Livin' live
Already intense Danielia Cotton amps it up a notch on stage at Levitt Pavilion
By Bliss 07/01/2010
Car horns blare loudly in the background as Danielia (Dah-NEEL-yuh) Cotton talks on her cellphone while bustling through the streets of New York. She’s just finished a two-hour karate class — part of her training for the New York Marathon. She’s a personable whirlwind of energy and laughter and it comes as no surprise, particularly considering the charismatic intensity of her performances, when she admits, “I like doing things at an intense level.”
Cotton’s music is an eclectic bag of her rock, soul, gospel, jazz and singer-songwriter influences. Her 2005 debut album, the Kevin Salem-produced “Small White Town,” compellingly chronicled her experience as “one of the few little black kids in a town of little white kids listening to rock ‘n’ roll” in her hometown of Hopewell, NJ — and the seminal impact of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt and Todd Rundgren can be discerned throughout, most affectingly on revealing tracks like “Devil in Disguise,” “4 a Ride” and the anthemic “It’s Only Life.” Her polished, funky 2008 follow-up, “Rare Child,” earned widespread acclaim for gospel-inflected rockers like “Testify” and personal anthems such as “Bang My Drum.” Cotton’s gritty, roof-raising voice can evoke Tina Turner at her best, and has earned her a devoted following if not record-breaking sales.
She favors music that takes listeners on a journey, whether she’s performing or listening to other artists with “signature voices” who put their lives “out there and sing about it emotionally” such as personal faves Pink, the Eels, Oasis, My Morning Jacket and Kings of Leon.
“I only cover things that I really feel like I can jump into the same way I do my own thing,” she says. “I like stories that I can tell with emotion and really go someplace great. I love music that really makes you feel something.”
Currently, she’s focused on honing new material, which, fingers crossed, she’d like to record before September. “I’ve been working with some writers that I really respect and really editing the work, making it the best that it can be,” she explains. “I think sometimes in the past I just went, ‘Oh, this is good!’ and recorded it. … These songs have benefited from a really intense editing process.”
She’s hoping to test-run new tunes at a Manhattan music hall before taking them into the studio. Hopefully, she’ll try out some when she plays Levitt Pavilion Thursday, where she also promises she’ll also pull out her band’s over-the-top cover of Prince’s “Purple Rain.”
“I record [albums] because I have to, but if I had my preference I would record live. I like the studio because it’s fun, but there’s nothing like live performance where you get an audience response … I get something from it just as much as the audience, if not more.”
Danielia Cotton appears at Levitt Pavilion in Memorial Park, 85 E. Holly St., Pasadena, 8 p.m. Thursday, July 1. Info: (626) 683-3230. danielia.com
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