Back when I was an avid music writer, I somehow wound up on the Web site of Paste Music, an Atlanta company which publishes a national magazine and, at the time, ran a record company of the same name. The record company part produced Adult Alternative type music like you hear on the soundtrack of Grey's Anatomy.

Perusing that site I caught sight of a singer-songwriter named Jennifer Daniels. Frankly it was her looks that grabbed me first, but after listening it turned out she had a world-class voice, too! I looked her site up and saw she would be playing at a Unitarian church coffee thingy in the near future. I made a point to be there, and also e-mailed her that I'd like to write about her for my happening `zine, Voyager.

Upon hearing her in person I determined this was certainly a star in the making, and it was my duty as a music fan to give her some promotion. So I scheduled a time to do a phone interview and produced an article.

Around that time I was also getting my stuff published in Creative Loafing, and decided she would benefit much more from that exposure than from my homebrew project. Creative Loafing said they had just done a story on her the previous year (that was last year, this is this year?). She tours the East coast a lot so I also sent a query letter to the newspaper in Rome, Georgia, where she was playing a coffee hut, but they gave me dead silence on the article. I also sent a few songs on a disc to a lukewarm contact at Z-93 with the suggestion they should use her for one of their live broadcasts, but didn't succeed in getting her booked. (None of this is any commentary on her talent, it was my timing). I finally decided maybe I looked like a loon gawking at a married woman, anyhow, so I shelved the whole fucking thing.

But anyhow, I was doing some cleaning the other day and found the article. So here, read it! It's timely because she has a CD release party scheduled at Eddie's Attic for April 17th. The title and closing line are the corniest things I ever came up with, but the rest of the article is pretty well-done.

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Cool Enough to Be Jennifer Daniels

“The reason I’m not wearing shoes is because during soundcheck they were making too much noise when I danced,” Jennifer Daniels explains to her audience. “I’m really not cool enough to be a barefoot hippie chick.”

Over the ensuing hour-and-a-half Daniels does prove cool enough to entrance the audience with nothing but her voice, acoustic guitars, songs and charming stage presence (with help on acoustic guitar and mandolin from husband Jeff Neal). Even a broken string mid-song is dissolved in her girlish candor. “Ooh, that doesn’t sound good, does it?” she asks no one in particular. “Well, this song is about rage so I guess it fits,” she laughs, discarding the string and then returning to the lyrics full-throttle.

Jennifer Daniels grew up on Lookout Mountain, on the Tennessee/Georgia border, where she still lives. Her interest in music that emphasized thoughtful lyrics was partially the result of a strict religious upbringing. “I wasn't allowed to listen to secular music,” she recalls, “I wasn't allowed to listen to the radio for the longest time. Finally my dad made this rule that if I could be discerning about what the song was really saying, and if I could prove why it was a valuable song to listen to, then I could listen to that song. Isn't that cool? So it really helped me, I think, to figure out what is this person is saying and what they’re using to say it.” She took up guitar just because her dad happened to have one around and it was more portable than a piano. Musically she was particularly impressed by Suzanne Vega’s “The Queen and the Soldier” and her mother’s singing of traditional Irish songs like “Danny Boy,” but cites poets like J.R.R. Tolkien, St. Vincent Millet, and Robert Frost as her major inspirations.

The future chanteuse earned a Master’s degree in counseling at the University of Colorado-Boulder and returned to Lookout Mountain where she was a school counselor for a year. Around the one-year mark, however, the desire to perform overwhelmed her. “I've always wanted to do music ever since I could speak. I've always been singing and fantasizing being in front of people. And I had done a little bit of touring, certainly not full-time, but I had played out some. So I picked up my roots, left the school where I was counseling and said, ‘Okay, I'm gonna go play.’”

Chasing her musical muse led to meeting her musical accompanist and husband, Jeff Neal. Neal had come to Lookout Mountain to help a friend start an independent music label. Daniels, Neal and others involved with the label took a road trip to Baltimore for some shows that had romantic results. “In the very beginning I had a friend who kind of liked him and I said, ‘Well, I'll try to help her hook up with him,’” she remembers, “By the end I said, “No, no! I really, really like this guy!’ It seems like where my talent ends his picks right up so its a really, really nice fit with our music and personalities and interests.” The couple was married in 1998.

Also in 1998 Daniels released her debut CD, Fists of Flood, which was picked as one of the top 12 independent releases of the year by Performing Songwriter magazine. Two thousand one has seen the release of her sophomore effort, Dive & Fly. “It’s not that I long to die/It’s just that I long to dive and fly,” she sings in the title song. Her mountain upbringing may explain the title further, “I used to run to the bluff just for freedom. I don't know what it was, I just had to run there and be there and see over all the city – ‘Rock City, See Seven States!’” she laughs, quoting a famous tourist attraction billboard. “It was such a feeling of freedom away from the house; whatever felt confining about being at home, it was the exact opposite of it. That was solitude, freedom, and inspiration. I think I've carried that with me.” Many of the tunes on Dive & Fly, though not self-consciously commercial, sound like they could easily fit on alternative rock radio, aided and abetted by a video featuring Daniels’ photogenic looks. The songs display strong Celtic influences, often drawing comparisons to Sarah McLaughlin.

Daniels and Neal now tour the Southeast vigorously, and have shared stages with Kevn Kinney (drivin’ n’ cryin’), Jimmie Dale Gilmour and Leo Kottke, and are regulars at many festivals. She also won the Southeastern songwriter’s competition at Eddie’s Attic, the premier acoustic music venue in the region.

Whatever the future holds, Jennifer Daniels says she values the success she’s found so far – and don’t you forget it! “(Fans) will ask for my autograph and they'll say, ‘It might be worth something someday,’ and I think that is such an insult! Why isn't it worth something right now? Isn't what people do valuable right now if they put their hearts into it? We have achieved so many of our goals right now. People are digging it, they're buying the CDs and asking us to come play.”

Though she may feel she’s not cool enough to be a barefoot hippie chick, she’s cool enough to be Jennifer Daniels.