Emmerald: Tell me about the album, "Dani Siciliano Likes". I heard "Walk The Line", your single, on Worldwide a while back, and it really caught my ear. Now, I've had the chance to listen to the entire album a few times, and I really like it. It’s got a really different sound, and interesting sound. How did you come up with the concept and the sound for the album?
Dani Siciliano: I’ve had a pretty strong background in night clubs, and I have quite a strong understanding of music. I enjoy what I’ve gotten out of jazz music so much, but in some ways I feel like it hasn’t moved forward very much. In the past, you know, there would be moments when like you feel like there’s an offshoot of something that’s about to happen, then it just doesn't take off. I just don’t feel like a real ballsy shift has occurred. I don’t think I've necessarily done that. I don’t think I’ve done anything extremely pioneering, but I just didn’t want to fall back on the laurels of things that have already worked within dance music. For example, with "Walk the Line", that song has a lot of different styles, whether it’s like a kind of trashy semi-punk new-wavy sound, or, you know, a house song, or kind of like Two Step. So there’s all sorts of sounds. I just didn’t want it to sound like anything else.
Emm: How did you end up doing the "Come As You Are" cover? Dani Siciliano: I just knew that I wanted to cover that song. It had just been in my mind to do for a long time. I wanted to try make it sound like an old standard, give it a kind of dark jazz standard sound, you know what I mean? The lyrics are fabulous, and I just wanted to kind of give it a little bit more depth in the music. I think it was a well written three-chord rock tune as well, but I just wanted to give it a bit more of an edge musically, and make it sound like a standard.
Emm: Who did you work with on this album?
Dani: A lot of the tunes I started on in my own in my little studio, and then I would flush them out in more sophisticated studios. My studio is pretty simple. I would work on my own, then bring those bits over to Matt's studio. I worked with the engineers and producers there. In some cases, just Matt and I would work on the production a bit further. So, for the most part, I produced the tracks, with Matt doing some additional production.
Emm: Matt? That's Matthew Herbert, or Herbert, right?
Dani: Yes, that's right.
Emm: How did you create the different sounds you hear on the album?
Dani: Well, I play clarinet. So any clarinet you hear on the album, like on "Red", that's me. I also used a lot of pre-recorded sounds, and many different sound sources. I used a lot of old sounds. I mean one was like from 1979, and one was from 1985 or 86. One of the sounds I used was an old typewriter. I also used a lighter sound on "Come as you Are". It was done as a kind of tribute song, so I used the like a mechanic crackly sound of a lighter, you know that crick-crick of a lighter on that one. I also used an interesting French horn sound. I had a person playing it by knocking inside in the bell of the horn. It sounds quite metallic, like a really flat bell or something. On "One String", I just sampled a guitar string. I like played one string on the guitar and then I just cut that sample of it in many different ways, so that entire instrument sound is one sound.
Emm: It’s really interesting to take those sounds that you hear every day and make different rhythms out of it. I think if you're into music, you're in tune to the natural rhythm of everyday things, you know what I mean?
