First Published in Country Music International – January 1999

Having enjoyed two runs of chart success in both the 1970s and 1980s, Dan Seals has proved with his new album that don’t need nineties radio play to have a hit record.

The story of Dan Seals is one of the most remarkable up-and-down, comeback tales in the annals of contemporary music history.

In the 1970s, he was one half of the chart-topping pop duo England Dan and John Ford Coley, chalking up million-selling singles like I'd Really Love To See You Tonight, Nights Are Forever Without You and Love Is The Answer, but differences over musical direction led to the dissolution of the duo. Seals got to keep the name and also inherited staggering financial and legal problems, difficulties he was not aware of until it was too late for him to do much, apart from watch his world crumble. But he persevered with his music, relocated to Nashville and, following three years of hardship, made a breakthrough in country music with an incredible run of a dozen country Number Ones.

He recorded some of Nashville's more lyrically interesting, vocally colourful and sonically satisfying albums like WON'T BE BLUE ANYMORE, ON THE FRONT LINE and RAGE ON, which all went gold. The co-written Bop, one of the biggest country-pop crossover hits of the 1980s, has since become a British line-dance fave, and his classic, chart-topping country ballad Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold) stayed on the country charts for almost six months.

Then the hits stopped. For some inexplicable reason, following the success of Good Times in 1990, Dan's country success came to an abrupt end. A move from Capitol Records to Warner Brothers in 1991 failed to change his luck. It seemed that Dan Seals had disappeared: but nothing could be further from the truth.

“I'm working more now than I ever did before,” he explains from a Nevada stopover. “It seems the acoustic album has hit some kind of nerve here in America and things have exploded. Of course, QUIET ROOM II has not been released here yet, but the first one has really been a success for us.”

He recorded the first QUIET ROOM album three years ago for the independent Intersound label, and readily admits that he was suprised at the record's success. “Since we put out QUIET ROOM I we've worked just as a trio. I play 12-string, my guitar player, Porter, plays six-string, and my bass player plays a five-string electric bass guitar.”

THE QUIET ROOM sessions came about accidentally and have taken Dan back to when he first hit Nashville back in 1982. The acoustic-flavour of these new recordings have given the singer-songwriter a whole new lease of life. In typical Seals’ fashion, lyrics are of utmost importance, his music is on a human, storytelling scale as his yarns of simple, hardworking folk spin out.

“The record company here in America wanted a two volume set,” he explains. “I'd just finished the first, and it had taken me a year, so it took a while to get around to the second set. I had enough material, and there were still things I wanted to do from the England Dan days, so I thought we should do it.”

Like the first volume, QUIET ROOM II features new recordings of some of Dan's old hits along with a few songs like Wood and We Are One that were not hits, but have made a big impact with his fans. The album also features some of Nashville's finest musicians including Paul Franklin, Mark Casstevens, Andrea Zonn and Viktor Krauss, with background vocals by Dennis Wilson, Pam Tillis and Alison Krauss.

“I'd been familiar with Alison's music for a number of years, but we don't actually run around together,” he smiles. “I fell in love with her videos. She had such a innocence that came across in the videos. I asked her brother, Viktor to play bass on QUIET ROOM I, and that's where we met. I was really surprised that she wanted to be on the album. The first time I met her, she brought me a song called The Healing Kind and said: ‘I thought this was a great song and that you'd like to hear it.’”

QUIET ROOM II was released in Britain last summer, but unfortunately a British tour planned for the autumn fell through. “I'm always disappointed when something stops me coming across to Europe,” Dan reflects. “I heard there was a possibility of me going, then a month down the road I was told we're not going. I don't know any of the details, but that's just the downside of what we do.”

Most veteran country acts have a chip on their shoulder because they are no longer featured on mainstream country radio. Seals is the exception. He has taken his music to the American public by traversing the backroads and playing small clubs and listening rooms throughout the real Mid-West. He has shown that the bonds between performer and audience are not measured simply in dollars.

“Obviously, QUIET ROOM is not radio-friendly to what's happening in the States now,” he says candidly, “but the following we have has been fed by secondary stations, who have been playing QUIET ROOM. It's been a real odd thing to have a successful album with no successful single. But it's been a lot of fun.”