Manchester psych alumni Daniel Land is back with his first new LP in three years ‘In Love With a Ghost’, this album follows albums ‘Love Songs For The Chemical Generation’ and ‘The Space Between Us’ by Daniel Land & The Modern Painters. It was recorded over the three years following that group’s disbanding, at a time when he seriously considered giving up making music.
His new single ‘New York Boogie-Woogie’ is driven by a piano motif, guitar shimmer and laced with Land’s doleful. It’s an intoxicating, widescreen scene setter infused with a deceptively heartfelt quality. Land explains, “This is an album about cities. It is an album about reinvention, and starting your life over. It is an album about growing up, finding love, and settling down. And to a lesser degree, it is about the damage that can be done to a person, or a family, by falling in love with the wrong person. With ‘In Love With A Ghost’, I came full circle for a while by incorporating a whole bunch of influences that pre-date my love of dream-pop and shoegaze. I really wanted to make a colourful, widescreen, detailed record. When I started the album, I didn’t have a live band, and most of the tracks were written on the piano, for my own amusement, rather than for a group with three guitarists.”
Daniel suffered a series of health issues midway through making the album, including a chronic inner-ear infection that left him partially deaf for over a year and also prone to bouts of dizziness.
“Unable to make music, and living in a new city made me feel, at times, powerfully depressed. This became a crisis of confidence that went very deep and it did seem, for a while, that I would never find my way back to making music again. Finishing the album was a process that involved re-evaluating my life and overhauling my relationship to music, and coming out of the other side more healthy, more humble, and more grateful. It’s good to be back again,” says Daniel.
