To celebrate the release of his new album last Friday, Daniel Donato played three Nashville shows in one day — with a solo pop-up at a record store, his band’s headlining show at Ryman Auditorium and a late-night covers set at a honky-tonk around the corner.

“Three is the cosmic number after all,” Donato said, “so I think it’s only fitting.”

The 30-year-old guitarist said he didn’t need a lot of recovery time afterwards, although he speculated that liquid IV and Bob Ross YouTube videos would help those who did.

“None of us really went to sleep at all. I think we all stayed up till seven (a.m.) and just reveled in the spirit,” Donato said Monday. “It was really just beautiful, man. I am sad that, in a time sense, it’s over, but such is the design.”

“Horizons,” the new album from Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country, showcases the band’s signature blend of country, rock and psychedelic jam music. It’ll be on display Sept. 7 at Stage AE in Pittsburgh with a triple bill that also includes Railroad Earth and Yonder Mountain String Band.

A pair of recent local Donato appearances played to capacity crowds at Club Cafe in 2023 and Mr. Smalls Theatre in March.

“Our earliest sold-out shows have always been in Pittsburgh, and for one reason or another, Pittsburgh is really on the frequency of what cosmic country is about. It is a place that I love playing every year, and we try to play there several times a year, and I’m just so, so grateful for the community that is in Pittsburgh,” Donato said. “It makes a lot of sense to me as to why Pittsburgh loves cosmic country because it’s a working town. It’s a town that’s really important to the history of our country, especially on the level of industrialization, and also its artistic output with Andy Warhol being from there.

“So it’s a working man’s town that has the ability to create beautiful and great art, and Nashville is a lot like that. So I know geographically they’re different — we say y’all, they say yinz — but the relationship of the spirit is very similar there. So I’ve always felt at home at Pittsburgh, and I feel like people in Pittsburgh always feel at home in cosmic country.”

In a call Monday from Nashville, Donato discussed the album “Horizons,” the meaning of cosmic country and more:

Have you ever played that many shows or songs in one day before (as last Friday)?

Yeah, way more. Back in the day when I was about 16, 17, 18, there were full Friday through Sunday on Broadway (in Nashville) where I would play three-, four-hour shows, for tips. I think we did just about a little bit over 30 songs, which isn’t crazy, on Friday. The yield, not commercially speaking, but just spiritually speaking was literally close to a thousand times more than what happened on all those days down on Broadway. So I’ll take it when I can get it.

The new album seems like it came together pretty quickly after you went into the studio in January.

Yeah, it all happens really fast. Everything in my whole musical life happens really fast and really slow in some way. There’s always a lot going on and we need to get it done in a way that is expeditious, but career-wise everything happens very linear for me and it happens really slowly. I know a large part of the narrative that surrounds Cosmic Country is that there’s a meteoric rise but that isn’t the case for us, for me rather, because I’ve been doing this since I was 14. I started out on the street and then I got into the bars and then I got into American Legion halls and then I just stepped in every possible place to go and serve music I’ve been called to play every possible step, so it seems fast to me but it also just seems like business as usual.

What were your goals with this album musically?

I would say probably the biggest one was to lean into humanity, which I know sounds very large and abstract because it is, but we’re in a time now where there are a lot of domains of our life here in America in which we have to interface with algorithms and intelligent systems and essentially non-human transactions. And it’s no secret to anybody that the sacred space of music is starting to be exposed to that trend as well. There’s nothing that we really can do to stop that, but there are missions and creations that artists can do to serve tradition more. So we wanted to lean into humanity, and we wanted to serve tradition while also creating our own tradition with cosmic country.

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With that term, cosmic country, what does that mean to you?

Cosmic country is a duality of sorts. Harlan Howard, one of the great country writers of the genre, once said that country music is just three chords and the truth. Relatively simple, you know? So country music is supposed to be simple. Merle Haggard said country songs are the working man’s dream. So country has to be simple, but it has to be truthful. So if country is simple and truthful, then there must be something that is just infinitely and existentially complex that is also truthful. And that’s where you bring in the cosmos. That’s where you bring in the cosmic mystery of mysteries, and that also is truthful. So we’re trying to unify through the live music experience, the dance between what is complex and what is simple through truth.

You don’t hear a lot of people in the country music business talk about that cosmic aspect much.

Well, they used to. Hank Williams had a lot of great gospel songs, “I Saw the Light.” Merle Haggard had a great record, “The Land of Many Churches.” Johnny Cash was a devoutly spiritual person in his own unique way. But as it started to become more commercialized, the narrative for what is most cosmic lost a lot of its equity. We’re not so nail on the head about it as traditional artists used to be. But that’s fine because the spirit of that imbues everything I set forth to do, if I’m lucky. (laughs)

Do you feel like you’re pushing the boundaries of country music a little bit?

I think so. I think it was inevitable that something like this had to happen. I feel like I’m just on the branch really, or a tapestry of sorts, because cosmic country has a history. So I feel confident in pushing boundaries. There’s a lot of ideas that are out and about today in the collective conscious that haven’t aimed to push boundaries, but those seeds are not sowed in any ground that is fertile. Not to name anything specifically, but say like Blanco Brown, a few years ago, where he had that viral TikTok country song (“The Git Up”). It’s cool. It’s trendy and everything, but it doesn’t really have any history that it’s rooted in. So it’s not going to grow any roots. It’ll be like a sunflower that grows really high for a short season and kind of just falls. So I feel comfortable in what we’re pushing because where we get the fuel to push from is from a place that is traditional and trusted.

Just from listening to the album, you can definitely hear that, and basically from a bunch of the covers that you played on Friday, you’re pretty well versed in that.

Yeah. If an artist can serve tradition, tradition will serve the artist.

The song “Chore” checks in at more than 11 minutes on the record, but I’ve seen that in a live setting, it goes even longer. How do you whittle that down for the core recorded version of that?

I think you have the intention to do so. When I get in a room with my band, everyone loves records in Cosmic Country. And records are really just completely different than the live show. They need their own conversation, and they need their own space. So fortunately we all love records, and we wanted to make a record, but we didn’t want to compromise the story that that song tells, both lyrically and musically. So with that intention, our producer Vance Powell, he’s literally the one guy in the world that knows how to create Nashville music without being owned by Nashville in any way. He doesn’t have to do any of that if he doesn’t want to. So if I come in and I want to make a record that sounds like it’s from Nashville, he can do that. I think those two things plus just a little bit of magic.

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