Interview: Daniel Donato
Seeing Daniel Donato play guitar is akin to a spiritual awakening.
A gifted shredder, the Nashville-based artist and his Cosmic Country ensemble craft intricate, often freewheeling tunes that pull listeners in with an appealing blend of Americana, rock, jam and, yes, country music. Donato’s skillset has earned him collaborations with the likes of Billy Strings, Widespread Panic, and Asheville’s own Warren Haynes, but it’s his own imaginative projects that seem most worth following.
Prior to his Saturday, Sept 26, show at Hellbender with Houndmouth and Molly Tuttle, Donato spoke with Asheville Stages from his Denver hotel room about his Christmas Jam experience, his admiration for enthusiasm, and the keys to professional development while already functioning at such a high level.
Edwin Arnaudin: How’s the tour going?
Daniel Donato: So far, really well. It's a wild thing touring for this long. I’ve been playing since I was 14, so that's 17 years now. And so to be out here with a fantastic crew and the band and this community of people that come out to the shows every night and the energy they bring, it really is a blessing.
EA: We're excited to have you come back to Asheville. You've been very good to us the last few years, and now you get to play a brand-new venue, too. It's only maybe the fourth or fifth show at this spot.
DD: Absolutely. Asheville's one of those towns — there's some towns that just really love music. And there's some towns that you finish the show and it's as if you were never really there. But the thing about Asheville, it's really something else each time we play there. It's a lot like Denver in that way. So, I always look forward to Asheville in a very unique way.
EA: I think we take it for granted because we just go to The Orange Peel or Grey Eagle or wherever, and it's just another night for us. So, it's very reassuring to hear from artists that it is different and there is a difference that's being made.
DD: Oh, yeah. There's transpersonal similarities that can be found from Portland, Maine, to Anchorage, Alaska — in my experience. But if you enter into the show somewhat like a child and you try not to know what's going on, those differences sometimes can be very moving and profound on stage, at least in my experience.
EA: Very cool. And you’ve got a pretty stacked bill for that show, too, with y'all and Molly Tuttle, and then you're joining up with Houndmouth in North Carolina. It seems like you've got more history with Molly, but I'm curious about your past with Houndmouth, too.
DD: No past with Houndmouth. I like dogs, though.
EA: [laughs]
DD: And I like their records. I like that record [Little Neon Limelight] they did with [producer] Dave Cobb all those years ago [in 2015]. Molly, I've known for so long. At one point in time, Molly and I were in the same band…
EA: Oh, wow!
DD: … playing with an artist named Dee White. And Dee White is — I don't understand why he's not headlining Stagecoach [Music Festival]. He really probably is one of the top five country and western singers that has ever lived on this planet. He can do it all. He can do the Del McCoury, he can do Hank Williams, he can do Lefty Frizzell, and he can do the George Jones and Merle Haggard. He’s really brilliant.
At one point in time, Molly and I were both in his band. This was years ago, dude. This must have been 2017? Something like that — 2017, 2018. So, I've always loved Molly, and I think she's such a talent. And her personality, she's such a light. She truly is a person that is radiant with what she does. Some people get on stage and they're radiant, and then they get off and they're not. Everywhere she goes, she brings that light with her. So, it's a blessing to do some shows with her. I'm excited.
EA: I've seen some videos from a couple months ago from that Virginia show [at Wolf Trap in Vienna] that y'all played, and getting to see you just shred next to each other. Not to go all Chris Farley Show on you, but what's that like, to be just you two standing next to each other, doing that in front of people?
DD: It's not too dissimilar from doing it just in the times that we've played backstage together. I really love playing for people. It's really exciting to me every time. I meet a lot of musicians on the road, especially in this time of the year. We’re wrapping up “festival season,” so to speak. September, usually, is when that calms down. But from May to September is when you get to see all your friends. It’s amazing.
And man, I'll tell you, I really just love playing for people. If anybody ever asks me a question about how the road's going, there's never gonna be a narrative that comes from me that sounds something along the lines of, "I don't wanna play tonight."
It's really fun playing with Molly. And I will say, she's a great band leader, too. Her band has a different approach than we do. They do a similar set night to night. It's more of a Grand Ole Opry approach to entertainment, which is really cool and hard to do. It's hard to distill a show down to where everything you say on the mic is consistent night to night, but it lands every night. That's hard to do.
That's never been my forte as an entertainer. I've always just been more off the cuff. So, sometimes it hits and sometimes I just miss — I miss the arrow by yards and it's awkwardly quiet in the room. But Molly's great at that more, like, traditional entertainment style than I am. And so it's nice to see someone do that. And Ketch [Secor from Old Crow Medicine Show], her husband, is also masterful at that.
EA: Banter is a gift.
DD: It is, dude. I'm not a banterer.
EA: But you don’t have to be. I feel like your music speaks for itself.
My partner and I went to the Warren Haynes Pre-Jam at The Orange Peel last year, and we ended up pretty close to the stage. And just getting to see you and the band play was pretty mind-blowing. That's coming up again this year in a few months and, especially since you guys played that night and then you popped up with Warren a few times over the weekend, what's really stuck with you from that experience on a personal level?
