Madonna would be proud.
As an accomplished composer, Danielle Eva Schwob has worked with Philip Glass, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and Ben Folds and her impressive compositions has been featured in numerous film, radio and television projects of all stripes. However, it's her work as DELANILA that we're excited to feature today.
Schwob's dark alter ego conjures comparisons to the Material Girl for her ability to create songs both seductive and muscular. Today's featured premiere, "Time Slips Away," is a hypnotic, ghostly song whose musical mood matches the shadowy subject about which she sings.
We asked Danielle to tell us about the song's origins:
"Time Slips Away" is about wasting time online. Written during a period when I was working at home on my own and staring at a screen a lot, its lyrics are deliberately repetitive, as life can sometimes be. For a long time, it was lost in search of a better chorus, a bigger sound and an apocalyptic outro. True to its title, it took me a long time to finish.
I wanted the ending, and the lyrics, to feel like the earth was caving in. Because sometimes it feels like it is. It’s 2019 and politics doubles as entertainment, we waste hours interacting with each others' avatars, texting and “liking” and typing but not speaking, watching friends “fade into the strangest lives” and blindly following celebrities while wondering why our relationships lack depth. My screen is my “hollow windowpane” to the world, through which I “watch as it disintegrates.” Life: wired in and simultaneously disconnected. Beyond that, the song is about how strange it is to walk the long and largely solitary path towards becoming a good songwriter/composer with an internet connection, linked artificially to everyone you have ever known while writing alone in a room.
I wrote and demo’d it initially in my home studio, sorting out programming and mapping out guitar, bass and synth parts. Then I worked on it some more with Pearse MacIntyre (Emily Burns), who is a great musician and programmer, at Abbey Road in London, and producer David Bottrill (Tool, Muse) in NY along with the rest of the band – Nick Semrad (Cory Henry & The Funk Apostles), Adam Agati (Ludacris), Reuben Cainer (Animus Rexx) and Jim Orso (Escort). Playing alongside such brilliant musicians was a blast. Then David and I tracked vocals and mixed it in Toronto, which took most of the winter because we recorded way too much. He’s the single biggest reason the project sounds as expressive, expansive and clear as it does, though Emily Lazar, our mastering engineer, had a huge hand in that as well.
VISIT: DELANILA