White is a Wichita-based musician and producer, and current member of Zsa Zsa Ketzner (bass) and The Flaming Wailers (guitar) – who are both releasing EPs this fall. In the past he has played with Vehicles, Aaron Lee Martin and The Taylor Martin Band, in addition to playing in bands while living in Chicago and Honduras. Originally a guitarist, his repertoire of instruments has expanded as his musical taste has grown, as evidenced by his ever-increasing collection of Craigslist instruments.
My name is Daniel White. I play bass in Zsa Zsa Ketzner and guitar in The Flaming Wailers.
The Flaming Wailers kind of started as a joke, originally with my friend Taylor Martin. We’d played a lot of bluegrass and rock together and thought that it might be fun to play some reggae, so we recorded this song “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Part I” by the Flaming Lips and put it on MySpace with the name Flaming Wailers by mixing the names Flaming Lips and Bob Marley and The Wailers.
We kind of forgot about it for six months and then one day we got a message from a random guy who said, ‘Hey! Love your music. Would you guys want to play my party?’ We had played all the parts ourselves so we decided to get a band together to play this show. We had a lot of fun doing it. We just stuck with it.
We like to call ourselves a reggae tribute to the Flaming Lips, so this EP that we’re putting out is four songs by the Flaming Lips that we’ve done in a reggae style.
The Flaming Lips are a little bit out there sometimes. Before doing this I hadn’t listened to a ton of their music. Playing their music in a reggae style—and trying to play it in general—there’s a lot more subtleties to it, a lot of weird time signatures and pauses that you don’t really realize until you try to play the music. I think they’re great artists.
The Flaming Wailers perform October 31 at Lucky’s Everyday with Coriander and Steel Cranes
