After starting as a lark at parks and schools in Brooklyn, Dan Zanes & Friends would come to set the standard for what family music could be. In addition to the Grammy-winning album, “Catch That Train!” his many albums are distinguished by their mix of re-energized folk classics and original folksy songs, as well as explorations into special niches in everything from Latino music in the 2008 album “Nueva York!” to nautically inspired tunes in 2004’s “Sea Music.” This past July, he released a greatest hits album, “Get Loose And Get Together: The Best of Dan Zanes,” and on the eve of his annual holiday show at City Winery on December 14, we couldn’t think of a better time to catch up with him at his home in Brooklyn.
What was putting a greatest hits album together like for you?
It was nice to look back, and it seemed like a good time to stop and look back and take stock of things. I felt good, man. There wasn’t anything I listened to that I was like: ‘I would have done that differently.’ I felt like it was just right. Not because I consider myself any big genius, but because I have always worked with such great people. There’s always been really strong people involved. Not all professional musicians just people with a lot of spirit, soul, and heart. So I felt like we all cooked something up together, and none of us really knew what we were doing in terms of making all-ages music, but just trying to update what the folk-ways records did for me when I was a kid. Like Peter Seeger, Led Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Ella Jenkins. So it would be a mix of old and new songs, from a variety of traditions, a few different languages, kind of inclusive music, and it would always sound like it was made in someone’s kitchen.
Was that always the plan?
Yeah, I wanted it to sound like the neighborhood, even though I’m a lot clearer now on why that’s important. Back then, I just thought: “This is New York, this is great.” I grew up in New Hampshire in the white mono-culture, so I was able to appreciate the multi-culture down here. I just thought: ‘This is the 21st century; we need to make records that sound like the city.’ At least get as close to that as we can. That was always important. But I never wanted it to sound like a studio, it I wanted it to sound like a house. Because a studio is an abstract concept to me, and I’m a grown up. But to a kid–what’s a studio, where’s that sound? What’s that place? I don’t know. I wanted it to sound like a house because that’s where a lot of people make music, in their homes. I would listen to Lead Belly’s records and I just pictured him sitting in the kitchen with his guitar. So I just always knew that that’s where you made your music.
Very nice. The way you described it, it’s like a yearning to get back to old-fashioned jamming. I grew up in Brighton Beach, and my older cousins used to take their guitars down to the boardwalk.
Wow. That’s it though. That’s not how I grew up, but that’s the reality I wanted to try to create for listeners to think about. So I was trying to create something that I never actually had. I think it’s important, and it’s something I have now as a grown-up. I want me as a 5-year-old or 7-year-old, I want that kid to be able to hear these records and think: ‘Ah man, people from all different places and backgrounds get together and jam.’ And that’s what life can be. And that’s what I’ve always tried to make.
Tell us about one or two songs on the greatest hits that are special to you—maybe one old one and one new one.
The song ‘Hello’ is the only original song from the first record. The thing about it that’s cool for me is that it’s three chords over and over again, which I do a lot, but it’s also got Barbara Brousal on there. When I started doing family music, I was playing with a couple of dudes who I met at the playground, good guys—my friends—so we played together. And then—and this is a turning point in my whole life—I was talking to this friend of mine, my oldest friend, Mike, up in Newton Mass., and I was telling him about playing at PS 29. And I was like: ‘Yeah man, it was beautiful, there were black kids, Latino kids, Arabic kids, white kids, an even mix of everyone was in there, Asian kids, such a diversity—incredible—and we’re playing songs from a few different traditions.’
And he said: ‘That’s great, but so who were you playing with?’
‘A couple of guys are I know.’
‘Are they white guys?’
‘Yeah.’
