Daniel Kemish & Friends

(UK)

The heartland of America isn’t confined to America alone. It exists wherever a man picks up a guitar, gazes at the horizon with the resignation of those who have lost much and the stubbornness of those who carry on regardless, and decides to put it all into a song. It exists in Nashville, in Bakersfield, in the cotton fields of Mississippi, but it also exists, more improbably and therefore more interestingly, in a childhood spent in Portugal, in a British boy who grew up between the Atlantic and the Alentejo and remained forever convinced that he was born on the wrong continent.

Daniel Kemish was born in the UK, but it was in Portugal that he grew up, and this dual identity shaped in him something that genuine Americans rarely achieve: the necessary distance to view tradition clearly, without the pressure of having to defend or betray it. He began playing in British bars and clubs in 2006, performing other people’s songs, searching for his own voice. In 2011, he decided it was time to have something of his own to say. He had accumulated stories of roads travelled, of nights in nameless countries etched in his memory, of people met and left behind.

Daniel Kemish’s music is American American in the noblest sense of the term. The kind that precedes trends and survives them. Blues, country, alternative folk, all filtered through the lens of someone who knows the tradition because he loved it before he studied it.

The debut album Fools & Money, recorded at the legendary Ocean Way Studios in Nashville – where Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and R.E.M. had previously recorded – was released in 2016 and immediately set the tone: a raspy baritone voice, observational and sombre lyrics, and country music filtered through the sensibilities of 1970s outlaw rock. The influences are clear and acknowledged. Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Bob Seger. But what Daniel Kemish does with them is his own: not imitation, but lineage. The second album, Under The Same SkySky, was written in radical isolation, in a refuge in the Austrian mountains with no electricity, no running water, no telephone, heated only by a wood-burning stove and the urgency to create. In 2023, Hard Times, recorded entirely on analogue tape at Welcome to 1979 Studios in Nashville, mixed live without a computer, cut directly to vinyl from analogue masters, arrived as a statement of principle: that the honesty of the sound matters just as much as the honesty of the words.

Daniel Kemish has built much of his reputation as a solo artist. Just him, his guitar and the room. But over the years he has gathered trusted musicians for those moments when the songs called for more than a voice and six strings. The Friends accompanying him at MED are not mere decoration: they are the natural extension of a sound that grows when shared.