Quick Take
Austin-based country singer-songwriter Jesse Daniel, originally from Ben Lomond, has a new album coming in June and continues his West Coast tour with a stop Friday at The Catalyst, an annual visit that always feels like home.
Jesse Daniel now lives in Texas — that is, when he’s not on the road touring as a country singer, which is pretty much constantly. But home? Wherever he might collect his mail, on one level, home is and will always be Santa Cruz County.
In that sense, the 31-year-old singer-songwriter is coming home on Friday for what has turned out to be an annual show at The Catalyst, the iconic downtown club where a younger Jesse used to work as a bouncer.
Friday’s show, in fact, is Daniel’s first show there since the release of his live album “My Kind of Country: Live at The Catalyst” last summer. It’s a bold and spirited live recording, in which he converts the Buck Owens classic “Streets of Bakersfield” into “Streets of Watsonville” with a palpable sense of recognition from the hometown audience.
Daniel’s home turf, however, is not Watsonville, but rather the San Lorenzo Valley — in fact, on the live album, he follows up “Streets of Watsonville” with “Son of the San Lorenzo.” He grew up in Ben Lomond, and many local fans are familiar with his story of transcending addiction in his punk-and-skateboards youth.
Daniel’s musical story, however, bears all the hallmarks of having grown up in the kind of rich swirl of musical subcultures that Santa Cruz County offers. For example, his childhood coincided with the heyday of Henfling’s Tavern, a tiny watering hole smack in the middle of Ben Lomond that was also a venue for a stunningly diverse and ambitious array of live music from around the world. It was a small-town roadside dive bar masquerading a cosmopolitan big-city concert stage. Yet it also maintained a local flavor. Daniel’s father, in fact, played in a band that would occasionally perform at Henfling’s. (His mom was also a local artist.)
“Back then,” Daniel remembered, “I used to be able to get in through the back door and just kind of sit if I didn’t enter the bar.”
Even when he wasn’t sneaking in to see shows, Henfling’s made Ben Lomond a kind of unlikely hangout for musicians from all over. “I remember that there was also a lot of musician types around and other kinds of artists, so it really did shape me,” Daniel said. “I think that kind of gave me that interest, and planted a seed about being a musician and wanting to pursue that.”
As a musician, he started out in an improbable place for someone who would eventually become a honky-tonk troubadour — he played drums in various punk bands. He said he lived a kind of dual musical life — punk rock down in Santa Cruz and country music and bluegrass in the SLV.
“Long story short,” he said, “through my years of addiction, country became this form of refuge for me. [It was] a more meaningful form of music for me to put my energy into, and a more cathartic one, a little bit more wholesome. And even though a lot of [country singers] sing about heartache and addiction and loss and all that stuff, it was a more constructive way to put those emotions out into the world. And I feel like it just worked for me. It just kind of fit.”
Though he now lives close to Austin, Daniel’s grounding in country music, he said, is still steeped in the California sound of Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam, aka “The Bakersfield Sound.”
“A lot of people have this misconception that there’s no country music in California,” he said. “Movies don’t really portray it properly. It’s not really that history that gets carried on into present day. But [the Bakersfield Sound] gave me a lot of pride when I realized, hey, there’s these guys that are from my home state, and they made some of the best country music that’s out there. And it really lit a fire under me to want to contribute to that, you know?”
In 2024, Daniel has released a couple of new songs — “Workin’ Hard (Day and Night)” and “Comin’ Apart at the Seams.” The former was picked up as the intro song to a Netflix comedy special by Dusty Slay, which has given Daniel some juice in the larger music world.
“We got kind of connected,” said Daniel of his relationship with the stand-up comedian, “and he contacted me and said, ‘Hey, man, I want you to write a song for my new Netflix special. It’s coming out and you only have two weeks to write and record it.’ And so we just wrote it quickly. I already kind of had the idea. He basically pitched me, ‘If you could incorporate a few things about my personal life into this song ….’ I already had a clear idea of what I was going to do and we went into the studio and just knocked it out.”
The release of the new songs are prelude to the release of his latest album, “Countin’ the Miles,” due in early June. Since 2018, Daniel has released three full-length albums of original material, not including the live album recorded at The Catalyst. The new album will be his first self-produced recording, and, he said, it’s largely a product of the supportive but competitive atmosphere in Austin, where country and Americana musicians are as common as surfers in Santa Cruz. But taking on producer duties, Daniel wanted to make a record that was as close a distillation of his own personal tastes as possible.
“We ended up cutting it at Arlyn Studios in Austin,” he said. “And I think it’s the best record I ever made. So I’m really excited about it.”
Jesse Daniel plays live Friday at The Catalyst in a 16-and-older show. Showtime is 9 p.m.
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