And he said: ‘So you have three white guys playing the music, how do you think the girls in the audience related to that?’ And I had no idea what he was talking about, because I had been playing rock-and-roll my whole, life so a collection of white dudes was all I knew. For playing music, that was the default. But then I got it, I got what he said. And then a week later I was like: “Wow, he really is right about that, forget about the racial piece, I’m not even playing with women.” Then I ran into Barbara Brousal, who I knew from the summer camp I worked at. And it was like God put her on her bike and sent her down the street to me. And we started talking, and I asked her to join the band. And sure enough, she was with me for years. She was the first woman in the band—there have been many women in the band—and we’ve gotten to the point now where it’s always a multiracial group of men and women. It’s important to me that kids in the audience can look onstage and see themselves. Otherwise, I think however well-intentioned the music is, the subtle implication is that this is a white guy’s thing. And we’re reinforcing that old thing, which should die an immediate death, I think. So that was a turning point, and Barbara was the beginning of that for me. [‘Hello’] was the first song she sang on it. She started writing songs in Spanish, she was a Spanish teacher. It was really cool. That’s why that song means something to me. And as for one of the new ones? ‘Coney Island Avenue’ might be on there.
I haven’t heard that one, and I grew up two blocks from Coney Island Avenue–I was very happy to see a song named Coney Island Avenue.
I wrote it standing on the corner of Coney Island Avenue when I first moved to this neighborhood. At least a couple of years ago, 11218 was the most diverse zip code in the country, and that’s all around here. So walking down Coney Island Avenue is like walking around the world. So I was thinking about that, and I was just thinking about Brooklyn, and I think Andrew Wyeth—all his paintings were in a four mile radius of his house—and I thought all of my songs could be within a two mile radius of wherever I’m living in Brooklyn. So I love Brooklyn – and I loved Brooklyn even before it was the center of the universe. And I still love it–it’s a little obnoxious now–but I still love it out here. Because it’s really is a nice, diverse environment. It makes me feel more of a sense of life’s possibilities, more what I think life can be…I appreciate it. Just being a worker among workers out here.
Are you a Leonard Cohen fan at all?
A little bit.
He once made a documentary of his life living in the city of Montreal—and the sentiment was very similar to what you just said. It was so important to him to live in the city, in the community.
That’s cool. I’d like to see that. I feel lucky to live out here. Like I said, I’m from New Hampshire, I know the other experience, and that’s experience a lot of people have—and not to take away from it, but multicultural living is the best.
Was it hard for you to separate from Barbara?
Oh, no. We were ready to go our separate ways. We drove each other crazy. Barbara brought a lot to the party. She certainly did. Then there was a year of a lot of changes. Cynthia Hopkins went off to become a superstar. I could have seen that from the day I met her. But it was nice, we’re all still friends, and I just feel so blessed to have the people that have come through the band, as permanent members and guests.
Is Elena [Moon Park] still in the band?
Yes, she is. She made that record of hers, ‘Rabbit Days and Dumplings –Music from East Asia,’ which is amazing. And Father Goose made his record. And now Sonya de los Santos is going to be releasing on Festival Five, a record of hers, songs primarily from Latin America, some that’s she written, all in Spanish, and it’s really good. So that’s coming up. She has some great guests on that.
Help me kind of understand a little bit about your relation to the music you choose. You go through different genres, and then you try to keep great songs alive. How does this work?
‘Sea Music’ was a natural thing, it has a lot to do with the music that I grew up hearing in New England, and then a group down here called New York Packet–a group of folk musicians that are dedicated to maritime music–and my daughter and I used to go hear them sing every week, so that inspired me. It was really just done to give to people for the holidays, we just all got together and recorded a bunch of these things, and then we loved the way it came out and we said: ‘Oh, well let’s turn it into a CD.’
And then my wife at the time had come back from the Carl Sandburg’s [American Songbag]..and she was like, you should do a record based on these songs. I didn’t even have to think twice about it. I had never even seen the book, I loved Carl Sandburg enough to know—I mean I knew enough about him to know where it was coming from, but I’d never looked at the book before, so I started digging into him and the book. He was really the first guy to look at the overview—or what was, at the time, the most comprehensive overview—of American folk music, and take it seriously and want to write about it, and write in his style, which is so beautiful, and so generous. People at that time, in the 1920s, people weren’t really taking that stuff that seriously, it wasn’t like it is now. He almost had a nervous breakdown, making this thing, but it was a real labor of love—280 songs, crazy piano arrangements, super flowery. Not what I would think of at all as folk music, but somebody kind of arranged them in these grand formal stylings, and then Carl Sandburg wrote a lot about the songs, and then you listen to his performances of some of the tunes and it’s like performance art, you can’t tell, does he even know the song? What’s he doing? It’s so weird, the whole thing is so weird and personal, how could I not love that. And for its time, he was incredibly multicultural and incredibly inclusive, and so that really spoke to me.
