Along the Ramparts: In Conversation with Early Day Miners’ Daniel Burton

Some bands conjure up an emotional response where it feels like they simply exist for your ears only. Over a lifetime there are several acts that spark such sentiments and, for me, Early Day Miners are one of them. Ultimately, this is the power of art.

Formed in Bloomington, Indiana at the turn of the century, the band is led by Daniel Burton (Ativin and sound engineer for underground legends, Songs: Ohia, Papa M and Windsor For The Derby). While their history has seen a revolving cast of musicians, the latest Early Day Miners incarnation sees Burton joined by long-time co-writer and multi-instrumentalist Martin Sprowles, drummer Jeff Massey, and bassist Matt Sklar.

Following the Early Day Miners’ 2000 game-changing debut, Placer Found (Western Vinyl), the band spent the next seven years as mainstays on the Secretly Canadian roster – the leading light of independent labels during the ’00s, which now sees them occupying the same stratosphere as Sub Pop, Merge, Matador and Domino.

This period saw Early Day Miners underpin the label’s aesthetic, led by the one-two majesty of Let Us Garlands Bring (2002) and Jefferson At Rest (2003), the electrifying All Harm Ends Here (2005) and the spellbinding Offshore (2006). Releases which also solidified the band’s position as one of the most modest, underrated acts across the independent music landscape.

The slightly more adventurous recordings that would become 2009’s The Treatment proved to be band’s last for Secretly Canadian before returning to Western Vinyl for Night People, which was released two years later.

The ensuing years proved creatively dormant for the band, until 2019 where they released the The Ongoing Moment EP. Since, Burton and Sprowles have continued writing songs, and the end result is Early Day Miners’ first album in 13 years, Outside Lies Magic (also their first for Solid Brass Records).

On Outside Lies Magic, alongside Sprowles, Burton’s songwriting covers new terrains. This is a band both growing old gracefully and extending their dynamic songcraft with some of the best songs they’ve ever written.

Starting with the majestic opener, The Arson Garden – a song that sees Burton turn back the clock to the best moments captured on Placer Found, but with a new retrospective vigour that comes with age and honesty. So too on Amends and later with the dazzling title track; both rich in emotional intensity, echoing through those lonely orbits Bruce Springsteen explored on Nebraska.

Then there’s the effortless grace of Along the Ramparts. This is where Burton of Sprowles catch lightning in a bottle, showcasing a songwriting synergy that stacks up alongside Early Day Miners’ best songs (“It’s hard to see a path to be free.”)

Continuing the momentum, Soot, Smoke and the Working Coast and Night Suit sees the band recounting their slowcore traditions of the past, with spatial, slow-motion guitars that are like floating in the ether.

On the back of Outside Lies Magic, not only do Early Day Miners release one of the finest ‘comeback’ albums of the year, but also one of 2024’s finest moments, period. Burton’s songs unveil a naked intimacy and fragility like never before, and backed by Sprowles, Massey and Sklar, Early Day Miners stir up the embers with the kind of emotionally driven songs that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

At the end of January, over Zoom, I caught up with Burton from his New Orleans home to talk about the band’s return, their past, and what inspired Outside Lies Magic.

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Sun 13: What are your earliest memories of the Early Day Miners?

Daniel Burton: “Essentially, it began as Rory [Leitch] and myself from Ativin. Chris Carothers had moved to Chicago, and we were still living in Bloomington. I had been playing around on acoustic quite a bit… and we naturally started recording at home. I was really into a slew of bands from Austin at that time in the early ’90s, or mid to late ’90s. Windsor for the Derby, Stars of the Lid… and we were also into Talk Talk and Blue Nile and stuff like that. Rory and I were really aligned on that, so we just started playing shows in Bloomington, we had a lot of connections because of Ativin. We mostly did house shows, because at that time Bloomington bars weren’t letting our genre of bands play. (laughs)

“Fast forward to 2000, [and] we opened for Cat Power in Bloomington as our first ‘bar’ show. She wasn’t really known at the time, and I remember Steve Shelley showed up behind her and was playing drums. She talked to me for something like an hour-and-a-half about what I should take on tour. (laughs) ‘Make sure you have Kleenex, you’re gonna need lots of water drink’. She had the famous breakdown on stage, total nervous breakdown, just dropped her guitar ran offstage. She’s certainly come a long way these days.

“We were really just trying to pare things down to the most minimalist music as possible. Again, with the Austin scene of Monroe Mustang, The Pilot Ships – that vibe. Ativin was playing there a bit, and I was in talkswith Western Vinyl, which was very much in that same spirit – Brian [Sampson – Western Vinyl co-founder] was super into that kind of stuff, too. It was just natural connections.”

