Walking Through "A Room With Many Doors: Night" with Darian Donovan Thomas
Walking Through "A Room With Many Doors: Night" with Darian Donovan Thomas
The first part of the conceptual double album walks away from the expected chronological release order.
Darian Donovan Thomas is widely recognized throughout many genres, commissions, album credits, performances, and, most importantly, friendships. His trajectory reflects years of surrender to art and all its variations, whether recording and touring internationally as a multi-instrumentalist with Moses Sumney, Arooj Aftab, Balun, Ben Sloan, and Wild Up, to mention a few, as a resident composer, performer, and fellow for organizations like the Marfa Ballroom, New Amsterdam Records’ Composer Lab, So Percussion Summer Institute, Aeon Ritual at MASSMoCA, and Bang on a Can Summer Institute, or as a commissioned and premiered artist by Jennifer Koh, Ensemble Signal, Adam Tender, So Percussion, ~Nois Quartet, and YOSA (the Youth Orchestras of San Antonio), Darian never stops.
Darian's narrative, style, and sound epitomize the intricacies of intersectionality. While interviewed by Majel Connery for the Reverberations Podcast, he declared, “My mom is from Mexico City. I was born in San Antonio, Texas. I am half Mexican, half Black, so Afro-Latino.” The dichotomy of the continent’s division of American identity and his own has compelled him to forge his unique path. Navigating his upbringing as a mixed-race and “extremely, aggressively gay” individual led him to adopt an “expert mode” demeanor around conservatives in Texas while seeking solace in music. “I think I’m a person that likes to make people feel safe.” To do so, he shares how he’s learned that you first must “understand yourself, and understand how to account for yourself when you are surprising yourself.” This took special meaning as he prepared for his debut record, A Room With Many Doors, a double album focused on heartbreak, honesty, and healing. The album’s second part was released first, prompting our conversation with Darian today.
A Room With Many Doors: Night
A Room With Many Doors: Night was released on August 2nd, 2024 via New Amsterdam Records. On release day, Darian shared “a narrative arch” to his Meta followers:
”An event triggers shadow work. You decide to go deeper than you have - you reach the dark of your soul: the hell you’ve made for yourself. There you find a test: “What has actually hurt you? Therefore, what do you need to keep?”
You reflect on this as you climb out of the depths and onto the mountain top to scream how good things once were - and attempt to call them back. It’s a summoning spell.
You remember daylight - glittery. And think of going into yesterday.
Then you’re reminded: that’s not possible. But you have tomorrow. And the coming sunlight. What do you do?”
Inspired by Bjork, SZA, and many artists and friends, ARWMD morphed into variations of the same concept: a reminder that we’re never alone. “I had this idea of making each song for a different friend. That’s where the title comes from. A lot of people were involved in making it. Even though a lot of the songs are very centered in my own experience of heartbreak and various stories of failed love, the only way I was able to get through all of that was with my friends and colleagues so I wanted them all to be in these stories as well.”
The Tracks
Throughout this record, Darian’s need for aggravating detail came in the form of instructions for his collaborators. As we dig deeper, track by track, we can appreciate these prompts as part of the final product.
“Snow Storm”
“This is a very sobering moment in the album, which is why we’re starting here for the second half. I wrote that song after experiencing a weird lesson in real time of the kind of people I tended to fall in love with; the kind of unrequited love I tended to take safety in. In his solitude, during the snow storm of 2020, self-reflection and the realization that, in his heartbreaks, “the common denominator is me” hit him.
Inspired by Bjork's use of horns and vocals, and drawing from his collaboration with Moses Sumney, who often incorporates striking sounds that blend the vibrating instrumentation, Darian invited his friends from that musical context—Alfredo Colón, Ben Chapoteau-Katz, and Kalia Vandever—to contribute to this track. They were given specific prompts by Darian:
“(1) be calm, maybe kind of tired — very plain and uncolored sound, (2) then be more aggravated, and (3) on the third time play it as if you’re the worst middle school player ever. Raw and sincere, and maybe a little embarrassed. Then do that whole process again but more extreme in all of these directions.” - Prompts by Darian Donovan Thomas
The objective was to transform the piano-based composition into a controlled chaos that captures the torment of heartbreak. “I’m going to commit to...saying things that feel honest to myself and give people the opportunity to see me work through it in real-time. That’s why Failed Acolyte comes next."