Then we made a couple more family records, and we won a Grammy. And then after winning a Grammy, we put out a record all in Spanish. That was because we were tapping into it. I went out to Iowa, and I did this tour of little towns in Iowa, and there were communities that had gone from 0% to 40% Mexican, Mexican-American or Central American in the space of 15 years because of meatpacking jobs. So this unbelievable shift is happening, and I’m thinking: ‘Well if it’s happening in Iowa, this is happening everywhere, and I gotta learn how to speak Spanish, man, or I’m gonna miss the party.’ So I started taking Spanish lessons at El Taller on the Upper West Side. It’s like a cultural center, and the guy who runs it, Bernardo Palumbo, we’d talk a lot about music. And he was friendly with Pete Seeger, and he had been part of the kind of radical Latinos in New York in the ‘70s, and there was always music around the movement at that point, so he was very well-connected and very knowledgeable about music from all around Latin America.
And he said: ‘Man you wanna make a record in Spanish? I’ll help you, you can do it.’ And he did, and he was a once-in-a-lifetime teacher, really, really set me on a track, and just kind of blew the walls right out of my world. Everything opened up once I met Bernardo, and I started to see at that point what multicultural living could be, because all of a sudden, I was hanging out with a lot of people I had never hung out with before, and it was beautiful, and since then, I’ve come to realize how, that for a lot of white people, we live in such isolation. We live in white isolation and we live in a multicultural city, but that’s not the life that we live. We can so easily live in that bubble, and so that’s when all of that started to break down for me, and you can tell how grateful I am to this guy. And that kind of started me on a whole other path, which is trying to examine what the possibilities are, and who’s invited to the party and who’s not, you know? Because when you really look at it, white people get a lot of the invitations to the party and everybody else gets very few. And the thing is for me, my experience tells me once I started to recognize that and push back against that for myself, that I started to experience and understand white power and privilege. I started to feel freedom, and I started to actually feel like a part of the human race. And to take the actions that I can take to connect and to be living a more inclusive life, and I started feeling freedom, started feeling better than I ever had, and that’s, you know, one of the things that I think sometimes we get kind of uncomfortable at the thought–that we’ve got to examine our power and privilege and all that stuff, but you know the other side of it is this incredible possibility for being connected to the isolation, or as I’ve heard it called, the ‘comfortable prison of whiteness.’
You know it’s funny because–speaking personally for a minute–growing up in Brooklyn, my life has been almost—in terms of the kinds of issues we’re talking about, I was bequeathed a very good place, I grew up with, I had Puerto Rican friends and Chinese friends and African-American friends, and it’s been one long slide into the bubble. After grade school, after public school, I went to Cornell University, and I was shocked. I thought: ‘That’s where it’s going to be a kind of indivisible play zone of all these really smart people,’ but no, it’s separate—I couldn’t believe it, and that’s when I started thinking about these things again. But really, my life has never been less segregated than it was when I was in grade school.
Yeah that’s fascinating, I totally believe it.
I mean honestly—I had an African American friend who had to go to a foster home, I asked my mother if we could adopt him, I was really—these are all my friends. Life quickly went the other way.
That’s really interesting, that’s what this country does to us. There’s a real pull to separate us.
Have you ever had a significant other who was not white?
Yeah, most of my girlfriends in the last few years.
That’s really cool. I think even from a gender point of view. Being married, you have a front row seat of what women go through.
My girlfriend is Director of Diversity at Brooklyn Friends. So she’s right in the thick of it, so we talk about this shit all the time.
You go down many channels to explore different kinds of music—from sea music to Latino music. Do you still intend to cycle back through more family albums now and then?