S13: Were you thinking about that aesthetic during your days in Ativin, or was that something that evolved during time?

DB: “There’s a similar strain. The importance on minimalism in songwriting, and the same lines in production. We were really interested in ‘off the floor sounds’. I started drifting in different directions rediscovering Daniel Lanois, etc. But in those early days with Placer Found and three years before that record was recorded, it was very much like Ativin in where it was. Not just being a pop band to be a pop band. There’s actually a lot of similarities between Ativin’s music and Early Day Miners. I don’t think most would initially hear it, but it’s there in the orchestration and arrangements.”

S13: Yeah, for sure. Space and atmosphere are things that I’ve always been drawn to with both bands… and even before that with Windsor for the Derby. I can see a lineage there because they were a band that seemed to be exploring a lot possibilities that others weren’t at the time.

DB: “I totally agree. It was such a pleasure to meet Dan [Matz] and Jason [McNeely] of Windsor. I offered for them to work in Bloomington at my basement studio, and we ultimately made We Fight Till Death. I was geeking out the whole time because I was picking up on a lot of their production tricks. They had this cool little sampler, lo-fi equipment. Dan was just down here over the summer, and we put together a new record for him. I don’t know where it’s gonna go, but [it] sounded just as glorious as all the Windsor stuff.”

S13: It’s been 13 years since your last full-length release. Was there a spark or a moment that prompted you to start work on a new record?

DB: “A lot of the break was out of necessity. I went to grad school and started a professional career as a landscape architect. I toured with Unwed Sailor a bit [who are] good friends of ours, and [then] did an EP in 2019 and toured Europe with Julie Doiron. So, I’ve been kind of dabbling, while working around getting my license and professional nonsense. Now that I work for myself, I have the luxury of being able to create again, so that’s what’s happening. We’re already halfway through writing a new album.”

S13: You touched on Western Vinyl, and you’ve also worked with other great labels over the years like Secretly Canadian. How did the collaboration with Solid Brass come about?

DB: “I was following them on Instagram. They put out the Pines of Rome album, which I dug and then I noticed a ‘for fans of Early Day Miners’ reference. We had finished Outside Lies Magic, and it was clear Secretly Canadian and others were way out of scale for us right now. I just hit Solid Brass up, direct messaged them and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this new music. Let me know your thoughts are on it’, sent it over and then it just snowballed from there.

“We’re so pleased to be working with them. Their aesthetic has such attention to detail. They strive for the same goals. Beautiful packaging. The whole package, whether it’s from the quality of the vinyl, layout… it’s just extremely professional, and that’s hard to find these days. Nothing seems too crazy to pitch to them. I have a photographer friend, Christa Blackwood, who did the photograph for the front, and they coordinated with her to make that happen.”

S13: To be honest, they popped onto my radar through the Pines of Rome record, too. And then they’ve done some really great reissues of late. Grain…

DB: “Yeah, I used to really like hardcore. I’ve never not liked it. Just, as you grow older, your vision sort of expands because you’re constantly curious. But man, that stuff is so visceral. Growing up near Louisville, I would see bands like Rodan, Crain, MetroShifter, Enkindle, Falling Forward, all these great raw bands. I really miss that. I know that it comes out in different ways with music these days, but maybe Early Day Miners mined some of that sound. The new record has a lot of energy to it, so I’m exciting about that.”

S13: Do you generally need any overarching themes to begin the writing process of an album?

DB: “We were talking about this in practice the other day. When you start the process of writing, especially in our band, we always have the end goal. Like, ‘Let’s make this kind of record, let’s make that kind of record’. Never in my career of making records for 20 plus years have I ever ended up making the record that it started out being. But I think it’s important to have that intention. It’s a guidepost, it gets you somewhere. But it always takes a left turn and becomes its own thing, then you fall in love with what that is. I’ve always said I want to make a piano record, and maybe I will one day, but whenever I’ve tried to start doing that, it just becomes something completely different.”

S13: I guess it feeds into that notion of the creative process. Some artists say that when they enter it, certain things become out of their hands. It got me thinking about your album, Offshore, which is said to be inspired by the song from your second record, Let Us Garlands Bring… the idea of that record was taken from one song. I’ve never heard of that before…

DB: “I’m glad you brought that up. Chris Swanson from Secret Canadian came up with that idea. That was like 2006. He saw us play and we would play Offshore extra-long when the mood struck, and he came up to us after a show in Bloomington and said, ‘Why don’t you guys just make a record of that song?’ I said, ‘Like a reprise?’ Then I got my head around it, but at the time, I was thinking we’ve already recorded it. It’s done, we’re moving forward. We spent a year just layering that thing, making tapes. I had Dan Matz perform on it, Darren Gray did some work on it… and it just became this cacophony of sound. I love listening to that record.”

