Amigo the Devil, the musical project of Danny Kiranos, is acclaimed for his storytelling and compelling lyrics, full of drama and darkness. His gruff and gritty voice is perfect for these murderous folk tales and confessional traumas. For the past year, Kiranos has been touring relentlessly, promoting his fourth full-length release, “Yours Until the War is Over”, a collection that draws heavily on human responses to unsettling situations, loss and survival; it’s uncompromising, unrelenting and utterly absorbing. During the UK leg of the tour, Amigo the Devil – with a full band – has been supporting Frank Turner and the shows have been intense and emotional. Most of all, though, the shows have showcased Kiranos’s wit and dark humour, with audiences laughing along to his reflections on songs such as ‘Murder at the Bingo Hall’, ‘Hell and You’, ‘Once Upon a Time at Texaco pt. 1′, ‘My Body is a Dive Bar’, and ‘Husband’, the latter of which has a particularly challenging theme and personal back story.
Towards the end of the tour, AUK’s Andrew Frolish caught up with Kiranos backstage at The Corn Exchange in Ipswich. The band and crew were dealing with the realities of the road – laundry and sleep and singing happy birthday for a crew member. Just before the show, Danny took the time to play us a song in the green room, raw and acoustic, and to tell us about what it means to him. He chose to play ‘Virtue and Vitriol’ from the latest album, a song he considers to be one of his most personal and introspective, perfect for this quiet, intimate setting. Many thanks to Danny and his management for putting on this extra little mini-gig exclusively for us – check out the video and his thoughts on it below.
After the song, as we began to chat, Danny picked out a beautiful melody on the guitar, compelled to play it and share its musical language.
“So, you made a mistake and put a guitar in my hand. That’s a problem – I’m just gonna keep playing!”
Oh, what a lovely soundtrack to our conversation!
“I’ll be quiet with it!”
So, why did you choose that song?
“I think it’s a song based on exhaustion. Exhaustion with tolerance and, you know, dying relationships, exhaustion with tolerance to strangers that believe you owe them something, tolerance with the world you don’t really understand – all kinds of tolerance and the exhaustion that goes with it. They come on, these moments backstage before the show; it’s not that anything is horribly wrong, but there is a level of exhaustion. Especially, we wait to work quite a bit and we tour nine months of the year kind of thing. At a certain point that exhaustion just begins to wear on you because the world sees tours as individual brackets, but they continue, they don’t really stop. It doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s just a continuous cycle of routine so that exhausts you. In that song specifically, I kept asking myself some questions about why am I tolerating unhappiness? Why am I protecting everything but myself? And I had to find this perspective to make sense of it, and that was the internalising. And at any time that I find a reason to analyse something from my perspective, I also have to analyse it from what I’m assuming is the other side. What do I do wrong? I can’t just blame everyone else…So I have to look at myself and see: what do I do wrong? If I keep stretching my head out, if I keep on creating, if I keep being tolerant, if I keep on giving, is it really someone else’s fault to keep taking? Sometimes. But if I’m not gonna stand up and protect myself with the people around me, that truly are building a future with me, what am I doing? I’m nourishing a monster that doesn’t need to be fed, and by monster, I don’t mean people, I mean situations. There was just no protection, and there are moments backstage where we do feel fairly alone. I think exhaustion sort of breaks the barriers down of humanity, but we start to feel like: why are we do with this? And at the end of it, some things are worth sacrificing yourself for. You must sacrifice yourself for you. That’s worth it. My family – sacrifice myself for my family. The right ones in the family – that’s all! You can put that down! That’s fine – they know!”
Speaking of exhaustion on tour, of course, you’re coming towards the end of quite a long run and you’re supporting Frank Turner over here in the UK. What’s that been like?
“That’s good – it’s our third time touring with Frank. Frank has built a beautiful little castle, a little floating castle. And he has allowed us within the walls and protects us very well and keeps everything flowing beautifully. So it does make everything a lot easier than if we were to just be on our own, you know? I’m grateful for that. So, we’re in a little floating castle right now. It’s not drugs, this floating castle! It’s not even drugs.”
Sounds good – I like the idea of floating castle. It sounds like a song title – maybe the next album!
