Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country returns to town to headline at The Jefferson Theater on October 15.
Guitar slinger Daniel Donato cut his teeth in the Nashville honky-tonk scene. The freewheeling electric picker started busking in the city’s Lower Broadway district at age 14, and not long after he was invited to play at storied clubs, including Legend’s Corner and Robert’s Western World.
With fleet-fingered runs on his Telecaster, Donato mastered much of the well-worn country songbook, but he’s since proven to have bigger aspirations on his instrument.
As the leader of Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country, he guides a versatile band through a mix of high-energy takes on twangy standards along with original material that goes deep into the territory of improvisational psychedelic rock.
The broad extent of the guitarist’s interests is covered on the sprawling new live album, Ryman to Robert’s—a 28-song, three-plus-hour effort that documents a huge night of music for Donato and company. On August 22, 2025, the group played Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, its first-ever headline slot at the city’s venerable 2,400-seat hall (the former home of the Grand Ole Opry), billed as a hometown celebration of the group’s latest studio album, Horizons. Then later in the evening, the band wandered over to the nearby Robert’s to play its own afterparty at the much more intimate venue.
The live album features songs from both rooms, offering a full-circle look at Donato’s progression from traditional torchbearer to multi-genre explorer. The Ryman part of the evening takes up two-thirds of the record, and for good reason, as it showcases the breadth of Donato’s range with his dynamic band. After opening with a hyper take on Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues,” the group spends the bulk of the show going way out into the sonic wilderness.
Donato and his crew, which also features versatile keyboardist Nathan Aronowitz, bassist Will McGee, and drummer William Clark, have clearly studied the jam-band canon. As a result, many of their original compositions hit familiar touchstones, from the mystical grooves of the Grateful Dead (“Fortunate Sparrow”) to the aggressive space-rock of Phish (“Hangman’s Reel”) to the driving live-tronica of the Disco Biscuits (“Dance in the Desert”). But in all contexts the focus largely remains on Donato’s nimble fret acrobatics, which move between speedy roadhouse scales and soaring arena riffs.
In “Lose Your Mind,” a gospel-hued anthem about letting go of mental hangups, he hits multiple blues-based peaks over the course of 15 minutes that should please fans of The Allman Brothers Band.
During the Robert’s portion (the last eight tracks), Donato nods back to his roots, playing barroom staples by the likes of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams.
Toward the end of his marathon, two-venue evening, his fingers are still flying, especially as he tosses hot-potato solos back and forth with Aronowitz and special guest, pedal steel player Mike Drassler, on a rollicking rendition of the well-shared 1930s tune “Sittin’ on Top of the World.”
As a young guitar hero still on the rise, Donato, who’s made Charlottesville a regular stop in the past few years, is giving old sounds new dimensions.
