Live And Let Die

"This project’s been a funny one,” singer-songwriter Daniel Lee Kendall admits of his ironically titled debut album Daniel Lee Kendall Is Dead, “because they’re all old songs, so it was much more of a producing gig than a songwriting gig, ‘cause all the songs were kinda written. I was just choosing the best ones and just sparkling them up a bit, so it was an interesting process.”

Growing up on the NSW Central Coast, Kendall had written and recorded 50-odd songs by the time in 2010 he introduced himself with the release of an EP Lost In The Moment before promptly disappearing. Lost In The Moment is the only track revisited on the album.

“I was thinking, ‘What do I do with all these songs?’ I don’t really feel like pushing them but I thought, they’re there. To be quite honest, it was just a moneymaking project really, so I just picked the best ones that I thought might possibly get a sync on whatever, the ones that seemed to stand out the most, because if I’d done it any other way I don’t think I would have got it done.”

The irony is that the reason Kendall “disappeared” was that he felt he was making music for the wrong reasons – chasing fame rather than musical truth. So he walked away from music, went travelling, had a motorbike accident that laid him up for a while and went to uni, only to find, over the uni holidays, music was tugging him back.

“It’s been a really odd process. That’s why I say ‘Daniel Lee Kendall is dead.’ I still feel that these songs are very separate from me, which is why I’m going to be doing one tour [the aptly titled Funeral tour] and that’ll be it. At the same time I’m really proud of what it is.

“When I look at all the old songs, a lot of them, to me, are sort of questions about how I wish the world was and how it wasn’t, and sort of looking for answers and how I might find more satisfaction in life, and I feel like I have found a lot of those answers, which is why they feel a bit inauthentic to me, because I’m singing songs with questions in them that I actually feel like I’ve got answers to. That’s probably why they needed to go.

“So it was a conscious decision to move forward and hope that I’ll find something else that resonates again because I just felt like I would have… I think it became too much about the ego and the success thing kind of takes over when I go down that road and I find I need to be authentic and feel an authentic connection with the songs for me to feel more myself, I suppose. Yet I felt it would be a shame for people never to hear these songs, so it’s nice to put them out into the world for whoever engages with them.”