The Obelisk Questionnaire: Daniel Taylor of Cold Blue Mountain
The Obelisk Questionnaire is a series of open questions intended to give the answerer an opportunity to explore these ideas and stories from their life as deeply as they choose. Answers can be short or long, and that reveals something in itself, but the most important factor is honesty.
Based on the Proust Questionnaire, the goal over time is to show a diverse range of perspectives as those who take part bring their own points of view to answering the same questions. To see all The Obelisk Questionnaire posts, click here.
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The Obelisk Questionnaire: Daniel Taylor of Cold Blue Mountain
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How do you define what you do and how did you come to do it?
I’m the drummer in the band Cold Blue Mountain, but I’ve also been fortunate enough to be able to contribute by playing keyboards on the records we’ve made. And for the newest stuff we’ve been working on and will be recording soon, I even got to help out on a couple guitar parts, so maybe now I’ve risen to the level of Drummer+.
Growing up, I never played drums, never owned drums, never really even thought about drums. I took piano when I was a young kid and picked up guitar when I was a teenager, and my bands in high school were me playing guitar or piano; even the first real band I played with in college I played guitar. But I quickly realized that finding a drummer was the hardest part of starting a band and being 19 and wanting to be in cool bands I figured I should probably learn how to play drums. So I started playing drums in a punk band which was definitely a good starting point, and once you become A Guy with Drums in a college town like Chico, you are automatically a drummer no matter your skill level. So from then on I’ve always been a “drummer” who occasionally dabbles in other stuff when I can, and thankfully Cold Blue Mountain is a band where there is a lot of opportunity to add some fun layers with organ, piano, and synths, which really make up some of my favorite parts of some of our recordings.
Describe your first musical memory.
It’s not technically my “first” musical memory, but I really feel like it was my first musical “a-ha” moment. My dad had an old nylon string guitar laying around the house but coming from the piano it seemed like a pretty daunting thing to even pick up, like with the strings and the frets and all of that. One day I was just sort of fucking around with the open strings and I realized that you could play the opening riff to “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica–which was still sort of a new song at that point–just with the open strings and it was like a light bulb went off: “Holy shit the music on the radio is just this?” It was the first time I had really considered that the rock bands I was listening to weren’t necessarily creating these extremely challenging, master-level works of art, and it made me instantly dive into guitar by learning the first position chords and trying to figure out any song that came on the radio.
Describe your best musical memory to date.
Cold Blue Mountain organized and mostly pulled off a full US tour in the first part of 2015 following the release of our second album on Halo of Flies that sort of felt like the payoff for a lot of years of sort of putting all the pieces of the puzzle together slowly. We had really lucked out with getting our first record pressed on vinyl by Gogmagogical Records and getting some decent press here and there and had been touring up and down the West Coast as much as we could fit in one -or two-week stints. We recorded the second record without really knowing what we were going to do with it but it worked out that Cory at Halo of Flies said that he would put it out on vinyl so we wanted to do something a little bigger to really get the most mileage out of what was, to us, a pretty rad situation getting our new record out on a really badass record label. So we booked a pretty bonkers tour that went all the way from California to New England and back down and around, sort of a big circle across the majority of the country.
Of course, January and February in a lot of places is absolute shitting snow so we had a lot of hairy drives and ended up breaking down once or twice and not making a hand full of the shows. But so many of my favorite shows ever were on that tour. We got to play Saint Vitus in Brooklyn, we played an awesome in Milwaukee with Cory from Halo of Flies’ band Protestant that was packed to the absolute rafters; we played a show on Super Bowl Sunday in Des Moines Iowa during an absolute Blizzard and there was actually not a single person there except for us and the people working and it was such a bizarro-world type of feeling. And for me personally, I had semi-quit my job and ended up quitting it completely by the end of the tour so a month in a van freezing and stinking and eating way too much truckstop dried fruit was incredibly conducive to the sort of transitional state I was occupying.
When was a time when a firmly held belief was tested?
There were several times on that tour, I mentioned above, where the whole idea of trying to play shows or present your music to the world in the classic DIY fashion by driving around in a van and showing up to some house or some warehouse and having zero idea what you were going to find seemed like maybe not something that was really worth doing. I mean the good shows were good, and some of the bad shows were good too, in their own way. But for me being 34 years old at the time and loading in gear in freezing snow to play for a handful of people at some guy’s house and sleeping on a wood floor you ask yourself “how much do I really want to do this?” But it’s been a lot of years since then and we are still doing it, to a lesser extent, so the answer to that question must have been more yes than no.
Where do you feel artistic progression leads?
I think it leads to more or less the same place as artistic regression leads: a realization that the process of change, either for better or for worse, is always ongoing. I don’t know if that’s just the answer of someone who has regressed or at least never progressed far enough to realize some sort of artistic epiphany, but it seems like even most of the people who are making art at the highest level are either strangely unconvinced of their own greatness or are striving to be whatever it is that they feel like is better than what they are doing.
How do you define success?
Success for me would be an ability to accept the outcome of something forever. There is a famous list of rules for living that Jack Kerouac wrote out at some point that I have, for whatever reason, reproduced using single letter ink stamps on the front head of my bass drum. And there are a lot of very beat writer nuggets in there like “blow as deep as you want to blow” but one of my favorites is “accept loss forever.” And I think that the idea of being able to just accept something that happened good or bad in its final form forever is probably one of the most beneficial things you can do, in any circumstance, including when taking an honest look at whatever you have done on an artistic level.
What is something you have seen that you wish you hadn’t?
So far, I have managed to watch every episode of all 10 seasons of the television show The Curse of Oak Island and it is honestly one of the most painful things I do on a regular basis.
Describe something you haven’t created yet that you’d like to create.
I have an idea for an extremely quiet band that plays very subdued, rigorously melodic instrumental post-rock, with no build-ups, no distorted guitars, nothing like that. There is a band called The Six Parts Seven who used to do the sort of thing I’m talking about and it’s really something I would like to do before I’m too old to play in bands anymore.
What do you believe is the most essential function of art?
Art is the great equalizer. Anyone anywhere can make and appreciate art out of whatever is around. In that sense art is the most universal language, even more so than math, at least in my opinion, because it takes the principles of math, ratios, shapes, etc., and makes them into something that even a child can understand has meaning.
Something non-musical that you’re looking forward to?
I’m hopeful that during my lifetime there is some disclosure about the true nature of UFOs, UAP, whatever people want to call them. Maybe not a complete explanation, because maybe that’s not even possible, but at least a fuller sharing of existing knowledge about what maybe these things are not. Much to my own dismay, I have never personally experienced ANYTHING mysterious or paranormal, although I’m certainly open to the idea. If the guy who owns Skinwalker Ranch is reading this, I’m ready to come visit any time.
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