WTJU 91.1 FM

Rockbridge County native Brennan Gilmore will stop by WTJU this Friday afternoon to go track by track through his new debut solo album, My Name is Daniel Leek. Sunset Road airs Friday afternoon from 4-6 (eastern) at 91.1FM, online at wtju.net and via the WTJU app.

Charlottesville locals may know Brennan Gilmore from his UVA student days, when he was an intern at WTJU and then a cohost of WTJU’s Sunset Road, or maybe from his time as the founder and leader of the local bands Walker’s Run, Wild Common or Borden Grant. Or maybe you’ve heard of his time post-UVA when he was recruited by the US State Department, serving numerous tours of duty in conflict zones in various parts of Africa. Or the crossover Appalachian/Tunisian band Kantara he co-founded with oudist Riadh Fehri , which toured North Africa and Europe, earning a State Department award for cultural diplomacy (they also came and played in Charlottesville). Or maybe you know of him as the person who unwittingly became the focus of national attention after he happened to record the deadly attack by a white supremacist who drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors in Charlottesville on the day of the infamous ‘Unite the Right’ rally.

Brennan’s life experiences inform the content of his new album: My Name Is Daniel Leek traces back to 2009, when he was stationed in Jonglei, South Sudan. Walking into a crumbling building sheltering hundreds of refugees, he saw scrawled in chalk on the wall: My Name Is Daniel Leek. That declaration — by a Sudanese refugee he would never meet — became the conceptual core of the album, its 12 tracks building a fictional biography of Daniel from two decades of relationships and stories gathered across the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and Sierra Leone.

The album was recorded in Galax, VA, at the home of co-producers Dori Freeman and Nick Falk, and features fiddler Nate Leath, singer Davina Jackson, keyboardist Bryan Holmes, saxophonist Charles Owens, and Steve Hoke.

The album “is a richly layered, deeply personal project that challenges listeners to reconsider how they understand identity, conflict, and connection. – Jon Lohman, State Folklorist (emeritus), VA

Tags: Brennan Gilmore, Bryan Holmes, Charles Owens, Davina Jackson, Dori Freeman, Jon Lohman, Kantara, My Name is Daniel Leek, Nate Leath, Nick Falk, Riadh Fehri, Steve Hoke, Sunset Road, Track By Track, Wild Common, WTJU Folk