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Friends,
I’m so happy to share this episode with you featuring my conversation with DANIEL HIGGS, best known as the front person of the Baltimore post-punk band Lungfish, but also known as a tattoo artist, a solo musician, a member of Fountainsun, the Pupils, and Skull Defects, and also as a painter of spiritual landscapes which often feature strange figures rendered in seized motion and vivd colors.
My first encounter with Daniel’s efforts came from listening to Lungfish, a band which I always find difficult to describe directly. That’s because Lungfish, like the rest of Daniel’s art and music offers something that is true and reveals itself on its own terms in collaboration with Daniel, the artist.
It’s far from pop music or even “punk” and closer to the work of artists like David Lynch, Emma Kunz, or the writing of Joy Williams.
So when I would try to tell friends about Lungfish when I was younger, I would say things like, “It’s a spiritual experience to go see them!” Of course that sounded canned.
So I’d shift and talk about the spectacle of the concert, say it was like seeing Walt Whitman in a band. Or I’d describe how the music was droning and loud and the singer’s voice was almost terrifying at times, and yet a real beauty somehow inhered in all of that.
The closest I came to describing a Lungfish show, though, was something like:
When you see them, you will fear that Daniel will levitate just a centimeter off the stage, and in that one centimeter, everything you know about the world will fall away. It wasn’t until finally speaking with Daniel, that I realized that this did happen – that in his music and art, a small space is made where a new world exists is rendered visible.
The way that Daniel describes some of this on the episode is that the concerts Invited people into intimacy – a quality of intimacy that will remind us that intimacy is ultimately what we’re always heading toward.
This conversation itself is intimate, we talk about friendship, about being able to perceive spiritual beings in a spiritual landscape, in the way a presence appears in the middle of a concert, and the way trust plays a paramount role in relationship and creating art.
Here’s an AEWCH DANIEL HIGGS SPOTIFY PLAYLIST with some of my favorite songs by Daniel and his bands for you.
Friends, this is the last full episode of 2023, but there will be a little surprise for you for the holidays soon. Please find the openness and the healing of creating peace.
Here are the words to “The Words” by Lungfish.
MORE ON DANIEL
- Here’s Daniel’s website, which features a lot of his artwork.
- Here’s a video of Daniel painting. Watching him work is really lovely.
- Fountainsun has an Instagram here.
- Here’s Fountainsun playing “Ripening Sheaves” in a forest.
- Here’s a good quality recording of a Lungfish concert from 2003 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
- If you’d like to know more about Daniel’s life as a tattooist, you can read his interview with Ed Hardy here.
- Two interviews with Daniel: First, at The Quietus, and second at Goat Palace Zine.
- My appearance on The Unanimous Hour, a podcast about Daniel’s art.
- You can support Daniel’s music by buying some of it online via the Gnome Life Records Bandcamp page. You can also support Dischord Records and the other members of Lungfish by purchasing their albums and physical merchandise on the Lungfish bandcamp page via Dischord Records.
- A recreation of Daniel’s cross (from the episode)
Conner Habib 