Not all artists receive the musical education and start Danika did as an artist singing backing vocals for prominent Australian artists including 30/70 collective, Allysha Joy, Sampa the Great, Tomgirl, Harmony Byne, and Emma Donovan and the Putbacks. However, Danika has made a name for herself as a stand alone artist led by her raw and honest storytelling, oozing rich harmonies with inflections of soul in previous releases and now in her latest single ‘For My Baby’, proving that she is here to stay.
Out now via Endless Recordings, ‘For My Baby’ follows on from ‘Coolshit Bullshit’. Both songs are lifted from her forthcoming second EP titled Down Love slated for release on March 10, 2023, following on from the 2021 release of When Love Comes.
For Danika, the purpose of making music continues to be about exploring the inner workings, as a way of self-inquiry, understanding and self-expression. When writing ‘For My Baby’, “I challenged myself to capture a feeling of love from a hopeful place, as most of my songs are pretty devo due to some challenging life experiences. As Laura Marling once said ‘love and pain go hand in hand’ and so I figure it would do good to imagine the tenderness of love, to balance out the pain it also causes, and to broaden my beliefs around what is possible in the name of love”, explains Danika upon reflection of her songwriting.
Featuring the uniquely familiar sound we’ve grown to know and love from Danika, ‘For My Baby’s soft gentle guitar, is layered amongst the percussion and drums of Hudson Whitlock (Surprise Chef) and meandering bass lines of Paul Bender (Hiatus Kaiyote), while Danika invites her 16 piece female choir to harmonise alongside her offering the perfect dynamics bringing her emotive lullaby to life.
A song about realising what some of us have come to understand, that many of the issues we humans have around our relationships with others are due to learned behaviours from childhood. “Nick Herrera and I experimented quite a lot with the production, inspired by the original home demo version,” says Danika. “I sang the final part of the song with quite a different tone, and in the final edit, it’s almost Childlike. So it’s almost like my little kid version is singing the lyrics ‘no memory of pain can shatter this” aka, I’m not going to let my previous experiences continue to shape my current and future experiences of love”.
