never particularly hidden my history with depression, or the breakdown and hospitalisation which inspired this song; it's just that it doesn’t come up that much—it was all nearly 30 years ago now. If it’s top of mind at the moment, it’s because it’s the main story of the memoir I’ve been working on. But I’m glad things have changed enough that it feels more possible to talk about these experiences openly.

The homophobia that so badly affected my first partner (and, by extension, me) is much less common now. It still exists, of course, sometimes in rural pockets; that’s why it was important for me to give any proceeds from this release to the Intercom Trust, which exists to support people experiencing exactly those kinds of issues. It only takes a glance at places like Hungary or Russia, where governments are once again trying to suppress LGBTQ+ lives and visibility, to see how easily things can backslide.

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks again. At some point next week I’ll send everything over to the charity, and I’ll post a screenshot here so you can see exactly what’s been raised.

Thanks for listening!

Daniel

Hello everyone!

I'm delighted to announce my new single, ‘Snowdrops’, which is available from today at my Bandcamp page and all worldwide streaming services including Spotify.

‘Snowdrops’ is a charity single, and all proceeds will be donated to the Intercom Trust, an organisation I was previously involved with, which works to make the South West a place where LGBT+ people are respected, celebrated, and able to live with real equality. The charity, its work, and my involvement with it relate directly to the themes of the song.

‘Snowdrops’ is a deeply personal song for me. It deals with mental health and recovery, and marks another step towards my aim of complete transparency about my experiences and feelings in my music—even if it feels a little uncomfortable at times to put myself so vulnerably “out there”.

The song takes its name from the first flowers to bloom after winter, and reflects on a nervous breakdown I had in 1999, when I was eighteen, following my first serious relationship.

Growing up in rural Devon in the late 1990s—a relatively homophobic place at that time—I fell for another young man who was struggling with his sexuality, his mental health, and sustained homophobic bullying. His own collapse—and the end of our relationship shortly afterwards—precipitated my own, and in the early spring of that year I was admitted to a psychiatric ward at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital.

The story in ‘Snowdrops’ is drawn from a section of my as-yet-unpublished memoir about that period of my life. A few days after being discharged, I was driving through North Devon with friends when I experienced an epiphany that changed everything:

"A song came on the radio which felt like it had been written for me. The words—about pulling through, about not giving up, about having the music in you—reached right out of the radio and into my heart. In that moment I realised how foolish I’d been to risk everything—my art, my very life—for a boy. I realised that I simply had to get better."

It marked a turning point in my life: the moment I became committed to being an artist. Over the following weeks, music—and the desire to live—slowly came back:

"Over the course of a few weeks, the lights in my life started turning on again. I picked up my diary for the first time in over six months. I started writing music again. Life felt… well, if not brilliant, at least okay. Like it was worth living for. And that was enough."

‘Snowdrops’ is the first single from my next album, due out either late this year or early next year.

All proceeds from the single will go to the Intercom Trust, a charity that works with exactly the same kinds of vulnerable LGBTQ+ people that I once was. After my breakdown, I volunteered for the organisation for over a year, and that involvement—and having something to contribute to, something to put my back into—was a key part of my recovery. Its work is still close to my heart.

You can read more about my time working for the organisation in an extract from my memoir here, and more about the current organisation here.

You can hear ‘Snowdrops’ at my Bandcamp page and all streaming services. 

Also, a quick reminder that if you'd like to hear it live, along with many other songs, we'll be heading out to perform two shows in just over a week: in Holt, Norfolk, on Saturday 18 April, and in Manchester on Sunday 19 April. Tickets for both of those shows can be found here. 

Thank you for reading, and please give generously!

XXD

Hello everyone,

I was going to post this when I got to 25,000 listeners but got distracted. But just to say: absolutely bonkers numbers coming out of Spotify recently, reflecting some things that have been happening quietly with some of the Chinese streaming services since Out of Season came out in 2023.

And to think I trundled along for so many years with 150 or 200 listeners! This is insanity…

I do, of course, have a special place in my heart for those who were there from the start, and of course, all of this comes with caveats: Spotify is evil, these numbers will probably dip once I slip down whatever playlists I've landed on etc etc.

And yet. There's been a noticeable uptick in people reaching out, inboxing, asking about songs, sharing their own experiences, and those have been some beautiful messages to receive and experiences to read about. Thank you so much for all those, and please keep them coming!

It strikes me (this is not an original thought!) that these pieces I put together, largely in bedrooms or home studios, have travelled further than I have or ever will... it's awesome.

I've no idea who all these people are, but if any of you happen to check this website from time to time, and see this, thank you: you're all welcome here, and I'm grateful to you for lending me your ears!

With deepest gratitude…

Daniel

Hello everyone, 

I’m so happy to share that my brand new song "Snowdrops" received its first ever play on BBC Music Introducing in the South West last night ⭐️ 🥳 

It’s a deeply personal track, and the first glimpse of what will be my next album, due out later this year or early next…

It's repeated on Saturday 21 March on BBC Radio Cornwall, BBC Radio Devon, and BBC Sounds—or you can listen at this link for 30 days. 

