NORTH CONWAY NH – When people first meet Daniel Donato, they’re not fully braced for this walking tornado of creative energy. Donato, a 27-year-old Nashville native, weaves outlaw country, Grateful Dead-style Americana, and first-rate songwriting into a singular form he calls “21st-century cosmic country.”
The Telecaster-wielding wunderkind—who at 16 became the youngest musician to regularly play the iconic honky tonk Robert’s Western World while gigging with the Don Kelley Band—gained a formidable education by jamming regularly with Nashville’s most seasoned players. Around the time he turned 18, one of Donato’s highschool teachers gave him a Grateful Dead box set. It was another ‘eureka moment’ for the guitarist. His love for the Dead may have been ignited much earlier by virtue of the fact that his mother was a bonafide Deadhead who followed the group on tour when she was pregnant with the future guitarist, but it was that collection that changed the way he looked at music. “It gave me a tie to all of the classic country gold I’d been working down at the honky-tonks each weekend,” he said. “Grateful Dead and Merle Haggard had always lived in my heart, but now, the link was made, and I had a vision on how to keep it alive for this generation that I am coming from.”
Incubated to the sounds of the Dead, educated by some of Nashville’s finest players, and having more than 2,000 shows under his belt, Daniel Donato is indeed a millennial whirligig of creative fire. He’s been dabbling in professional music since the age of 14 and yet he’s just getting started.
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