To me, they’re all family records—that’s the thing, it’s a constant source of frustration for me. Since I did win a Grammy, you know, once you win one, you want more. I keep thinking I’m making records that are really good family records. They keep getting put in other categories. I made the one with Elizabeth Mitchell, and I thought: ‘Well, how could you put this in any other category?’ And they put it in the folk category, so I don’t know, but to me they’re all family records. But what I’ve realized in the last two years is that they’re really not children’s records, because I’ve been doing this early childhood music education program—developing it with the Brooklyn Conservatory—and so I’ve learned a lot about early childhood, and I realized that my records are nice records to listen to as a family. And I’m sure kids listen to them and hear a lot of mystery, and I hope the kids hear them and there’s a lot of mystery and identification and emotional connection that they can make, but I see now how important simplicity is for children to really latch onto things. Simple music is good. And my music isn’t always as simple. I think the next thing I want to do is make a record based on the music I’ve been writing for that early childhood program, and really make a record that’s for children and the classroom and for children and teachers, where it’s clear what the activities are, and it’s easy to get in and hold onto it, and sing along, and do something to it, and move to it. So I’m going towards minimalism now.
You use the phrase music for ‘all ages’ or families, and I think that’s great. My kids are jumping around and I’m sitting there soaking it all in. But if you drill down towards parenting, and make it more sort of that message that’s deeply relatable to a toddler or preschooler, then it would be fun for me to share with them, but less relatable.
Yes. Because I was so limited and attached to music, I just wanted to share the experience. I wanted my 1-year-old daughter, and me as a 35-year-old, to both really have an emotional connection to whatever we were listening to. It wouldn’t be songs about romantic love because that wouldn’t work for her, but it couldn’t be songs about old girlfriends and drinking, or it couldn’t be songs about learning to tie your shoes, it had to be somewhere in the middle.
How old is she now?
She’s 20. How old are your kids?
I have a girl who’s 14 and a son who is 10. Every day I am learning anew about what it means to have a teenager. I’m like, ‘Ok I didn’t know that I can no longer micro-manage your life,’ I’m learning. I can really relate to the sentiment of having something to share with your child. Sometimes that’s a lot easier than just being their parent. My daughter and I had Harry Potter. Well, what I wanted to ask you is what her perspective is on your world now? Is she deeply proud of you, is in any way connected to the music scene?
I would always ask myself that same question. We just played out in LA where she goes to school. She came to the show. She had tumultuous teenage years, from 13 to 19, those were hard, you know, those were hard years for her, and there’s a lot of upheaval in her life and this and that, but I always recorded in the house, so people were always coming in and out. She got to know the band really well; she’d come to shows when she was little and play with us sometimes. I kept her out of school when the Blind Boys of Alabama came to record. I said: “You can’t go to school today because these guys are coming over, this will never happen again in your lifetime, and you have to be there to see this.” And they did not disappoint.We all had lunch together, then we recorded.
What album was that for?
‘Catch that Train.’ And she came to the show, and she was saying: ‘I can’t wait to see the band, they’re like my family.’ And I thought it was so nice, because I didn’t know she felt that way. She said she was watching the show and she was crying a lot because it took her back, and I really didn’t know, because there were a lot of times where I was just an idiot, the idiot dad. But of the same token I knew she was always proud of me too, and knew that I was doing something that I believed in, and all that. Even the stuff that would drive her crazy in our conversations. She called me up last year and said: ‘I have officially turned into Dan Zanes, I am leading a conversation about white privilege in my classroom and it’s so fucking intense.’ And I never know what gets in and what affects her, but I feel good now.
It’s really true; it was a part of her childhood. And now a part that she seems to remember fondly, that’s great.
At the time, there were a few years where we were very visible, because we were on Playhouse Disney, so wherever we went people would want to stop and say hi. And I always feel like I’m a country singer at heart. The country thing is if you fan wants to say hi, you stop and say hi, you can’t blow anybody off—these people are keeping you alive. Wherever we would be, [my daughter] would have to stop, she’d have to wave, and I would introduce her, this whole routine that she had absolutely no interest in. ‘I have to share my dad again!’ So there are all kinds of funny memories, but I’m really grateful that we’re in a good spot now, and she appreciates it.