S13: You mentioned Talk Talk, but I think there’s Bark Psychosis in there, too. A really dark atmosphere…

DB: “Those were absolutely the schematics of what we would work within, creating something within those confines. That’s absolutely dead on.”

S13: Moving onto Outside Lies Magic, and The Arson Garden and Solace feel like songs that are brought about by the wisdom getting older. Songs that a younger version of yourself wouldn’t have written. Would you agree?

DB: “Yeah. I’ve thought about that. They’re very bare, honest lyrics about personal life experience. I remember Michael Stipe saying that he would never write a love song because he’d never been in love. I think that was probably mid-career of R.E.M. I can relate to that; I never wanted to fake it and write about what you don’t know – that’s the hardest thing to listen to. It’s phony when it’s not authentic, and so just having gone through personal pain, relationships in life, it didn’t feel inauthentic or phony to just lay it out on this LP. It’s not nice to have gone through some of the experiences that I’m singing about, but it does add another level of performance and feel to the art that I wasn’t able to access before.”

S13: With songs like Amends, Petrochemicals and Soot Smoke and the Working Coast, there feels like a real sense of conflict in these songs. Was that something that inspired these songs?

DB: “Absolutely. Petrochemical is kind of mining my life growing up in Mobile and now in New Orleans. That rambling talk thing that happens is stream of consciousness. It’s the first take of just places that I went to, like Dauphin Island and the moments – witnessing water being sucked out of canals during storms. I think there’s a line in there where I say who would want to come to this ‘Eden’. Because it is an Eden to be on the coast. But this is the working coast. This is the rust belt of the Midwest, a Southern version. It’s interesting when people come to vacation to New Orleans, or Mobile. They’re put off by the chemical factories and the smell of sulphur in the air and the destruction of the environment… and so I think Soot Smoke and the Working Coast and Petrochemical kind of dovetail with one another on those themes, and still it’s a view from a melancholy and mostly happy childhood.   

“Amends is the closest thing we get on this record to a pop song, I feel. It’s directly about a friend that we all have… these people in our lives that move to a new city and their life is immediately better. I can think of musicians that moved from the United States to Europe and, historically, are living their best life, and it’s kind of a sham. If you can’t make your own personal life where you are the best, then it’s not going to happen when you go to another city with the original mindset. It could be you, maybe it’s not where you live. It’s not directed to anyone person in particular, it’s simply an observation on human nature. Lots of friends from New Orleans leave blaming New Orleans for things that have not gone well for them and it’s frankly often unrelated to the city.”

S13: I think sometimes people have their own internal conflict where they spend their existence blaming everyone else instead of looking in mirror…

DB: “I’m certainly guilty of that. I at times can have a dark, narcissistic personality. We’re all a bunch of people in one. So maybe that song was also kind of accusing myself of that.”

S13: Right. Freedom is another aspect that is quite prevalent with the album. In particular with a song like Along the Ramparts…

DB: “Ramparts, came along in the session when the songwriting was strong. I think I’ve made an Instagram post about this, but it really came off the floor, as we say. It wrote itself, it was done in a day, the basic structure of it. We were vibing the whole time, working quickly. And that’s one of the most joyful things about making music. The outro with the lengthy drifting – that was really influenced by the Emperor’s New Clothes, the Sinead O’Connor song. I love how that ending just doesn’t stop and nothing really happens. It’s a beautiful hook and the band isn’t leaving it anytime soon.”

S13: Going back Windsor for the Derby again, and they had a couple of tracks like that. Particular on We Fight Till Death really locked into a riff or a groove that took you to really lovely places.

DB: “That album was recorded right around the time of Offshore and a lot of the studio had been set up in a way to encourage that sort of songwriting. A lot of improvisation. We had an area, that’s when I was living with Ben Swanson from Secretly Canadian. He’s got a marimba. He loves vibraphones and stuff like that. We had that setup, and everything was mic-ed, so you could just jump over there and do something. The idea of that studio at the time was very inspired by Daniel Lanois’ setups where you’re not in a studio, tape is rolling all the time. It’s all about vibe and with a computer you can just leave it recording, so that’s what we would often do – that’s how you end up with a nine-minute jam like We Fight Till Death.”(laughs)

S13: Outside Lies Magic’s eponymous song is sad one, but it also got me thinking that perhaps you could see this record through the lens of the same protagonist in a loose conceptual way. I don’t know whether that’s something you thought about or whether you leave that to your listeners to interpret?