“Failed Acolyte”
Acolyte is a word commonly used when describing a follower of a religious faith or leader. In Donovan’s case, it’s “this vibe of new, tried, and failed, which feels like a very apt way to describe my love life up until recently,” a brutal characterization as per Majel Connery. He continued, “I’m okay with being brutal with myself. I’m not trying to do it but, I hope that if with no one else, I can be honest with myself. I don’t know if that’s the right feeling, but it’s where a lot of us are often.”
As the song unfolds, the mood begins to shift. “There’s the poem, there’s the laughter, and L’Rain is being perfect and amazing…the transition within the middle of it felt appropriate.” The message is drowning by excruciatingly mechanical filters depicting guilt, and the laugh, withering away at your soul, seems eternal until, suddenly, melodic vocals start coming and going in waves of relief. “Yeah, we’re in the harsh noise, we’re in the depths of hell here, and the pit of self-hatred, but from that comes an awareness and an understanding of “this is why we’re alive…it’s to have all these feelings, and to try.”
Previously in the conversation, he laughed while trying to describe himself. “It’s funny. On my dad’s side there were a lot of ministers and musicians for generations, and on my mom’s side we have a lot of curanderas and brujas. Something is out there and I can bring it here; there’s a channeling that I can do. While listening to “Failed Acolyte”, this theory self actualizes. “So we climb out of this hell space into a more ambient world. It’s the first time you hear me play violin on this side.”
“This is me, kind of re-acknowledging myself after the mess…after the numbness. I felt that was the right time to have a voicemail from my mom.” - Darian discussing his use of violin on Reverberations with Majel Connery Ep. 4.
“Volver, Volver”
Darian confessed that he used to be part of a Mariachi band in San Antonio. “We started doing a cover of [Volver, Volver], and I remember being struck by how, every time we’d do it, [the crowd] would start singing along in the chorus.” The song, composed in 1972 by Fernando Maldonado, focuses on the nostalgia of what a lost love used to be and the overcoming desire to “volver, volver” (go back, go back). “I wanted to take it and make it not only gay, because I am gay, but a song to self. I’m actually singing it to a version of me from before that didn’t have all this bitterness from the early part of Failed Acolyte. There’s this desire to return to myself.”
Kalia Vandever returns on this track with a heart-wrenching trombone solo, directed by the following instruction:
“Think of the person that you’ve loved the most - that you’ve lost - and imagine that you’re calling to them. Summon them.”
“There was a time when I looked at someone with a very pure and light love, and I want to return to that,” says Darian. “Calling to yourself is really hard, especially from inside the house, so you have to be very loud about it, hence the ending of it getting so massive.”
“Flirting”
The concept album "A Rooms With Many Doors" was started during the COVID-19 pandemic and took around two years to complete. "Flirting," the second single from ARWMD: Night, captures the sounds of the world as it began to open up again, reflecting Donovan Thomas' healing heart as he ventured out once more. “I get to meet people outside and be outside and do these things. It’s a quick song and it’s good. It’s exactly what flirting should be. Here’s a simple thing, it’s true and nice and it’s powerful in its simplicity.”
It was important for Darian to reach the listener where they were at, musically. “I want to meet them there, pull them into the album, and give them the chance to leave through a different door. I feel okay with how wide and eclectic the music in the album is because it feels like me. These are a lot of bands that I’ve been in, and a lot of genres and music I’ve been in. I don’t feel that any of them are costume. I feel very at home in each of them and I hope the listener can get some of that too.”
“Flirting Coda”
As we talk about the last song, Darian smiles. “To do the flirting thing, I have to be in a place where I acknowledge all of these complexities.” The last prompt given was to Phong Tran. The instruction? “Destroy this”. “We’re trying to accept everything now that it’s here. I get to choose. Instead of running around or being cynical, I can walk through this space. In the end, I have to put down the stories and failures I’ve had before and move on. So, it ends with that sentence of “I’ll pick a door and I’ll go.” That feels like an appropriate place to end.”
You can check out A Room With Many Doors: Night, by Darian Donovan Thomas, by clicking here. Make sure to subscribe to New Amsterdam Record’s Substack and support our efforts to showcase the genius composers and artists under our label.
This article was written by Kárenly Nieves-Fred, Label, Marketing, and Operations Coordinator for New Amsterdam Records.
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