{"id":2259,"date":"2023-03-28T00:00:03","date_gmt":"2023-03-28T00:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/?p=2259"},"modified":"2023-04-07T16:47:34","modified_gmt":"2023-04-07T16:47:34","slug":"palette-dana-harper-influences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/articles\/palette-dana-harper-influences","title":{"rendered":"The Palette: Dana Harper Talks Influences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you hear <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/artist\/6GRkcUEjH1zDb1nKjfaHGA?si=JT7WgAszR9a-Altev9a3Fg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dana Harper<\/a>, you just<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> immediately<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> feel like she\u2019s singing from a place of full, unwavering honesty. The Dallas, TX-based artist caught some big waves of attention with her appearance of<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1CW0bxTJYug\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Season 11 of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Voice<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and since then <\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">she\u2019s been continuing to hone in her craft, one vulnerable note at a time. We got the chance to chat with Dana Harper for our newest series, The Palette, a place for artists to share a few of their influences. Here\u2019s what speaks to Dana Harper\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><b>1.\u00a0 The kind of Acoustic Soul where the heart gets poured out.<\/b><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dana Harper: I didn\u2019t grow up in church\u2014well that\u2019s not true, I didn\u2019t grow up singing in church, I\u2019ll say that. A lot of times when people see me, judging a book by its cover, they\u2019re like \u2018oh I bet you can sing down some gospel music,\u2019 and I could, but that\u2019s not necessarily where my vocal influence came from. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I grew up listening to a lot of folk and acoustic soul\u2013India Arie, John Mayer, Jason Mraz, Tracy Chapman\u2013once I realized music was something I could do, I don\u2019t even call it a career, it\u2019s just my life. The guitar is a huge influence in my music. India Arie and Lauryn Hill are two of the most amazing acoustic soul artists I study and look up to. Everything from their writing and the way they\u2019re so vulnerable, unzipped their chest and just poured their heart out in the music they created.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><b>2. The feel of \u201890s music.<\/b><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One of my big influences is the 90s, I don\u2019t think that I realized that until more recently. As I write and when I sing and listen to myself back, I\u2019m like that was such a \u201890s lick, or such a \u201890s run. There\u2019s just something about the way that people were creating music in the 90s that really resonates. Definitely the 90s, especially on the love song side of things.<\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 1080px;\" class=\"wp-video\"><!--[if lt IE 9]><script>document.createElement('video');<\/script><![endif]-->\n<video class=\"wp-video-shortcode\" id=\"video-2259-1\" width=\"1080\" height=\"1080\" preload=\"metadata\" controls=\"controls\"><source type='video\/mp4' src='https:\/\/sofar-blog-images.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Dana-Harper_The-Palette_Audiogram01_v2.mp4'\/><a href=\"https:\/\/sofar-blog-images.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Dana-Harper_The-Palette_Audiogram01_v2.mp4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dana Harper_The Palette_Audiogram01_v2<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n<h4><b>3. India Arie\u2019s \u201cTalk To Her\u201d.<\/b><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I was in the car with my cousins and two of my aunties. I remember listening to that song, we were sitting in a parking lot and someone had gone into a store but all the kids were sitting in the car and the doors were open and we were in a mini-van. I remember crying listening to that song. After that, I burned a hole in that CD, I listened to it so much. I think that was like when I was like, I like this a lot, I wanna do this, I want to know how to do this.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><b>4. The squeak of the guitar strings.<\/b><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I think when I first realized music was what I wanted to do, or something that I loved, and wanted to dig deeper into. I was probably 9 or 10, when it was serious. I was always around the house dancing and all these things, but I was probably about 9 or 10 when I was like, I want to do this. I can\u2019t remember what song it was, but you know the squeak on a guitar, when someone\u2019s playing and there\u2019s a squeak on the strings? That is like, one of my favorite sounds in the world. I can literally, Sometimes I\u2019ll have my guitar and do that, it\u2019s soothing to me. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There was something for me about the simplicity about hearing artists like India or John Mayer be able to create these worlds with just their voice and the guitar. It was not overproduced, there was not a lot of other things going on. The guitar is like another voice, another singer. I think it\u2019s the simplicity and honesty of being able to pull so much from just these two things and marry them together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 1080px;\" class=\"wp-video\"><video class=\"wp-video-shortcode\" id=\"video-2259-2\" width=\"1080\" height=\"1080\" preload=\"metadata\" controls=\"controls\"><source type='video\/mp4' src='https:\/\/sofar-blog-images.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Dana-Harper_The-Palette_Audiogram02_v2-copy.mp4'\/><a href=\"https:\/\/sofar-blog-images.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Dana-Harper_The-Palette_Audiogram02_v2-copy.mp4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dana Harper_The Palette_Audiogram02_v2 copy<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n<h4><b>5. The vulnerability of love.<\/b><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the songs that I write are about love. Right now I\u2019m in a space of exploring myself and who I really am outside of all the things that have been programmed inside of me, the things other people have told me about myself\u2014at 32 years old, just now doing this. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I write a lot of songs about love, love lost, or love that I would like to cultivate, or that I\u2019m experiencing in the present. It\u2019s endless. I don\u2019t think you can ever stop writing about it. It\u2019s such a vulnerable space, and I think that&#8217;s what I love about it. My favorite songs have always been from a very vulnerable space. As I mentioned before about the guitar and the voice, it&#8217;s a very vulnerable space, there\u2019s not a lot of other instruments drowning out the lyrics.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>Revisit Dana Harper&#8217;s performance of &#8220;Daydreaming&#8221; at Sofar Dallas:<\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Dana Harper - Daydreaming | Sofar Dallas - Fort Worth\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0o1cz-zDjQM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>You never know where you might catch Dana Harper. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Explore Sofar shows year you<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Interview by Sofar Editorial Team<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you hear Dana Harper, you just immediately feel like she\u2019s singing from a place of full, unwavering honesty. The Dallas, TX-based artist caught some big waves of attention with her appearance of Season 11 of The Voice, and since then she\u2019s been continuing to hone in her craft, one vulnerable note at a time. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":2260,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[86,92,256],"class_list":["post-2259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-dana-harper","tag-the-voice","tag-the-voice-season-11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sofarsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}