Danny Green is a London-based singer/songwriter and guitarist, best known for being the frontman of acclaimed British folk pop act Laish. And with Laish, Green was behind four critically applauded albums released through French indie label Tailres, which he and his bandmates supported with extensive touring across the UK, the European Union and the States.
Green went through major life changes in 2019: That March, he met his soon-to-be wife Leanna “LG” Green. And by December, the couple had married. For their honeymoon, the newlywed couple decided to spent six months across South America with a simple recording set up that they carried with them in a backpack. The duo wound up creating the demos that would help start their collaborative project together, DG Solaris. “In between swimming with sea-lions, exploring sacred plant medicines and climbing mountains, we had been searching for beautiful spaces to set up our backpack studio,” the Greens explained in press notes. “All of our recordings feature the sounds of birds, cicadas and crickets.”
Returning home to London after their honeymoon, Danny and Leanna recruited Tom Chadd, Matt Canty and Matt Hardy to help flesh out the material they demoed during their honeymoon. The end result was the act’s full-length debut, last year’s Spirit Glow, which drew from and meshed elements of 70s psych pop, synth pop, krautrock and prog rock in a unique and playful fashion — with the album’s material written as a textural journey through emotional realms. “We wanted to explore the idea of two voices, two spirits, two creative minds and see where this dynamic could take us,” DG Solaris’ Leanna Green says in press notes. Danny Green adds, “It has been an incredibly inspiring trip. We came back with over forty songs and it has been a challenge to chose our favourites for this first album.”
DG Solaris’ first single of 2021 is a fairly straightforward cover of Marty Willson-Piper’s “I Don’t Think So” that retains the original’s gorgeous melody but adds brief and subtle bursts of shimmering strings and steel pedal to the mix. Green’s sonorous baritone adds an even deeper sense of resignation and defeat to the proceedings. To me, the heart of the song are tacit acknowledgements that you play a role in your own misery and defeats — and that there are countless crushing defeats that you can’t maneuver around and are forced to accept. Along with that there’s a sense of shared past you long for that you can’t ever get back.
Green met Willson-Piper, a former member of the acclaimed Aussie rock act The Church when Green joined Wilson-Piper and Salim Nourallah for a week-long tour of Texas in October 2018. “I listened to Marty sing it every night and I fell in love with the melody and lyrical defeat,” Green says. “After the tour, Salim invited me for a day in his studio and it was still going around my head, so we sang it together.”
The recently released video is split between footage of Green singing and playing the song in his home, and singing the song’s chorus with his wife and a drunk reveler, who has gone a bit too far with the fun, fucking up to the point of having serious repercussions.
