Releases
Bio
Don DiLego has released 5 studio albums and 1 full-length score for the motion picture “Ranchero.” His last full length album, ‘Magnificent Ram A’, (One Little Indian/Velvet Elk) was
“DiLego’s Masterpiece” if you are to believe No Depression, and a “Stunner of a record”, if you’re willing to concede that opinion to Paste Magazine. Either way, Don was quite pleased with the album title, which he scribed after his umpteenth trip to The Museum of Natural History, in NYC, where he currently resides (even though spending most of his time at his studio in the woods of the Poconos). He released the outtakes and B-sides to that record the following year, and cleverly titled it “Magnificent Ram B.”
His last single, “Your Great Escape”, which RollingStone calls “big-city, alt-country music” (an apropos oxymoron that probably hits the nail on the head), was released in June of 2019. Don tours both solo as well as with his band, The Touristas, a mix of multi-instrumentalist do-gooders who make him sound just right. At least that’s what they tell him.
He has produced albums for Jesse Malin, Hollis Brown, Fantastic Cat, and Rebecca Haviland among others, and continues to write with the electro-twang side project Beautiful Small Machines which he started with Bree Sharp after David Duchovny stopped issuing restraining orders on her.
DiLego and Malin started Velvet Elk Records a few years ago (after their black mold basement studio project flooded out) releasing both artists along with the single “Run Right To You” by Hollis Brown, which Don produced in that studio in the woods that he never mentions the exact location of for some odd reason. Oh, Don has won several songwriting competitions, including one in Australia (International Song of the Year), where they had dancers on stage as they announced it and they LITERALLY called him from a cell phone on stage to accept the award…at 6am his time while he was eating scrambled eggs and the waiter thought he was very strange to be thanking his eggs for some songwriting award. Anyway, you should’ve been there I guess.
Growing up, Don’s dad had an old train station bar in Western Massachusetts and his first record was a 45 of “Rhinestone Cowboy” by Glen Campbell…who he would often mix up with The Lone Ranger, which makes kind of a lot of sense if you think about it. Since then, he has purchased other non-Rhinestone Cowboy related records, but still pines for the “good ol days” when you could wear “something bejeweled and sparkly” while singing country songs.
Don’s latest single “Make It Shine (Dim Red Light)” will be out June 18th on Velvet Elk Records.
End bio.
