Richard Daub grew up on Long Island, New York, where he pilfered milk crates, loitered in bowling alleys, rumbled in shopping mall parking lots, stocked supermarket frozen foods aisles, played guitar, cruised nightclub parking lots for girls, wrote crappy song lyrics, and longed for the day he’d forever leave “Strong Island”.

He fled the Atlantic Northeast for the Pacific Northwest and, in the late 1990s, worked for a company named after a piranha-filled river that sold books on the World Wide Web, where he met his wife.

In the 2000s he became an inexperienced journalist and quickly rose to international prominence covering the animal pharmaceutical industry.

After toiling in journalism for a number of years and reminding himself that he was but an artist, the author began a career in real estate, selling condos in Harlem until the financial disaster of 2008.

The real estate market having collapsed, he took a factory job and moved with wife and child to Westchester County, New York. After several years of labor, husbanding, and childrearing, he began writing again, waking at 3:00 am until it was time to take the kids to school and go to work, eventually completing The Adventures of Hyperkid, a young adult novel written with his son. He then completed two adult novels, History of von Schatt (1913-1960) and The Island Country, as well as a collection of short stories, The Greater Massapequas—the kind of thing agents and publishers love most, short story collections from unknown writers. Take that to your fiction workshop and smoke it.

History of von Schatt is a novel inspired by a creepy painting hung on in his author’s grandmother’s Long Island home, a portrait of the ship captain grandfather he’d never met, a man so frightening that the author, as a boy, could see fear in the eyes of the grownups whenever they spoke of “The Captain”, who, by then, had been dead two decades, harrowing tales of land and sea they probably never imagined the boy would recall later in life as a toasted journalist.

The Island Country and The Greater Massapequas are drawn from the author’s experience growing up on the desolate, amber-lit streets and mall culture of the Long Island suburbs he longed to get as far from as possible without leaving the country.

After the publication of The Greater Massapequas in early 2024 and with no new writing projects in the pipeline, said author turned his attention back to a road not traveled and only visited briefly during his adulthood. During high school, perhaps a little too late to make anything of it, he purchased a cheap acoustic guitar with really bad action and took a few lessons, and, after learning a few chords, went on to teach himself to the point where he got good enough to start taking lessons again to attempt to reach the next level. Despite a strong determination to escape the suburbs with a guitar and a notebook full of woeful song lyrics, he was less confident in his musicianship than his writing skills, and his initial plan to join or start a band in college quickly gave way to the debauchery of undergraduate life at the SUNY University of Oneonta State College at Oneonta. It also gave way to a stronger interest in writing and inspiration from Jack Kerouac to head west, eventually landing in the Pacific Northwest in 1996, just as Soundgarden was getting ready to call it quits.

Despite being in the land of grunge and occasionally thinking about it, he did not pick up his guitar in Seattle, and wouldn’t again until 2009, when he finally decided to get rid of the cheap old acoustic with the bad action and purchased a new Yamaha acoustic with much better action. At this moment in time, he’d just left his job as an animal health reporter and was completely burnt out after spending a decade working on an awful novel. He started making demos, including a couple of songs he’d written in high school, and also wrote some new songs as well, though these were not strong efforts. The guitar playing got better though.

Then life got in the way and that batch was left until early 2024, just after the publication of The Greater Massapequas. It was a similar experience to 2009 after he’d left his journalism job, again burnt out from a long stretch of writing, and, once that one creative door was closed, once again the music once opened and he began writing songs again, but this time would prove very different. Over a two-month period he wrote several songs a night, a flood of over 120 in all. While this was happening, the Sam Ash Music Store chain announced they were going out of business, providing a perfect opportunity to buy the equipment necessary to start recording. At the closing sale at the local location, he purchased an electric Ibanez guitar and also an Ibanez bass, as well as amps for each.

After sitting on these songs for so long, he wanted them to exist. Work began in his new office inside a very old house, and, despite many technical problems, the old songs started coming to life, as well as a few new ones from the batch he’d just written, some of the more oddball pieces in what shaping up to be more of a collection of “B-Sides and Rarities” than a proper first album. But he didn’t know what he was doing and also had to learn how to mix as well, so this project was originally known as The Practice Album, and would later be known as Songs From the Barn, a reference to the old horse barn that came with the property they’d purchased, giving the place a sort of Neil Young feel. Highlights from the album include two of the new songs, one of which the Young-esque “Bakery Girl” and the comic dance tune “Electric Bed” which includes a Marky Mark-like piano intro, and also one of the 2009 tunes, “Lonely Desert”, a melancholic tale of regret exposed by the desert sky. Two songs written in high school, his first two ever, were also recorded, including “That Boy Can Drink”, a Kris-Kristofferson-esque warning of the woes of alcohol, and the second being “Claustrophobia”, the lyrics of which were so bad that he destroyed them thirty years ago, but some of the chorus remained in his memory.

After Songs from the Barn was released in November 2024, he released a series of original singles, including “Nothing Left But Night”, a dark tale about a man who’d reached his end, and “Tracy and the Big Sombrero”, another Neil Young-esque remembrance of a childhood crush on a second cousin.

Though “Tracy and the Big Sombrero” proved to be a mild hit, it was a long and difficult song to record and left him burnt out musically. This experiment of recording, mixing, and releasing one new single at a time was also a more laborious process than working on numerous tracks at once, as he’d done with Songs From the Barn. After taking a break from music, he started putting down basic tracks of the new songs that jumped out at him in the binder, which included two powerful and very personal songs about his father, “No Dad of Mine” and “Omitted From the Obituary”. There were more guitar-heavy songs, and also some keyboard tunes, and a lo-fi joint called “Wax the Rabbit” about cruising the Spit Lot on Long Island in the early 1990s that would have fit perfectly with the first album. “Square Peg Lover”, about a childhood crush on a TV actress. Another Kerouac song in the vein of “The 4th of Eureka” from the first album, “Gunther’s Tap Room” visit Jack towards the sad end of his life in a dive bar in Northport, Long Island. A surprisingly sensitive piano tune called “Fireflies” that recalls “Thunder Road” and “We’ve Got Tonight”.

At the moment, a new novel is in the works. Stay tuned. ▪