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Daniel (Bat for Lashes song)

"Daniel"
Daniel Bat for Lashes.jpg
Single by Bat for Lashes
from the album Two Suns
Released 1 March 2009 (2009-03-01)
Format
Recorded Natasha Khan's house, Brighton; Bryn Derwen Studios, Wales; Magic Shop Studios, New York City; DK Studio, London
Genre
Length 3:29 (radio edit)
4:09 (album version)
Label Parlophone
Writer(s) Natasha Khan
Producer(s)
Bat for Lashes singles chronology
"What's a Girl to Do?"
(2007)
"Daniel"
(2009)
"Pearl's Dream"
(2009)

"Daniel" is a song by English recording artist Bat for Lashes, from her second studio album, Two Suns. It is her best selling single to date, selling over 46,000 copies worldwide. The song was announced as the lead single from Two Suns in January 2009, then released as a digital download single on 1 March 2009, and as a 7" vinyl single on 6 April 2009. The track was written by Natasha Khan and produced by David Kosten, as with all tracks on the album. Ira Wolf Tuton from Yeasayer provided the bass lines for the song and Khan did the rest of the instrumentation herself.

Khan said in an interview with The Sun newspaper that "Daniel" is based on a fictional character that she fell in love with as a teenager. The single's cover features Khan with an image of the character Daniel LaRusso, from the film The Karate Kid, painted on her back. A character much like LaRusso also features at the end of the music video which goes with the song. The B-side of the 7", 'A Forest' is a cover version of the 1980 single by The Cure of the same name.

"It's, like, the most frightening song on the record for me, because it's the most straightforward, naive and purposely simple song I've ever done. It's about teenage escapism and love and how simple things can be when you're a teenager in love, or how intense and beautiful it can be. I love songs like Pat Benatar's 'Love Is a Battlefield,' like when you sing them, you want to be leaning out the window of a car with the stars shining. And I felt like I wanted to encapsulate that feeling of abandon and love and sadness and melancholy, all at the same time."

Digital Spy said that "Daniel" is "probably the most immediate thing Khan has recorded. Both synthy and mystical-sounding, and filled with poetic lyrics about "marble movie skies" and "the smell of cinders and rain," it could almost pass for a lost Stevie Nicks track from the early eighties. Khan's velvety voice, meanwhile, remains as enchanting as ever, so here's hoping a few more people get to hear it."NME said the song "relives ghostly memories of her first love and sounds like Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon" filtered through the weeping circuits of a broken-hearted android."Gigwise said "a poppy work of kosmik disko à la Empire of the Sun as a sexy working of electric violin and vocal overdubs are strapped to the beats and bones of a mythic love song."Pitchfork likewise gave it a highly positive reception, awarding the single 9/10, describing the vocals in the song as "alternately commanding and fragile" and describing the song as "her 'Running Up that Hill'." At the end of the year, Pitchfork also rated "Daniel" the 4th best song of the year. The video for "Daniel" was named the 11th best video of the year by Spin Magazine in their "Top 20 Best Videos of 2009" countdown.


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