Music Of The World

Daniel Champagne has had a guitar in his hands since he was 5 years old. Following in his guitar-playing father's footsteps, Champagne says this tender age is when he started trying to become a songwriter. Just over two decades later, the young performer's virtuosity is turning heads all over the world as he continues racking up more miles than most people will travel in their whole lives.

"Watching Daniel Champagne perform is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. He is a true prodigy that plays like no one else could possibly play unless they spent at least two lifetimes studying the art," illustrates New Zealand publication BW Review.

"What I'm playing is acoustic music, which can go in a lot of directions but still sort of with the same feeling," Champagne explains. It's "very neutral and every place in the world, and everybody, has their own version of soft acoustic music, and therefore it resonates. It kind of feels like home in some ways for everybody."

More than just a neutral acoustic guitar player, it's the sheer talent Champagne demonstrates in his "show-stopping" live show (Firefly Column) and his captivating percussive performance style that set him apart from other musicians. In his first few years with the instrument, Champagne took the usual path of strumming learned iconic tunes -- from The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan -- before taking on the world of competitive classical guitar playing around the seasoned age of 9.

"I kind of put that down when I was 14 or 15 because I enjoyed playing it, but I just felt like no matter how long I could play it or how good I got at it, it would never really sound like me. It would always sound like the people who'd written the pieces or the guitar players that had played them before," he shares.

Now, it's possible there's no one who sounds like him as Champagne continues to experiment with open tuning, contemporary finger styling and two-hand tapping while writing songs about the people he's met and the places he's been -- which makes for quite a lot of stories. Perhaps most compelling to Champagne as a songwriter, though, are the "ready-made" stories of people he meets on the road because they "are a lot more interesting than my own stories."

"People after the shows, they're mainly who I talk to. And that's really interesting because I only meet people for a couple of minutes, but I think as a performer -- because you get up there for an hour and a half [and] hopefully throw it all out there -- often people feel like they know you better than they probably do, and they talk to you afterwards. So, often, I'll hear things that people wouldn't usually just say if they met you in a bar."

NAN What's Up on 09/02/2018