The Commercial Appeal - Go Memphis
Singer shares ‘private heartbreak journal’
The breakup Danielle Durack chronicles in such vivid emotional detail on “No Place” hadn’t happened yet as the Phoenix, Ariz., singer-songwriter started writing the songs that would make up an album she likes to think of as her private heartbreak journal.
“It was kind of like a timeline of what I was feeling throughout the whole process, kind of white-knuckling it towards the end and working through those emotions,” she says.
A few of the album’s hardest-hitting moments were written while they were still together, from “Don’t Know if I’ll Stick Around,” in which she tells him, “Don’t take this the wrong way, babe, but somedays, you’re just dead weight” to the album-closing “Eggshells.”
At that point, she says, “I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do.”
Once it was over, she wrote a few more songs reflecting on what she’d just gone through, from “Someday” to “There Goes My Heart.”
“Those were really powerful moments, nights of just getting it all out,” she says of writing those post-breakup songs.
“It’s a lot of just journaling and being able to get rid of some of the mental chatter when you’re going through something like that. And then recording was its own thing. It’s really intense being in a room and ruminating on all of those feelings. But now that it’s over, I feel like I’m able to be more at peace with all of it.”
‘A very fundamental human thing’
Sharing the intimate details of how it felt to live through the anger, the sadness, the guilt and eventual loneliness of ending the most serious relationship she’d ever had was “kind of scary, I guess,” she says.
“But I don’t know, I think it’s powerful to share those things that are the most personal.”
It also makes the song more universal.
“Everybody’s felt that grief,” she says. “That longing. That’s a very fundamen
tal human thing. So sharing it in this very personal way is scary. But I think it’s also really liberating to understand that you’re never alone in your pain.”
The album, which was released on Jan. 15, opens with a song she wrote about an earlier relationship, reflecting on the role she played in what went wrong.
“Well, I made some mistakes on you,” she sings. “Learned some lessons at your expense and I hope you know I’m sorry about that.”
It’s about her first serious boyfriend, Durack says.
“I wrote it as just kind of a reflection on experiencing all these things and now I’m on the other end of it, whereas I was the (expletive) one in the past. Now I get it. And I’m so sorry.”
The song’s stripped-down arrangement – Durack’s vocals accompanied by acoustic guitar and harmonies – is the
perfect introduction to an introspective album that offsets confessional bedroom pop with more electrifying pathways to catharsis.
The album’s most heartbreaking line may be the chorus of the second song, “By Now,” where Durack sings, “I just thought that I’d be over it by now.”
Working her way through the healing process
So is she over it by now?
“Oh God,” she responds, with a laugh. “I think so. But, you know, there’s days. I don’t mean to compare my breakup to a death, but grief is grief. And it gets it gets easier the longer you go on. There are more good days between the bad days. But I’ll still have a day every now and then where it’s just like, ‘Oh (expletive), I thought I was gonna marry that guy and I don’t know....”
One thing she’s learned is that the healing process is nonlinear.
“I’m sure there’ll be a day when I’m, like, 65 years old and I’ll be like (makes crying noise) ‘I messed it up with this guy,’” she says, with a laugh. “But that’s kind of one of my character flaws is just the whole what-if thing, you know?”
The album’s title, “No Place,” was inspired by a book she was reading by Jenny O’dell titled “How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.”
“One of the chapters is on dissatisfaction with society,” she says. “And one option is trying to escape it. In that chapter, there’s a segment on the direct English translation of the word utopia, which is no place. And I found that really striking, very sad and deeply, you know, true. This idealized place, it does not exist.”
The same is true, Durack says, of idealized notions of happiness.
“It’s not a destination,” she says. “Even in a personal relationship, it’s not gonna be this perfect union. Sometimes it is just a constant negotiation and trying to decide what is going to be the best thing for right now.”
The title also reflected the way she felt about herself after the breakup.
“I was kinda rattled pretty deeply and my identity felt a little bit stripped away,” she says. “Because it was somebody I’d been with for a really long time. And suddenly, I had this nothingness of an identity. It was just this space to fill. And that was really scary but also really liberating, if that makes any sense.”
In a perfect world, she’d follow the album’s release through by sharing her feelings onstage for an audience, completing the catharsis of the breakup album process.
Instead, she had to settle for a livestreamed release show, thanks to a global pandemic that’s made playing live a really bad idea.
“I’m glad we live in a time where I can play shows online,” Durack says.
“It is super weird, though. These songs are pretty emotionally charged. And I feel like being in a room with people and being able to share that vulnerability is a really special thing. I wish I could. But I guess it is what it is and I’m trying to make the best of it.”