In the opening line of his new album, Smithereens, Dan Reeder issues a simple if tongue-twisting manifesto. “Fuzzyfalafelosophy is my game, and I rock that shit like a boss. / Nobody else knows what it means, so I just do whatever I want.”
At seventy, Reeder looks like a boomer dad, sounds like a boomer dad, and indeed is a boomer dad, with three grown children, but he’s also a singular creative force. Born in Louisiana and raised in California, he has spent the past three decades recording music, making art, and building things—instruments, microphones, computers—in Nuremberg, Germany. Prior to a short tour last month, he hadn’t performed on his home soil in fifteen years, content to plunk away at a distance, if not exactly in obscurity. Jason Isbell adores him, the indie supergroup Boygenius covered him, and the New Yorker called him “one of the foremost outsider artists in modern folk.”
Chief among Reeder’s influences is the patron saint of modern folk himself, John Prine, who died in 2020 from complications from Covid. The admiration was mutual: In the early 2000s, Reeder mailed a burned CD of his homespun tunes to the songwriting legend, who liked it so much he signed him to his label, Oh Boy Records. Prine wrote at the time: “This guy is having fun with music and words and in return I am enjoying him, enjoying himself.” Reeder is now the label’s longest-signed musician besides Prine himself.
“John Prine was a fantastic guy,” Reeder says. “He was funny. He was smart. He was very, very generous. I am a musician—officially, sort of—because of him. I was told by his wife that I was an inspiration for him, which is a total honor.” A line in Smithereens’ “Skiing Song” sums it up: “I met my hero, and my hero met me.”
But while the two may have been kindred spirits, Dan Reeder marches to the beat of Dan Reeder. He has showcased paintings in Nuremberg’s foremost modern art museum and in a colorfully titled 2012 book. He’s built electric guitars, paper banjos, and PVC trombones. He mixes his own songs and creates his own album covers.
Then there’s his sound, which combines the vocal patina of late-career Prine with the gentle harmonies of Simon and Garfunkel and the ’round-the-campfire melodies of Raffi, if Raffi had a potty mouth. (See the 2020 lyrical gem “Born a worm / spins a cocoon / Goes to sleep / Wakes up a butterfly / Oh what the f*ck is that about?”) He often layers his own vocals in tight, two-minute tracks; there are twenty-seven on Smithereens.
Sonorous and soothing, that voice is as unique an instrument as the ones he fashions by hand. It shines on Smithereens’ “Nine Pound Hammer,” a cover of a bluegrass classic pulled from his early childhood in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. “One of the records we had was by Tennessee Ernie Ford,” he says. “When I was a kid, and I mean a little kid, I sang along with that song.”
Another childhood-inspired track on the album is “Hunt a Little,” which G&G is proud to premiere below. It features Reeder’s longtime love, the blues harmonica, and a primordial Southern setting that he reveals, Bob Ross–like, in an accompanying video he made himself.
“I remember as a kid going cane-pole fishing,” Reeder says of the song. “The brush is so thick you can’t cast, so you take a long cane pole and stick it out through the brush and dip it down into the water. The Mississippi River—I don’t know what it looks like now, actually—but it was this huge-ass river with islands and trees everywhere. And I always had this sort of Huck Finn fantasy that I could build a raft and just go somewhere else.”
But even when he’s singing the blues, he’s winking. Take “Bloo You Believe in Bloo Blove” from Smithereens, which finds the narrator drinking alone at a bar and making a show of watching the door, as if waiting on a friend; eventually he fools even himself into thinking someone is coming. Reeder wrote the song years ago with a less, um, alliterative title, but it didn’t feel right. “It occurred to me that if you’re drunk enough to be pretending that somebody would be coming in to meet you, you’re probably slurring words and talking nonsense, and then doubling down on the nonsense,” he explains.
Twenty years after Prine first got a kick out of Reeder getting a kick out of himself, he’s still having fun.
Watch the video for “Hunt a Little” below. Smithereens is out tomorrow and available for pre-save here.
