Local Legend Danny Shafer Releases New Album With String of Shows

Anyone who has engaged with the Boulder music scene over the past thirty years likely knows Danny Shafer. The Chicago native moved to Boulder in 1990; since then, he's become a prolific singer-songwriter and performer while also booking bands at small Front Range venues and working as a house manager for bigger gigs.

“I was 22 years old when I moved to Boulder, and I had a lot of raisin’ to still have done,” Shafer says. “I had a lot of growing up to do. I had dropped out of college a couple years before to tour with a bluegrass band. I could sing high and the band needed me, so they took me under their wing and taught me [bluegrass]. Best decision I ever made.”

Shafer, who has a gentle, vulnerable touch to his Americana singing and songwriting, didn't grow up on bluegrass in the Windy City. His family would play country music in the car, while Shafer was into such hard-rock artists as UFO and Ronnie James Dio — “whatever was coming through the older guys in the neighborhood filtered through whatever older brothers were around,” he recalls.

His dad was a Chicago cop who raised Shafer and his siblings “with all this Chicago pride,” he says, "particularly living in Cubs territory on the North Side.” He says he was even brought home from the hospital as a baby with a Cubs hat on. But a little more than a decade later, while Shafer was in seventh grade, he started coming home with song ideas. He began writing music the day after he started playing guitar.

“As soon as someone handed me a guitar,” he remembers, “I felt like I was supposed to express myself with words and with a guitar. I really wanted to be a great guitar player at one point, but writing songs always took me away from studying. Writing songs was more important. It still is.”

Shafer has written approximately 500 songs, with eight studio albums and countless demos as a solo artist and bandleader, including the just-released Phone Booth. He'll be performing songs from that album and many more at several upcoming shows, including at Abbott & Wallace Distilling on Saturday, September 9; City Star Brewing on Sunday, September 10; and the Dairy Arts Center on Wednesday, September 13, where he'll open for folk duo Mama's Broke. He'll also play the Wheel House in Niwot on October 1. “That's been the place where I've been able to do listening-room shows,” Shafer says. “I seem to be able to get people to sit down and really listen to the music there, so I've played probably eight shows there in the last three years. I've really enjoyed those shows, so I'm looking forward to being back there.”

Shafer has been performing almost constantly since he was a teenager. “When I was sixteen years old, I had my first weekly gig at the Happy Days bar in Chicago. I think it was $25 a week," he recalls. "I’d play for the old guys at the bar. My mom would drive me there and drive me home. It was a great experience.”

Those formative moments led Shafer to drop out of Northeastern Illinois University in 1990 and move to Boulder with the bluegrass band Geezer Junction. The musicians had a rough time getting gigs along the Front Range, so they focused on playing the streets for a bit before going back to Chicago. But Shafter soon returned to Colorado, hitchhiking back to Boulder with $90 and a guitar. He hasn’t left.

“This area has been very, very good to me,” Shafer muses. “The local scene here is always, always giving me work, something to do, a way to be present. I’ve made a living off of some sort of music [work] for a long time. The sacrifices are...you can see them from a mile away sometimes, but that doesn’t really bother me much. I figure if you’re going to go through all the things that regular life brings, like fear and anxiety and divorce and taxes and all that shit, you might as well do it in a good scene, in a place that’s beautiful.”

Shafer’s new album, Phone Booth, is so far only available on his SoundCloud page. “I call it a mini-record,” he says. “There are six songs on it, and it’s been very warmly received, so I’m happy about it. It’s a songwriter record, [but] the subject matter is all over the place.”

The overall sound is a departure from his ordinary style, recorded in such a lo-fi way that some people might not even believe it's Shafer. “My last record was recorded for Octave Records, and it was done very high-audio, so this was a chance to turn it around and record something that was more lo-fi, just doing it my own way and making it available," he explains. "The way music is put out right now is sort of the way I always hoped it would be — for the small guys.”

Doing Phone Booth Shafer’s "own way" included just one thing: pressing “record” on his iPhone’s Voice Memo app.

“Just the red button,” he beams. “I recorded this record completely on my phone in my house. I’d get a take and then I’d move on. Maybe I re-recorded two of the songs and waited for a better take, [but] not a single knob, EQ, master or anything was touched on this. I didn’t touch anything. And then I put it out.”

The result is an endearing, heartfelt and surprisingly clear collection of songs sung sweetly by Shafer and played on a $100 Yamaha guitar with three-year-old strings.

“It just sounded dead and cool and different,” Shafer says. “I hope that people find [Phone Booth] lovable in an odd way. I had friends call me when it was released and say, ‘I listened to it twice because I couldn’t believe it was over.’ I also had some audio engineers that own really nice studios say, ‘I like this record. I think it sounds really good.’ They didn’t know it was recorded on my telephone. I didn’t tell them. I just let it go and sat with that information.”

Danny Shafer, 7 p.m. Saturday, September 9, Abbott & Wallace Distilling, 250 Terry Street, #120, Longmont; 5 p.m. Sunday, September 10, City Star, 321 Mountain Avenue, Berthoud; 7 p.m. Wednesday, September 13, Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut Street, Boulder (tickets are $25); Sunday, October 1, the Wheel House, 101 Second Avenue, Niwot.