After a few years off from the crazy tour schedule these lads kept up with the likes of The Smashing Pumpkins, Arcade Fire, The Black Keys, Snow Patrol, The Other Lives to name a few, as well as festival appearances at Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits Festival, Sasquatch and Bonnaroo, What Made Milwaukee Famous have regrouped and are back in action with their new LP You Can’t Fall Off The Floor – to be released later in 2012. Danny and WMMF singer/long time friend and collaborator, Michael Kingcaid have been brewing this record up for a couple years now. This project started as an outlet for Michael Kingcaid’s solo work, but has grown into a full blown WMMF record.  This record was recorded at Good Danny’s, Cacophony Recorders, Lakeside Studio and Public Hi-fi with a lot of blood, sweat and tears and an amazingly talented group of musician’s contributing to it including Delta Spirit’s Matt Vasquez, Kathleen Edwards, Cully Symington, Gary Newcomb and many more…

Cully Symington

Gary Newcomb

The band has launched a Kickstarter, to help fund a music video for the single “Gone and Done It Now,” which you can hear on Good Danny’s Good Friends Vol. 2.  Check out their upcoming show 2 set show in Austin at Hotel Vegas on May 11th (Tickets HERE), as they gear up for a busy year of touring in support of this new record that Danny is super proud of.

Okkervil River return to their lo-fi, raw roots with a live recording project of obscure 70′s folk and rock covers – a sequel to 2007′s Golden Opportunities. With just a few short days of preproduction and rehearsals with Danny, the band settled on a group of 5 songs to track AND mix live to 1/4″ tape in one very exhausting and exciting day. Danny recorded and mixed Golden Opportunities 2 (Jagjaguwar) at Premium Recording (assisted by John Michael Landon), on Premium’s lovely Quad 8 console.

Download Golden Opportunities 2:
320 Kbps .mp3
Lossless .M4a

Golden Opportunities 2 Tracklist:
01. It is So Nice to Get Stoned (Ted Lucas)
02. U.F.O. (by Jim Sullivan)
03. One Soul Less On Your Fiery List (David McComb)
04. Plan D (Bill Fay)
05. Dry Bones (American Traditional)

Consequence of Sound:
“beautifully recorded entirely live to two-track tape in one day” (read article here)

Pitchfork article HERE

Buzzine:
“Just enough, and never too much of everything” (read article here)

Well it’s Danny’s turn to be on the other side of the glass as The Lemurs return to Public HiFi to break ground on a new LP. Lemurs front man Mitch Billeaud was hard at work all summer in the rehearsal space at Good Danny’s writing and demoing while Danny was working on the new Shearwater LP. After a lot of refining, sculpting and rewriting with the help of Lemurs guitarist and WMMF frontman, Michael Kingcaid we are going into Jim Eno‘s studio this fall for 3 weeks to track basics for our new LP which we will finish off back at Good Danny’s and mix back at Public HiFi or at Lakeside Studio.

We’re so excited to be mixing this record with the Peter Katis (The National, Interpol) at Tarquin Studio in Bridgeport, CT. We’ve been working non-stop on this record for a few months and are really looking forward to having a fresh set of ears to help us finish mixing and have the talent and experience of Greg Calbi mastering at Sterling Sound.

Post Mixing:
Peter proved his reputation to be well deserved - he was able to clarify and cleanup a lot of the final loose ends we we're struggling with at the tail end of the recording process. DR and JM's perspective was dwindling after months of working and living together. Losing perspective can make it really hard to know when to let go and call it "done." Peter really helped get the record over the finish line, his ideas and suggestions were very thoughtful and musical. He constructed a pretty little Celeste part for the end of Animal Life (the first song on the record), and brought out another favorite Good Danny's trick - using a single note on the Arp Solina to help big passages lift and soar. Both Danny and Jonathan were already huge fans of Peter's work, so it was very exciting to go through the mix process with him, observe his approach and absorb a lot of interesting methods of working. To Danny's surprise, a lot a details in the way both he and Peter work were very similar, which made working side by side totally seamless. They both share a certain level of happy obsession with extremely precise mixing, editing and fine tuning - which if done properly, should be invisible. This really allowed them to work in lock step an communicate clearly. We we're so happy with our mixes that almost no additional EQ or limiting was used in the mastering by Greg Calbi - tiny little notches here and there and an AD/DA converter shoot out was all we ended up doing at Sterling Sound. We were joined by Sub Pop owner/founder Jonathan Poneman for our mastering session.

