Daniel Jacobs traveled around the world and ended up at home again. A Massachusetts native, Jacobs studied jazz guitar at NYU, classical guitar at the Mannes College of Music, sitar and tabla while living in India, Balinese gamelon in Bali, and bossa nova in Brazil. He has culled from these wide-ranging influences to develop a style of guitar playing that reflects all of these styles but cannot be classified as any of them. 'I always wanted to make music that was original but informed', says Jacobs, who has just released his first full-length album, Echoes of My Footsteps, the follow-up to an EP entitled I Like My Life which was recorded last year. 'But when I’m writing,' he adds, 'most of the influence of my experiences is unconscious. You wouldn’t say that Our Love, [a song on the new album] is a bossa nova tune, but it definitely has that influence.' Jacobs is driven by a personal quest for life’s experience. He relentlessly pursues his passions without ever losing sight of the simple pleasures of every day, and this zeal is the backbone of both his music and his lyrics. As much a poet as a musician, Jacobs is extremely conscious not only of the words he chooses, but also of the way in which they are structured to flow with each other and the music. 'Words are a funny thing. They’re what we use to communicate, but they’re also abstract. The writer walks the line between communication and nonsense,' says Jacobs. 'I feel that poetry, by definition, contains music. Words do not exist outside the elements of music. Even when we read silently, we ‘hear’ the words. The poet juxtaposes imagery employing musical elements. Composers internalize the poetry of the moment as music . Beethoven said that the composer cannot recreate nature or life, but must affect, in the audience, the feelings caused by nature and life,' he says. 'A songwriter works as poet and composer simultaneously and separately.' The way in which Jacobs’ lyrics and music complement each other is one of his greatest strengths. In the songwriting process, though, that synthesis can be anywhere from revelatory to painstaking. 'Sometimes both music and words explode out of me together, and sometimes they take time to find themselves and are culled from a variety of experiences over a long period of time,' he says. 'If I force words and music together because I want to finish a song, it never works. I have to wait. I do a lot of waiting.' Echoes of My Footsteps also required a good deal of waiting, but patience has paid off. He recently finished a residency at Mocha Java in Hyde Park, and he has been playing gigs all over the northeast in the past few months. He is an artist who is feeling the flow, and says he is already itching to record his next album, this one possibly solo rather than with the band that backed him on Footsteps. 'The album is an overview of where I’ve come from musically,' he explains, 'but the stuff I’m writing now is more in a style,' This bodes well for a musician who has already displayed a great talent for assimilating genres and creating a unique sound." - Dan Pashman