A few of you may know Daniel as the emotive voice on Mark Ronson’s chart-busting cover of The Smiths Stop Me. He is however, anything but a set of rent-a-pipes, and his debut album Love & War will rapidly tear up any pre-conceived ideas of what and who he is.
Having quickly garnered industry attention in his native Australia, Merriweather begun work on tracks for the album that he would later shelve before release because the label just "wasn't ready and that’s not how I wanted it to be." Courted by major labels there, few could see beyond the marketplace and how this voice could sit alongside the home-grown rock music that dominated the charts at the time.
18 months of writing and recording later, punctuated by months on the road touring with Ronson’s Version Players band and one nasty incident with a polyp on his vocal chords and its subsequent recovery period later has created the artist that he is now. “I just felt something had changed. I went back into the studio after I’d recovered. You think I’d be more cautious with it but it actually freed me up. You could die tomorrow and so I might as well go and sing the fuck out of these songs. Singing is an emotional thing; you’re giving a lot – a month or two off and getting back into the studio felt really good.”
