Casper Journal Article

The Tremors’ Cory McDaniel rarely performs as a solo act. In fact, he says, he might play as a single for only about an hour or so every other year. You may have seen him at the Beartrap Summer Festival, for example.

So when he was invited to Germany in December to play on his own at the Mettmann Bluesweek festival March 7-12, he was surprised.

McDaniel, Paul Lange and Dale Bohren of The Tremors have been invited regularly to the celebrated Mettmann blues fest since 2001, but this year, promoter Wolfgang Pieker needed to fill a solo slot.

McDaniel agreed, and to his added surprise, he was presented as one of the headliners, along with Stefan George, Eddie Martin, The Charlie Morris Band, Katy Baloun and Nina T. Davis, and Colin Earl and Dave Peabody.

Friends

If he experienced any uneasiness once onstage, it was fleeting.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he says. “The Tremors are well loved in Germany, but I didn’t know how it would be to perform as a solo.

“The coolest thing was, at the very first gig on Tuesday, I looked out and knew half the people, because we had been there three times before and they became our fans. I feel like they’re my friends. The audience response was wonderful. I felt warm. It was moving.”

Once again, McDaniel came away feeling that “Germans really understand the music.”

In the blues genre, The Tremors play “some pretty obscure stuff,” but in Germany, “they know you’re playing a Tom Waits song or a Leonard Cohen song,” he explains.

On a broader scale, Germans have a deep appreciation for this country’s music, art and movies. It’s so heavily influenced, says McDaniel, that you see American jargon on their posters.

One particularly heartwarming aspect of this festival stands out in his memory, and that is all of the young people in the audience – many more than usual.

“Keep playing this music, or it’ll be lost,” was his advice to the youth of Germany.

Lost in music

The fans loved McDaniel’s clever way of including the other Tremors’ musicians when he was onstage, he says. Propped up near him were enormous photos of Bohren and Lange.

When performing with The Tremors, McDaniel cues off of Lange’s harmonica and Bohren’s bass.

“If those parts aren’t there, I think, ‘What’s the next verse?’ When Dale’s harmonies are not there, I can get off course. We’ve played so long together that I get lost without them,” McDaniel says.

His biggest challenge, then, was rearranging the music. He wondered, “How do I arrange this so there aren’t empty spaces?”

But McDaniel loves arranging more than anything, and it came easily.

To him, music is all encompassing and is like meditation – a place in which he can get “completely lost.”

As a solo act, he stuck with almost all of The Tremors’ originals – music that McDaniel wrote. But he included pieces that they don’t get to play a lot, he says, such as Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” and “There is a War.”

‘Sensationally good’

One report in the Mettmann WZ mentions that “The Tremors’ style showed through everywhere in (McDaniel’s) show at the Stadtwaldhaus: rhythms rooted in traditional U.S. blues were mixed with modern arrangements and melodies full of variety. To the joy of the fan community, well-known Tremors’ pieces could be heard as well as his own compositions.”

Said Bluesweek organizer Pieker, McDaniel was “sensationally good,” and added that although not all musical solo tours are successful, “with Cory McDaniel, you can be sure of an aura that was present at the Tremors’ shows of the past.”

McDaniel usually saved the tune “Big White Lies” for the encore.

The trio’s new album of the same name is due to hit music stores this spring.

For more information about The Tremors, visit www.thetremors.com/index.php.