Great. Do you feel very fruitful? I feel like you are incredibly fruitful. That’s a classic thing, for a person who’s so productive, right? You feel like this a lot.
Yeah, I do. I know there is more I could be doing every day. Do I really have to catch up on season three of ‘Scandal,’ or should I write a song. Sometimes I just want to watch ‘Scandal,’ you know, or something! But I don’t even have a TV. I look over it all and it feels really good. I feel like we did do a lot. Like I said before, I’m grateful that I am surrounded by incredible people. Whenever it’s time to do something, there is somebody right there who wants to jump in and join in and try to make something cool, or do something that hasn’t been done before, or reconfigure something in a new way, and so I’m grateful for all the people who are around me.
You have this public life, and then you have this deeply private life where you are solitary, almost. You’re composing, you’re getting through the day out here by yourself, and then your girlfriend comes home later. Do you both sides of it, or do you hate one more than the other?
I like it all. When we had those years being on Disney, we were super recognizable for a lot of people, and that was nice, and it was hard to make the adjustment to being a little more anonymous, and I like both. I like being able to walk down the street and be another dude on the sidewalk, but I also really appreciate when people come up and say hi, and that kind of thing. I like both.
You like performing?
I love performing. I’m super shy, so the performing piece is nice for me, so I get to express what I have difficulty expressing in everyday life.
Part of you must be, in a sense, thrilled. You were a rocker, and you found an enormously fruitful way to be a musician.
That’s the thing that’s so crazy. God’s imagination is so much bigger than my own, because my plans that I had for myself, in retrospect, were so limited. Just keep making pop records and hopefully make some money one day from it all. I had no idea I could make music that would connect with a broader audience, and that I could actually feel like a part of the human race. I had no idea and if anyone had explained it to me, I probably would have taken a pass on it anyway, because there wasn’t anything particularly glamorous about making music for kids or families, when I started. It’s a little more glamorous now.
It’s so funny you should put it that way, because you seem like someone who is doing something that is a perfect fit for them. The notes, the archiving of these songs that people haven’t sung in a while, mixed with your own songs, so the idea that if 25 years ago if someone told you that you would have been like, “What, me?” is really interesting, because now you seem to really deeply value the fact that you can bring all this music to people.
Yeah, it’s incredible. Like the say, the mystery and sense of life’s possibilities. My own script was pretty paltry compared to what ended up happening.
In addition to the album for little children, any amorphous ideas on your back burner right now?
Yeah, a few things. I scored a Buster Keaton movie, ‘Steamboat Bill Junior,’ so I’m doing more performing of that. I’m going to DC in a couple weeks to do that. Colin Brooks, my drummer, and I play live onstage and that’s really fun. And continuing to—I know this group, this constructive white conversations group, working with other people that are white people that are examining whiteness and white power and privilege, and how to do our part to dismantle it on a personal level, and see where the possibilities are for the shift towards true multicultural living away from the white-dominated life that we’re brought up in. That’s really important stuff to me, because I’m so blessed that I had people to point me in the right direction. It wasn’t because they were telling me what to do, it was because they were telling me their stories and what they did, and how their lives changed, and so that’s really important to me because I know how isolated I was and how cut off from society I have been for most of my life. And the way I feel now and the way I felt then–I would never ever go back to that. The idea of gathering with white people and talking about this is really important.
So do you think there might be a musical manifestation of this?
I’m talking to my friend Jose Garcia, from the Ruby Theatre Company, and we’re talking about something we can do around that, and maybe pull my friend Patrick Dower, and see if there’s a musical way to take the conversation, and stage it and add music to it. I feel like music makes things go down easier, ‘cause the race conversation, I know for my people anyway, is a tough one. It shouldn’t be, but it is, and we’re taught that it’s a tough one. ‘It’s going to be difficult, you’re going to be uncomfortable,’ and this and that, but man, its liberating and I’m all for liberation.
