Q&A: Dan English Creates a Cosmic Fantasy with ‘Sky Record’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY HARRY SUTTON ☆
THE SKY STRETCHES ENDLESSLY IN THE TINY TOWN OF WEST BRANCH, IA— where the days drift slowly over cornfields and two-lane highways. As a kid growing up in West Branch, the hours can feel endless too. For Dan English, music, movies, video games and books were conduits to other worlds—vivid realms of possibility that painted color into a muted landscape. Now, all grown up and living in New York, English builds those portals himself.
His sophomore album Sky Record, released in June, sounds like the work of someone who never stopped believing in fantasy as a form of salvation. It’s a record suspended between centuries: where knights pilot starships, gargoyles perch atop neo-Gothic citadels and the music drifts between analog warmth and digital shimmer.
While quietly forging this album, English moonlit as guitarist for NYC indie mainstay Porches and threaded himself into the fabric of New York’s collaborative indie world. His cousin, Melody English, General Director of the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra, contributed vocals to Sky Record and helped assemble a cast of over 20 artists to fortify the album’s orchestral grandeur.
Listening to Sky Record is like stepping into a cathedral of memory and dream. It’s chamber pop, maybe. Slacker rock, sort of. But more than anything, it exists in a fantastical world of its own—cosmic and intimate, grounded and godly, archaic and futuristic. Maybe we should call it Pompeii rock, or as English himself puts it, “like Star Wars.”
His visual world completes that mythology. Through cover artwork, 3D Blender animations and music videos, English conjures a medieval cosmos of his own making—one where angels ride horses across molten skies and stone statues pulsate with life. The imagery is ancient and devotional, perhaps something unearthed from a forgotten reliquary. “Movies, music, video games, books—they all offered such rich and engrossing worlds to escape into,” he says. In Sky Record, those portals expand outward, inviting listeners into a world both handmade and holy.
LUNA: Your Instagram bio says “Song is often god.” What are some songs or musicians that feel divine to you? What qualities make a song godly?
ENGLISH: Neil Young, Lucinda Williams, Joanna Newsom. It’s not something easy to put into words–that’s why we have music. It’s a feeling I’m always after, right place, right time. Something that makes you appreciate the moment or be happy to be alive.
LUNA: The Sky Record album cover and music video to “Across My Jaw” feel rooted in medieval fantasy, evoking dungeons, dragons and knights of the round table. Do you have a favorite fable or fantasy story?
ENGLISH: Faust, Frankenstein, Bladerunner, Pinocchio (that being any fantasy is a reality that’s not ours).
LUNA: What drew you to that fantastical aesthetic? I saw that you use Blender 3D animation for some of your videos. What can you tell me about the process of building that visual world?
ENGLISH: I grew up in a small town in the midwest and needless to say it was quite boring. Movies, music, video games, books all offered such rich and engrossing worlds to escape into. It’s also long been a portal through which to escape problems and pain.
LUNA: Many musical elements also reflect that anachronism, combining the contemporary and the baroque with romantic string arrangements meeting digital production. I’ve seen a lot of people describing Sky Record as chamber pop. What led you in that direction musically?
ENGLISH: I really have no clue how I arrived where I did other than faith in one’s own intuition. I am attracted to things that feel different or stick out and I suppose that bleeds a little into what I make. I started with a lot of fake strings and drums and things that felt synthetic, eventually I replaced some with human performances. I didn’t think about it at the time but the combination of the two made things feel somewhat lost in time–futuristic but ancient. Like Star Wars.
LUNA: Not only do some elements of these tracks feel grounded in days of yore, but you also had written songs like “Across My Jaw” and “Borrow” about a decade before they were released. How do you approach finally putting together a song that you’ve been wanting to make for that long?
ENGLISH: I suppose I think of it as a process of incubation… or the song writing itself, letting it rest and grow until it’s ready to walk or leave the nest so to say. Songs start with a seed or initial thought, be it riff or chord change or melody, whatever. Some songs make it over the finish line the day they’re conceived but others take much longer. Maybe it takes growing/changing as a person ‘til you can see or feel things differently and allow the rest to come out.
LUNA: Sky Record feels expansive and cinematic, almost like a score without a film. If you were to score a movie, what kind of movie would it be?
ENGLISH: I love mysteries, noir, sci-fi, horror, period pieces. So some amazing cross-section of the five.
LUNA: Your lyrics can toe the line between abstract and piercingly concrete. Who are your literary north stars? And is “Near To The Wild Heart” a reference to the Clarice Lispector novel?
ENGLISH: I love Jim Harrison, Anne Carson, Joy Williams, Sam Shephard, Cormac McCarthy. Not the most well-read guy in the shed. Yes–good catch.
LUNA: Your cousin, Melody, played a big role in Sky Record, and your dad chipped in on the harmonica. What can you tell me about your family and your musical upbringing?
ENGLISH: It’s hard to explain I guess without knowing us. No one in the family has lived music as devotedly as Melody and I have, but it absolutely runs in the blood. My parents and brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles all have a portion of their lives heavily influenced by music and its effect on them/the world.
LUNA: What about your non-blood-related musical family and the community you’ve established in New York? Your record release party at Trinity Church looked absolutely awe-inspiring and was chock-full with incredible musicians.
ENGLISH: There are obviously so many of us wayward transplants brought together by the magic and medicine of music. I’m so eternally grateful to have many amazing musicians in my orbit who are willing to lend their skills and personalities to my music. I’d be nowhere without that community.
LUNA: In an interview five years ago, you mentioned that you’d been listening to ML Buch and Clarissa Connelly. The Copenhagen scene has since erupted, producing some of the most interesting alternative pop around, and you were clearly ahead of the curve. Can you put us on to any other artists who we should be aware of before everyone else knows them?
ENGLISH: Yeah, that music really moved me when I found it. Still does. There’s a band I play with often, KatzPascale, who make really special music, they’ve only got one song out and are just getting started but I know they’re bound to make a lot of amazing stuff. I’ve also worked with a few amazing songwriters recently since I started collaborating/producing: Lea Jaffe, Eliana Glass, Ruby Joan. Melody’s new music is absolutely next level, but you didn’t hear that from me.
LUNA: Lastly, what are you looking forward to most when you take Sky Record on tour next year? I’d love to catch a glimpse at how you’ll transform this majestic record into live performance.
ENGLISH: I’m obsessed with opening the songs up to whoever’s performing them, letting their character come through in their playing, so I’m excited to see how the songs evolve and continue to surprise me through that process. I have no attachment to the music sounding like it does on the record—I used to be more particular about sound, but now I know that a song is even more alchemical than that melody, harmony, form.
I also just love the road, the mundanity—the gas station, the hours of boredom in the van, at the show and waiting around. It’s when the best memory-making happens.
Lastly, I’m excited to meet the people to whom this music means something. I’ve waited a long time and those who’ve reached out all seem to be special, strange and creative. Means a lot to me to give something back.