Danny has been living and collaborating all summer/fall with Shearwater’s singer/songwriter Jonathan Meiburg on the band’s new record Animal Joy. This is the band’s 8th record and first release for the legendary Seattle record label Sub Pop. After completing a trilogy of albums for Matador Records, (Palo Santo, Rook and The Golden Archipelago), the band was ready to explore new territory. Searching for a more immediate, personal and forward album than previous records, Danny came on board during the demoing stages during the winter of 2011 to help guide the process and help guide the band into more visceral sonic territory.

Danny produced Animal Joy at Good Danny’s with special guests Andy Stack of Wye Oak (guitar, keys), long time Shearwater collaborator and touring musician Scotty Bracket of Murder By Death (synths and sounds), Sam Lipman (clarinet) and Elaine Barber (harp).

Austin’s CROOKS have been working hard in the practice space all summer with Danny narrowing down songs, working on arrangements and rehearsing together in preparation for recording their debut LP The Rain Will Come at Good Danny’s. These rough and rowdy boys have found a way to effortlessly move between and fuse many of their influences in their live set – Ennio Moricone, Herb Alpert, Willie Nelson, Texas Tornados, and a little Appalachian Folk. Danny is working to help tie these elements together into one cohesive record – streamlining and weaving a common thread among their diverse catalog of songs and throwing a little dust on everything for good measure.

The Rain Will Come will be out in May of 2012.

Check out this clever little video our friends at Austin Music Weekly created, starring Danny as the bartender:

KUT 90.5 (Austin’s NPR station):
“Texas band most likey to score big in 2012? (read article here)

MTV Hive:”5 bands worth investigating during SXSW”
“A four-piece country-rock outfit that likes things moody and traditional. Crooks are bleary-eyed, regretful western music. In other words, the best kind.” (read article here)

My Old Kentucky Blog:
“fame and fortune, or at least unconditional love from critics and fans, likely in their near future.” (read article here)

Austin Chronicle:
“2011 Critics Picks” (read article here)

Danny spent the better part of last summer engineering White Denim’s new record at Lakeside Studio. D is finally out on Downtown Records and has already received a slew of critical acclaim:

Pitchfork:
“D is easily White Denim’s best-sounding effort yet: The band’s trademark shape-shifting compositions now feature clean, interlocking guitar lines, and singer James Petralli’s voice has smoothed out into a raspy howl. It’s also their most consistent album”

Rolling Stone:
“4 stars” (read review here)
“Top 50 records of 2011″ (read review here)

New York Times:
“Rugged, fidgety, overdriven garage rock sweetened with psychedelic swirl”

Spin:
“A quality dose of heart garage rock and punk rock aesthetic”

Check out the video for Street Joy off of D below:

Danny’s former Belaire bandmates Christine Aprile and Malcolm Elijah Welbourne, together known as Silent Diane came by Good Danny’s for a couple of days to mix their new 7″ Capella for Matador Records imprint True Panther Sounds.

You can stream the A side Capella from Pitchfork.

SD have been touring the country this summer with mates Pure-X and Sleep Over. Check out their Bandcamp page for more tour dates and to purchase this rad 7″.  Check out what Gorilla Vs. Bear and The Fader has to say about SD.

Occasionally a record comes along that Danny dives WAY far into. This is one of them…

Steady Eye, Shaky Bow – 10 songs that we poured our hearts into over the course of the last year and a half.  Suzanna and Danny collaborated on striping these songs back to their core, rearranging and building them back up with a healthy dose of style and soul inspired by their shared influences to create a beautiful bed for Suzanna to showcase her sultry, smokey vocals and playful melodies. Danny and Suzanna worked to build an extremely stylized and transportive record with touches of indie-folk, rock, trip-hop and jazz.

Check out this great feature on Suzanna and the new record from Austin360.com

Suzanna will be performing at the Austin City Limits Festival this fall and is opening for the Old 97′s for KGSR’s Blues on The Green series on August 3rd. Try to catch here live in Austin before she permanently relocates to NYC later this fall.

Lafayette, LA based indie-rock-poppers Brass Bed will be returning to Austin to work with Danny again through the summer at Jim Eno’s Public Hi-Fi studio tracking their 3rd LP. After several months of demoing, rehearsing and finalizing arrangements the band will join Danny in tracking their record live entirely on analog tape from start to finish – mixing on Public Hi-Fi’s beautiful Neve console using motorized Flying Fader automation.

Keep an ear out for Brass Bed’s song People Want To Be Happy used in a Target commercial on TV and Hulu this fall.

Stream Brass Bed’s most recent Daytrotter Session HERE.