Daniel Tashian's 'Night After Night' simplifies his greatest inspirations

Daniel Tashian's musical career has seen him achieve both critical and mainstream acclaim as a producer, singer and songwriter.

Behind the boards and in songwriting rooms, he's a globally renowned country radio hitmaker and pop-to-crossover pioneer. However, the notion that the intersection of his work in the past five years for Josh Turner, Kacey Musgraves, Burt Bacharach and numerous others occurs within a devoted adoration of countrified California sounds five decades old ties all of the seemingly disparate successes of his career together.

Via his latest studio album "Night After Night," his inspirations and style draw into their sharpest focus yet.

Tashian's unique ability to harness and deepen his familial ties to sounds made by the likes of Emmylou Harris is as much tied to his history as it is to ever-growing levels of appreciation for his work. He's the son of Barry and Holly Tashian, a bluegrass duo whose roots intersect with "Night After Night" inspiration Paul Kennerley, as all have a history with Harris' 1970s-era performing unit the Hot Band.

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Kennerley's stylings created a "heart-driven" course for Tashian to reconnect with a childhood spent listening to "the greatest storytelling songs in American pop music history," involving not just the previously mentioned artists but also the Band, Rodney Crowell, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Townes Van Zandt and Neil Young.

"Those people are geniuses, but the music they made was all so complex," he says.

He offers that working with Kennerley taught him how to "simplify" the work that those artists did. That spurred him onto a career that he defines as "curating great stories and singing great songs about them."

Learning an easier route to understanding those songs' lyricism by demystifying their musicianship allows him the ability to continue to "grow, move forward and make the most of my time on Earth," Tashian adds.

Kennerley's skill as a rhythm guitarist who plays "open, three chord-driven songs where the major third happens in the melody – it quickens the blood but also puts you in a trance" – is what drives the material recorded for "Night After Night." The duo spent time together at each other's homes during the COVID-19 quarantine, strumming melodies in what is referred to as "seances."

"Paul would tell me at the start of a session, 'We're going to ask Bob Dylan and Buddy Holly to look over our shoulders on the rhymes we write for these songs.'"

The album's title song is one Tashian says he "could play at a backyard pool party or barbecue with impunity, (because) Paul is the master of that."

"It's a strum-along song for everyone," he adds.

A lovelorn ballad aided by a driving rhythm, it errs toward full-on danceability. Still, it stops at a good hand-clap, foot-stomp tempo appropriate for an afternoon where it's just a step too hot to break into a dance party.

Songs like "Tumble and Fall" and "Thinking About You Too Much" are powerful yet plaintive. The combined effect is intentional, driven by Tashian's Kennerley-taught notion that the best songs use basic major chord structures and stripped-down metaphors and similes like "Duplo-style Legos" as the essential building blocks of simple, approachable and "irresistible" songs.

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Intertwining the lyrics with the rhythm's cadence creates a "hurry up and wait for it" sensibility that makes the latter song stand out. There's a freewheeling nature in that, which when combined with how it unfolds another melodic or rhythmic element every 30 seconds makes for a song that could choose any number of ways to worm itself into your head but settles on achieving all of them in a measured manner. Lyrically, it's running down every connection to pangs of denial after heartbreak.

In the past – especially with David Gehrke and Jason Lehning as pop trio the Silver Seas, Musgraves' Grammy-winning 2018 album "Golden Hour" and 2021's "Star-Crossed," and with Bacharach for April's "Blue Umbrella – he's achieved renown as an aesthetic minimalist. For his band, he's eschewed electric guitars. For "Star-Crossed," he highlights how it is delivered as a three-act Shakespearean epic in 15 tracks. As for Bacharach, he notes how the iconic songwriter uses more one-syllable words than most.

However, when cast against a sonic environment where "people invent genres in their bedrooms every day," deepening this idea via working with Kennerley allows him to create sounds "definable and identifiable" by both classic and modern standards.

Or, in the case of "Somebody's Thinking About You," it's an anti-bullying lullaby for his daughter where he says that "somebody like (him) is hoping that (her) dreams come true."

Sometimes, mastery of the craft comes in a rapturous moment of genius. Other times it's in reducing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers-style rock & roll to its core folk elements to keep a child from crying through the night.

"I put so much time and effort into everything that I release," Tashian says. "And once it's out there, it's entering into an environment that, more than ever, feels like an explosive, daily barrage of media."

Bittersweetly, he makes a statement that offers a deeper understanding of his artistic motivations and how top-tier creators can best adjust their expectations of the music industry moving forward.

"I make music that I think will turn the world upside down," he says, "but then I accept that most people will just feel that my music is cool."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Singer/songwriter Daniel Tashian sharply focused in Night After Night