With a yearning, aching and dusty dirt-road voice, you'd expect Danielle Talamini to come from Tennessee or Alabama, but no, she hails from the back roads of ... Staten Island!
She calls her music “country for city kids,” and she may be on to something there. Danielle might have a New York City address, but she is more country than most of the sound alike singers in Nashvegas these days. And if you listen to her compelling new CD “The Road Rises,” you’d swear her address was Route 66, USA.
The timeless American music of three generations informs Talamini’s work, from founding father Hank Williams and Outlaw country heroes Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, to the classic roots rock of the Allman Brothers Band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival, as well as musical descendants such as Ryan Adams, Lucinda Williams and Patty Griffin.
The Road Rises was recorded in Austin, Texas by Dwight A. Baker (Brandi Carlile, Heart, Kelly Clarkson) and from the expansive “Save Me,” empowering and peppy “Pack My Bags,” haunting “Already Gone,” and dirt road driving title track “The Road Rises,” Talamini sings in a way you haven’t heard before, but want to hear again. It’s a voice vulnerable yet confident, sultry and strong, with breathy, understated phrasing to die for.
Stocked with literate lyrics and clever melodies, The Road Rises echoes Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” with its endless highways and horizons, and the promise of just what you’ve been looking for lurking right around the bend.
Timeless and true, full of grace and gravitas, “The Road Rises” is done right, for the right reasons. A road that should be more traveled, you might say.
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