In Love With A Ghost

In Love With A Ghost was released on 25 November 2016. It was my official follow up to the Daniel Land & The Modern Painters albums Love Songs For The Chemical Generation and The Space Between Us. 

In Love With a Ghost is an album about cities. It is an album about reinvention, and starting your life over. It is an album about growing up, finding love, and settling down. And to a lesser degree, it is about the damage that can be done to a person, a family, or even the body, by falling in love with the wrong person. 

I started the album in the summer of 2012 — my last summer in Manchester before leaving the city. I continued working on the album after I moved to London; bits of recording happened in other locations as well, including New York City, where I spent time between September 2014 and May 2015. In many ways, I think of it as my “New York album".

In Love With a Ghost features a cast of over twenty musicians including former members of the Modern Painters, along with Andrew Saks (Goodbye Ranger/Sway), the ambient legend Bing Satellites, Gerard Hopes (Little Nova Sound), members of my post-2012 live band — and many others.

The album took nearly four years to complete, at least twice as long as any other record I've made, partly due to complexity and layered nature of the recordings. But also, from 2013 onwards, I suffered a chronic inner-ear infection, which affected my hearing, and made it difficult to focus on music — this left me in very low spirits. This period of minor depression lasted around a year, but it ultimately proved transformational; I came out of it feeling changed, somehow — more humble, more grounded, and more grateful.

In Love With a Ghost is available on CD or download at my Bandcamp page. The CD version is presented in a sturdy Super Jewel Case format with a 16 page booklet, including New York photography, and full lyrics. 

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In Love With A Ghost

Daniel Land

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After a three year hiatus, Daniel Land has announced the forthcoming release of his 'In Love With a Ghost' LP, undoubtedly his most complicated and textured record to date. This album follows albums 'Love Songs For The Read more
After a three year hiatus, Daniel Land has announced the forthcoming release of his 'In Love With a Ghost' LP, undoubtedly his most complicated and textured record to date. This album follows albums 'Love Songs For The Chemical Generation' and 'The Space Between Us' by Daniel Land & The Modern Painters. It was recorded over the three years following that group's disbanding. The first single from this release is 'New York Boogie-Woogie', along with a video based on footage Daniel Land himself filmed in New York.

Daniel Land explains, "This is an album about cities. It is an album about reinvention, and starting your life over. It is an album about growing up, finding love, and settling down. And to a lesser degree, it is about the damage that can be done to a person, or a family, by falling in love with the wrong person.

"With 'In Love With A Ghost', I came full circle for a while by incorporating a whole bunch of influences that pre-date my love of dream-pop and shoegaze. I really wanted to make a colourful, widescreen, detailed record. When I started the album, I didn't have a live band, and most of the tracks were written on the piano, for my own amusement, rather than for a group with three guitarists."

The album was recorded at various locations including London, Manchester, Devon, California, and New York. It features nearly twenty musicians including members of Daniel Land & The Modern Painters, Andrew Saks (Sway/ASAKS), Gerard Hopes (Little Nova Sound), and members of Daniel's new live band, including Brin Coleman, aka the prolific ambient composer Bing Satellites, who was involved with the record from the start to the end, playing multiple instruments, helping with the production, and even co-writing some of the music.
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    You & Me Against The Sky 7:12
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    Holes On The Dancefloor 5:03
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    Everyone's Got A Guy Garvey Story 4:04
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    The Sweetest Lover 4:30
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    New York Boogie-Woogie 4:48
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    Little City Symphony 1:15
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    Saints With His Mercy 6:20
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    Whistling Gypsy 5:41
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    In Love With A Ghost 4:21
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  10. 10
    The Beautiful Room Is Empty 5:08
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VIDEO AND DOCUMENTARY

On New York

I like pinhole cameras, old Super 8 films, vintage lenses, and the photographs of Anton Corbijn — antidotes to the scrubbed-up, high definition, over-perfected images of this era. I try to take pictures that are a visual counterpart to the music I make — I like things that are resonant with atmosphere and nostalgia, and the texture is sometimes as important, to me, as what's being described.

My music is made with simple, even crude technology — but I know my processes very well, and I think this is one of the reasons why I've been able to make comparatively rich recordings (largely) at home. Likewise, my photographs are undoubtedly amateur, but I know my limited materials inside out. I'm a big believer in that Brian Eno adage that you should always prefer “rapport” to “options”. Modern technology gives us the ability to over-produce sound and over-tweak images — I think it's possible that in twenty years, the over-perfected sounds and images of this era will seem as absurd as any other passed trend.

The artwork for the CD of my new album, 'In Love With A Ghost', is made out of the pictures that I took of New York City, in 2014 and 2015. These photographs were taken with a couple of different digital and analogue cameras, and a poor quality camera phone, which I then re-processed in various ways. I also made extensive use of the iPad 8mm film app to shoot the video for my single, "New York Boogie-Woogie" — the same app that the director of the film “Searching for Sugar Man” used when he ran out of Super 8 film.

My vision of New York is dark but not bleak. It's a vision of dark nights and bright lights, crowded streets, dark bars, and rented rooms — like an Edward Hopper painting, or the lyrics on a record by The Blue Nile. It is a vision of a city of ghosts, a city of Susan Sontag, George Balanchine, Robert Mapplethorpe, and David Kalstone. Agnes Martin on the roof of her studio at Coenties Slip, and Frank O'Hara writing poems on his lunch break.

In writing "New York Boogie-Woogie" I was borrowing a lyrical style from Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes", who in turn borrowed it from an African tradition — in Peter Gabriel's song, you can't tell whether he's singing about romantic love, or love for God. In "New York Boogie-Woogie", you can't really tell whether the love is directed at a person or the city.

I grew up in rural South West England in the 1980s and 90s. Nothing could have seemed more removed from my day to day life than the hustle and bustle of New York. And yet, all of the music I was listening to in my teens — things like Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, The Velvet Underground, Brian Eno — all came from New York, or (in the case of Eno) had had a New York “period”. And so from the earliest age, I felt an irrational sense of attachment to the place. When I finally made it there, I felt like I had come home.

New York is to the States what Manchester is to the UK. I lived in Manchester for 12 years and it seems to be cut from the same cloth, somehow. Manchester has often been used as a stand-in for New York in films like Captain America, or the Jude Law version of “Alfie”, so I'm not the only person to notice this.

These days, there's a lot of nostalgia for 1970s New York, when the city was savage and bankrupt and practically everything below 23rd Street was overrun with artists. It's become a bit of a cliché, really. But as an outsider I still find it interesting how many different artistic scenes were co-existing at the same time — whether it be the Patti Smith/punk axis around CBGBs, or Robert Wilson's theatre, or the No Wave movement circling around bands like DNA, or Woody Allen's films, or Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs. At exactly the same time there was an explosion in post-liberation gay literature, writers like Andrew Holleran, or Edmund White (who I love). It fascinates me now, that these mostly-independent scenes, which I became interested in separately (as a true auto-didact) and which have proved so artistically nourishing for me, existed more or less concurrently in the same city.

I don't disagree with people who say that New York is over-sanitised now. So many artists have been priced out of Manhattan. Arto Lindsay says that New York has now just become the place where Donald Trump lives. I know what he means. We were in New York at the time of the 2016 election — a heartbreaking day for us. But there's plenty of great things happening at the edges, and in those artistic scenes, the city's energy remains undiminished. I find New York brings out the best in me; my sharpest thoughts and my best ideas. It's still the best city in the world.

 

New York 2014-2015