Track Premiere: Dan Raza “Wasn’t That Enough For Me”

Two good breaks propelled Dan Raza forward – being picked while still a student to tour with Joan Armatrading, and being championed by Neil Young on his ‘Living With War‘ website.  He’s already released two albums and today’s song is the first single taken from his up coming third album ‘Wayfarer‘ (due February 2025).  It’s been a while between Long Players as Dan explains: “After my last album, ‘Two’, came out (in 2017), I found myself feeling burnt-out and in need of a change of environment. I’d just come out of a long-term relationship, Brexit had just happened, and things were starting to feel quite claustrophobic for me in the UK.  I just had a realisation that life is short and I’d spent the best part of a decade-and-a-half doing the same things and had become a bit jaded; I wanted to go new places, meet new people, and spend some time reflecting on where I was at the time and where I wanted to go next.”  The solution was book a flight to Tennessee, and begin a long period of touring around the US, Mexico and mainland Europe.

Speaking of the song Dan Raza told us that: “I think it’s normal at the end of a relationship to experience feelings of self-doubt, confusion and guilt. The protagonist in the song is in conflict. He knows he has to drive forward, but he’s still haunted by the ghosts of the past in his rear-view mirror.  This is a good example of a song surprising me in the studio. For each session, I will always have a general instinct for how I expect and want a track to feel – but I like to be quite flexible with that. For example, the original home demo I made of this song had more of a stripped-back feel, similar to the acoustic material on Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’ album. But, once we got in the recording studio with everyone and started introducing different elements, like keys and backing vocals into the mix, this track quickly started to take on more of a wider, rolling, cinematic feel. It’s quite an emotional thing to behold other people taking your song and transforming it, with their playing and ideas, into something beautiful and unexpected. These are the transcendent days in the recording process.”