“Snowdrops” will be released as a single* before we go on tour in April, and I’ll share more at that stage about the particularly emotional backstory to the song…

Huge thanks to the ever-supportive BBC Introducing team—especially Daniel Pascoe, Will Marshall—and everyone on the BBC Introducing team who’ve played my music before.

Good times ahead!

Daniel

(*People who pre-ordered "Pearl Daddy" and are waiting on the vinyl, you will get a free download of this!)

The final Cocteau Twins album, Milk & Kisses, is thirty years old today. 

Many would argue it’s not their “best” record but it was the first album of theirs I heard and adored. It’s my favourite of theirs by a long way, and probably my favourite album of all time. It was also what first got me thinking about working with guitars.

When I first heard Milk & Kisses, in 1998, I was so out of touch with guitar music that I thought this was more or less a “normal” indie record. Blame the musical diet I’d grown up on in the 90s: Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel. Britpop passed me by; I liked ambience, keyboards, reverb. I hadn’t realised until I heard the Twins that all of that could be done with guitars.

And there was something about Elizabeth Fraser’s voice that made me keep coming back. Something that made me (as strange as this sounds) feel as though I recognised the kind of person she was; that there might be something in her background that chimed with my own. 

Years later I began to wonder why so many of the women I felt an immediate kinship with in art, like Agnes Martin or Virginia Woolf, turned out to have lives marked by trauma, depression, and self-doubt, even if I hadn’t known that when I first discovered their work.

My years listening to world music had prepared me for Elizabeth Fraser; I was used to music in different languages. And of course, part of the point of the Cocteau Twins was that Fraser’s words hung just beyond meaning. Trying to decipher lyrics on albums like Victorialand or Blue Bell Knoll was a fool’s errand. 

But on Milk & Kisses I liked that I could catch fragments of broken English within her elaborate puirt à beul. At the time I was studying English under the aegis of a powerful and inspiring teacher (another female idol), and living daily in the nuances of language, so the urge to decode her lyrics came naturally. I wanted to know what she felt, what she meant.

On this record Elizabeth seemed to be wrestling with the pain of receiving love in fragments, of giving more than she got, and of turning back to the quiet consolations of life. 

I felt a lot of empathy for that. The landscape for queer people in the mid-1990s was very different from today, especially in rural places like where I grew up, and although I was yearning for love, my early relationships were far from satisfactory; I was the king (or queen) of unrequited love. Perhaps that’s why this record spoke so clearly to my situation at the time. I clung to the simple wisdom of her lyrics like talismans:

Well, I’m still a junkie for it
It takes me out of my aloneness
But this relationship cannot sustain itself.

And:

Intimacy’s when we’re in the same place at the same time
Dealing honestly with how we feel
And who we really are.

And:

I have my friends, my family
I have myself
I still have me.

I know every detail of this album so well that I probably don’t even need to play it anymore. But I think I’ll give it a spin this weekend. I would wholeheartedly recommend that you do the same, too. It's a beautiful piece. 

Hello everybody!

On Friday, I released Pearl Daddy, on all digital platforms. That means the full release is available, including the second of its two tracks, “Bilal”.

If you’ve already purchased Pearl Daddy on Bandcamp, simply head to your collection to download it. It is also available on Spotify and all the usual platforms. 

In case you missed it: Pearl Daddy is my limited-edition “Concept Single”: two companion songs—“Pearl Daddy” and “Bilal”—written specifically for the 7" format. 

Sharing melodic fragments and harmonic ideas, the tracks reimagine noisy My Bloody Valentine–style shoegaze through a subtle North African lens.

Both songs feature darbouka and other Moroccan percussion by Othmane El Mansouri, while “Bilal” adds oud by Maryan Karpinskyi, giving the music a distinctly Moroccan colour.

Pressed on white vinyl and limited to just 100 copies, the record also includes an unusual extra for a 7": a 12-page full-colour booklet of artwork, lyric fragments, and text.

► Purchase Here

Thanks to anyone reading this!

Daniel

Hello everyone

Just wanted to flag a rather lovely interview I did with WROTE podcast. 

You can watch it here, although there's also a podcast version available from the usual places.

WROTE focuses on LGBTQ+ authors, so we mainly talked about my forthcoming "Concept Single" Pearl Daddy through that lens, although there were some entertaining questions outside of that.

Along the way, I also talked about why I think my best songs tend to be rooted in compassion, why the idea of “innovation” in music is wildly overrated, and why I can’t get enough of reading AIDS literature. 

It was genuinely lovely to catch up with Vance and Baz, who are resolute supporters of queer authors and outsider artists. I'm sure they're appreciate a few more views of their stuff. 

Thanks

Daniel

Hello everyone!

Good news for anyone who likes my ambient side-projects: I announced a couple of albums this week.

First up is the latest album by my droney guitar alias "Alan Lidden" (an anagram of my name!) called The North Coast. It's available at the Alan Lidden Bandcamp page here.

Also, and perhaps most significantly, a new riverrun release!

A Secret Cove (Spring Tide) is a longform, 15-hour variation of the generative A Secret Cove composition that I released last year. That release is available from the riverrun Bandcamp page here.

Both albums are download-only, with no physical format. 

Thanks to anyone who listens or purchases!

Daniel