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 Dan Wheeler: guitarist, singer-songwriter, producer
In the summer of 1986, I was a kid living in Cornwall listening to Phil Keaggy and working my way through ‘Complete Guitar Player’ volumes 1-3. I took to the guitar pretty quickly, so my mum bought me a Suzuki acoustic and I spent the next few years trying (and failing) to get to grips with Mr Keaggy’s licks. However, I abandoned my guitar hero pretensions at university when albums like Shawn Colvin’s ‘Fat City’, Crowded House ‘Together Alone’, and Counting Crows ‘August and Everything After’ turned my attention to songwriting.
I think it’s this focus on the song that suited me to session playing. Producers that I got to work with always seemed to appreciate the way I made a musical contribution that fitted the lyric and feeling behind the song. Eventually, there were enough of them interested for me to abandon the day job and take things seriously.
Playing other peoples songs all day everyday can either kill-off your personal creativity or be an inspiration - for me, it was the latter. In 2004, I recorded my solo debut EP ‘Ten Things To Do’ as a forerunner to the albums ‘Long Road Round’ and ‘Seven Kinds of Grace.’ In 2009 I recorded ‘Rites Of Passage’ with fellow songwriter Paul Field.
More recently, my focus has turned to production work, with credits including Portland, Tom + Olly, and co-production on forthcoming releases from Cathy Burton and Steve Parsons.
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