The Rural We: Danny Tieger
The songwriter in Lakeville, Conn. sings about everything. Here's how that happened.
An author, songwriter and performer, Danny Tieger moved to Lakeville, Conn. with his wife and then-infant son in 2017. He’s a fulltime faculty member at Indian Mountain School, while continuing to perform and write. Tieger’s music has appeared in hundreds of TV shows and movies. He is currently performing his songs in a Zoom interactive show (and on Youtube) every other week for preschoolers in collaboration with several area libraries. He’s also written two books: I Am Your Songwriting Journal and Let’s Make a Movie! The name of his Zoom program is "Danny Sings About Everything,” and boy, does he.
I was doing TV commercials and background work in LA, and was a member of The Story Pirates, which has developed into one of the top kids and family podcasts in the world. It was a great way to hoof around LA in my 20s, with a car full of costumes and wigs, showing up at schools all over east Los Angeles and performing for elementary school kids. When you’re acting, there’s a lot of waiting around for the next audition or project. During that time I fell in love with the songwriting process. I felt so much joy in it, that’s what people wanted to talk to me about at auditions and meetings. It pretty quickly turned into a fulltime thing.
I’ve worked with TV and film licensing companies in LA and written songs for kids tv shows. One of them,“Hubworld,” was a weekly musical news broadcast, the flagship show for The Hub Network in which I appeared and produced sketches. Dreamworks TV bought 25 episodes of my educational shows called “Sung History,” and songwriting landed me a job writing for the PR department for NASA. That was the zenith of writing educational songs — writing about discovering the universe.
In the fall of 2016, I worked on Lebron: The Musical, a parody of "Hamilton." The director of the project is a friend of mine, and this was his dream. We produced it in one crazy day in a gym on Hollywood Boulevard. LeBron James actually saw it and there’s a quote that he thought “these guys really did their research.” It was nominated for a Webby.
My producing partner Matt Appleton and I have been making music remotely for 10 years, so we were primed and ready for the pandemic in a way most producing teams weren’t. Right now we’re working on solidifying what an upcoming preschool album will look like. I’ve been writing songs with and for preschoolers for 15 years, but never put them all in a single place. These shows with the libraries have been great for going in and dusting off these songs.
We moved here when our first son was four months old (my wife is from this neck of the woods). We thought, maybe life doesn’t have to be its hardest version in New York. The benefits of the decision have been tremendous. There’s the sense of being able to give my kids the scope of nature that I didn’t quite have growing up in more suburban areas. It’s so exciting and dynamic to live in a place like this. It’s a loving and supportive community.
