The roots rockers play The Refinery on October 18
The roots band—featuring Andrew Hendryx, Mike Sivilli, Dan Lotti, and Steven Sandifer—performs at The Refinery on October 18.
Fifteen years ago, Dangermuffin was the sound of Folly Beach. They packed Surf Bar every Sunday night with rootsy songs that were full of depth yet still danceable and breezy. But after touring behind 2017’s Heritage, their last full-length album, they’ve made limited appearances—until the release of the self-titled Dangermuffin this August.
“There were a lot of signs saying it was time to slow down,” says singer/guitarist Dan Lotti of the band’s mind-set by 2018. A decade into performing 100 shows a year across the country, Lotti and his bandmates—Mike Sivilli (guitar) and Steven Sandifer (percussion and bass)—were feeling burnout on a personal level.
Just before the pandemic, Lotti and Sivilli helped form a production company, Morning Moon. The duo backed actress and singer Billie Lourd (Carrie Fisher’s daughter) during performances and wrote the score for Wildflower, a film starring actress Kiernan Shipka. In spring 2020, at the moment all touring musicians were forced to stay home, Lotti and Sivilli had a solid work-from-home gig writing and recording music. But they missed the freedom of being on stage together and realized that touring and interacting with Dangermuffin’s community had become part of their social language. “Playing with this band is an intricate, intimate part of who we are as people,” says Lotti.
In autumn 2022, Dangermuffin—including new addition Andrew Hendryx on mandolin—gathered in a cabin near Brevard, North Carolina, to work through years of musical and lyrical ideas they’d individually collected. On previous albums, like their breakthrough Moonscapes in 2010, the band played songs “500 times” before going into the studio. But for Dangermuffin, they booked time at Asheville’s Echo Mountain Recording and decided to let the collective aura in the historic room—a former church that’s hosted Band of Horses and the Avett Brothers—dictate the song development. “It’s a very special place to play music, and we were able to bring a little bit more of that moment into the recording,” says Lotti.
In August, Dangermuffin released a self-titled album, its first full-length collection since 2017.
After the hiatus from the studio, the 10-song result feels like their most complete album. The music video for the first single, “I Will Never Forget,” features images and video looking back on the band’s two decades. Lotti lost his mother two years ago, and although the song wasn’t written about her, he was overwhelmed with her presence while playing it in Echo Mountain. “It brought emotion to a song inspired by abstract ideas about déjà vu and synchronicities and how confusing and also reassuring they can be,” Lotti recalls. “The point of the song is that there are these amazing coincidences that are so simple you can overlook them. That’s where the magic is.”
The opening track,“We Push Mountains,” is classic Dangermuffin, with punchy, orchestrated stops complementing the feel-good shuffle. The introspective “The Golden Age” winds things down, with Lotti singing, “I don’t want to fake the golden age.” It’s an appropriate conclusion for a band setting the intention to begin a new era. “This is the most work we’ve done for any album. From mixing as many as 200 tracks on each song to the artwork, it’s a 1,000 hours kind of thing,” says Lotti. “It feels so great to release it to the universe.”
On October 18, Dangermuffin performs at The Refinery with The Infamous Stringdusters. Despite Sivilli and Lotti living in Asheville, they consider it a hometown show. “These mountains are where I reside now, but it’s not as much of a home as Folly Beach,” says Lotti. “That’s where we were born.”
Listen Up: Watch the music video for “I Will Never Forget,” a retrospective of Dangermuffin’s two decades.