DD: Oh my god — there was a moment when Stone Temple Pilots were playing on the main stage at Christmas Jam. In that little side stage with the acoustic setup and all that, all the backline there, Warren and I were standing behind all the amp cases. And Warren had been going all day. We had gotten to the venue at around 10 a.m. and he'd already been there for two hours. And this must have been 9:30 or 10:00 at night. And so just getting to stand with him and talk with him for a minute in the middle of Christmas Jam when he had been in it for about 12 hours already, and just to see his enthusiasm…
Enthusiasm: if you look at the etymology of that, “thus” in a Latin sense relates back to theos. And that prefix, you can find that word in theology and “to be illuminated, to be inspired.” And I'm 31. But I've been doing this a long time, and so I have an experiential density that I think is different than people that are 31 who are on the road. If you'd been doing this for as many decades as Warren has, I could see how it'd be incredibly easy to not have as much enthusiasm.
I'm very grateful whenever I get to encounter someone who has enthusiasm after doing it for so long because I think enthusiasm, at some point, becomes voluntarily. When you're young and you're doing it for the first time, it's the first couple of years, it's pretty easy to have enthusiasm. But once that normalizing function starts to kick in and it's your sixth time playing in Kansas, at a certain point you have to be voluntarily enthusiastic, and then you have to draw it out of yourself. So, Warren to me is a hero for that.
Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country at Warren Haynes Christmas Jam 2025 (Photo by Connor Burchett
EA: Yeah, we're so lucky to have him and have him keep supporting this community. Even when he's living in New York now, he still has these great ties and still cares about us.
Did you get to make any other new connections there and have any collaborations or plans for- collaborations come from that weekend?
DD: Yeah, Triple Wide. This was a trio set that we did at The Orange Peel with Duane Trucks [from Widespread Panic on drums] and Kevin Scott [from Gov't Mule on bass]. We'd been kicking that idea around in the mud for about 18 months up at that point. And Warren was kind enough to include us on the billing for that night and the show program.
That was really fun getting to play with a trio, especially as an electric guitar player and a singer. It pulls a different dynamic out of yourself, and it's very expressive. It's almost like parkour. As opposed to another setup of bands with different instrumentation, you’re pulling yourself at weird angles and doing great jumps that have a lot of gravity and physics to them, musically. So, it's really dangerous. And Kevin and Duane are just mad men. So, that was really fun.
EA: And on that note, because you have been playing for so long and you've put in the hours and it shows on stage, how do you keep advancing your craft when you're already at this high level?
DD: I believe in the phrase that to whom much has been given, much will be expected. And I've been given a lot of opportunities, whether that be an innate talent and disposition to play — and the way that music affects me and the way I believe in it, I know it’s not normal. That's not in the middle of the bell curve in terms of the total population that listens to music and how it affects them.
And so there's been this curvature in my philosophical approach to all this advancement, that all of that's not inherent in everybody. It's not latent. And so that means I've received those emotions, and I've received those talents, and I also receive these opportunities to go and play and be on the road. And so I look at everything as, I guess, somewhat like there's a transactional ledger of things I've received. And so I really just try to serve that. And I try to just operate in a modality that's humble and that of a student.
When I'm out here on the road — I'm taking a couple days off just because we've been right in the midst of touring. But on days that we're playing, I try to practice as much every day for an equal amount of time that the show is. So, if the show's three hours long, then I'm gonna practice for three hours throughout the day — that kind of a thing. And I write out schedules for my practice, and I'm just always trying to learn and listen back to our tapes and really just stay humble.
That really is the key, because if you don't, you'll start hating what you're playing. And you'll get tired of listening to yourself, which should happen. But what happens, though, once you arrive at a crossroads of “I'm tired of hearing myself," if you're exalting yourself, then you're gonna not take it upon yourself to transform. But if you're humble, then you'll take it upon yourself to realize that the creation in which music dwells in comes from a creator that has infinite potential. And so that means that the music has a potential that nobody on this planet has the ability to quantify, so it must be very high. And so you just keep growing with it.
Quincy Jones and Miles Davis, they've all said similar things in that the kind of music you make is one-and-one matching with the kind of person who you are. It's a reflection of your moral build-up and your volitional accolades that you've made and attained. And so I just want the music to really reflect that. I want there to be a density, and so I'm learning now that density — when I was younger, that wasn't obvious to me. I thought density in music was just how fast you could play or how [few] notes you can miss. But now, it's a whole different frontier.
EA: Thanks for sharing. That's really a cool thing to hear.
And lastly, you’re a prolific artist — I’m curious what project or projects are taking up your time right now?
DD: When you're committed to something that is your whole life, the concept of time needs to be reconciled — at least for me with my thought process, it needs to be reconciled in a way that almost is not very linear. And so, if there were 48 hours in one day, I'd be working those 48 hours on some level with music.
I say all that to say is I don't really look at things as “taking up my time.” I look at it as, “What time am I creating to focus on these projects that I get to participate in?” Because it's very easy, dude, to lose sight of the fact that you and I are both involved in a creative enterprise. Just on, like, a Maslow level, the fact that you can pay for a roof and centralized heat and air conditioning, and you can do that through a creative enterprise that you have a high percentage of creative freedom within, that is very rare if you look at that in relation to the general shape of humanity as a whole.
I just try to stay really grateful with all that stuff. And so right now, I'm mixing a project for Cosmic Country & Western Songs: Vol. 2. We're about to go do a photo shoot for that here today. And we're gonna finish out this tour, and then in January and February of next year we're gonna go make another record. So, it's pretty awesome, dude. We got our hands full.
IF YOU GO
Who: Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country with Houndmouth and Molly Tuttle
When: Saturday, Sept. 26, 5:30 p.m.
Where: Hellbender, 151 Thompson St.., hellbenderavl.com
Tickets: $63.08
(Photo by Jason Stoltz)