DB: [Pause] “I side typically with leaving the listener to interpret. From the beginning of lyric writing –which is a very arduous process for me personally, I love the idea of being able to take a line and misinterpret it, and it actually be interpreted better. That happens in physical design. An accident becomes something completely different. It’s not necessarily an accident, but the original intent creates a whole different resolution. The song Outside Lies Magic, one interpretation is – one suffering and needs to move away from where they are for a better life, and another interpretation, the narrator is actually hurting more. ‘Move down here, I promise you’ll beat this thing’… all in the eye of the beholder.” (laughs)

S13: In terms of your creative process, as a musician, do you see that entwined with your work as an architect now? Are there similarities?

DB: “I was accepted into grad school with my past LP’s as my work. I didn’t have a CV, or any kind of history in building. I just laid out my records, and the director of the program went through them and said, ‘You need to take the GRE, and if you do fine on that, then you’re in because of a design background. And very much the Early Day Miners approach, I think Ativin as well, it’s visual as well as auditory. I would love to be able to get more into film scoring, but who doesn’t want to do that? (laughs) If that happens for you, great, but I’m also happy enough to just make these beautiful little moments that you can put up on the wall and always reflect back on.”

S13: Have you always been in New Orleans? The band was from Indiana originally, right?

DB: “I met Ativin in undergrad at Indiana University in Bloomington. I grew up in Mobile, which is on the Gulf Coast, about an hour-and-a-half from here. Parents divorced, moved to high school near Louisville, to undergrad at Bloomington. When the Miners would tour through New Orleans I felt, ‘This is like Mobile, but it’s an international city. This is a good fit for me’. Even though our shows didn’t do great here, it didn’t really matter. You can always tour and have good shows somewhere else. I like to refer to New Orleans as a beautiful, yet cruel mistress. It’s a very hard city to live in, but when it’s good, it’s amazingly good, and a constant muse for any artist.

“There’s some life experience here. I think of Outside Lies Magic as these little vignettes, it’s drawing from people I know or people I don’t know but should know. In Night Suit, that whole created story of going into the old Union Terminal Amtrak station here and there’s a smoking room still, and there’s some crazy person in there smoking and you just want to go in there and say, ‘Let’s go home. Let’s get out of here. What are you running from?’ That’s a very typical New Orleans story.” (laughs).

S13: Does New Orleans have a vibrant scene?

DB: “Yeah. There’s, Special Interest on Rough Trade. Quintron & Miss Pussycat are legendary here. There’s an excellent lyrical band, Happy Talk Band. Arcade Fire live here, Hurray for the Riff Raff are fantastic. So many bands here are continually fantastic and get zero press – it blows my mind. It’s like Louisville where it was happening before anyone knew. It’s a very insular scene. These artists, a lot of them just don’t tour.

S13: Interesting.

DB: “It’s a great scene. It’s not all traditional jazz. It’s not all Jazz Fest. It’s not all Jimmy Buffett. It’s got a dark underbelly. Eyehategod, Thou,although they have history in Baton Rouge, but they’ve moved here.”

S13: You’ve worked with some pretty special artists over the years, Jason Molina, David Pajo, and, of course, Windsor. Looking back at that time, did you envisage that AI and tech would have such a monolithic presence insofar as devaluing art?

DB: “That’s such a good acknowledgement. I think people of our ilk think about this constantly, because it’s all changed so much. What industry has changed like this? We used to sell CDs and pull over and call the bar on a payphone to get where we’re going on road. Now, we’re promoting this record by social media posts. There’s no making a flyer, which was such a joy, you know? A silkscreen poster for your record and make 200 and send to record stores… that just doesn’t even factor into the equation.

“I was telling my partner the other day, I had been reposting and sharing and doing all the social media juggernaut stuff, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, two hours have gone by. I’ve just been working with my thumbs on this phone.’ Not really that it’s good or bad, it’s just… this is what it is now. It’s a shifting of priorities. It feel like it cheapens a bit the quality of the art we create. I think that’s why with our packaging, I really align with Solid Brass on this that a quality, beautiful product can directly reflect the intention put into it.

“I’m not too worried about AI, but what do I know, I thought Brian Eno had some great points on it recently. It can be equally as good as it can be bad, and we’ll inevitably live and evolve with technology – All generations have.”

Outside Lies Magic is out Friday via Solid Brass Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.