Dan
Navarro An Animated Singer-Songwriter-Musician In LA
Dan
Navarro An Animated Singer-Songwriter-Musician In LA
Life
has come full circle for California singer-songwriter-musician and voice actor
Dan Navarro. He is once again enjoying a solo career in music after two decades
as part of the duo Lowen and Navarro, with the late Eric Lowen who passed away
two years ago from ALS also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Songs that Dan
Navarro has written and / or co-written have been recorded by artists such as,
Pat Benatar, Jackson Browne, Keb’ Mo’, Dave Edmunds, Dionne Warwick, The
Temptations and The Bangles. Navarro has also added a new dimension to his
entertainment career in recent years, doing voice over work for animated feature
films and animated television shows. The affable and very articulate Dan Navarro
took time out from his busy schedule recently to sit down with Riveting Riffs
Magazine to discuss his new, still to be released album, his voice acting career
and to look back at his career in general.
Dan Navarro’s new album is called
Shed My Skin and he says it is really
a continuation of changes that have been occurring in his life since his former
music and business partner Eric Lowen was diagnosed with ALS in 2006, the same
year that Navarro was going through a divorce and he says even some changes that
began in 1998 when he was approaching middle age.
“Here I am now from 1998, about sixteen years later and
I am still dealing with change. The changes were being on my own, deciding to
continue being a musician instead of folding up the tent, deciding to make it
about a process and not about the outcome. It is hard not to be cynical about
the fate of my (new) record; I don’t think that there are people out there
champing at the bit for it. It is
an uphill battle, even though there is wonderful music being made, by all of my
friends, many of my friends. Sometimes there really isn’t an audience waiting
for it. Sometimes there is a larger mechanism that can take it and maneuver it
to greater fruition. In my case, I am really just trying to get the damn thing
made and say what I want to say, which is, here comes act three.
I
want it to be good. (It is about) peeling off some layers, so it is called
Shed My Skin and that was a track
that was actually written on commission. No money changed hands, but that wasn’t
the point. I was asked to write a song for a potential film and that was what
was created in the process. It has become the center point of the record,
because it really does
sort of reflect what I am
doing. In shedding a skin and moving on in one’s life there is a sense of
renewal, but there is also a sense of denial or more than anything a scuttling.
This isn’t who I am anymore. This isn’t what I am anymore. This was the outside
of me then, this is the outside of me now. It really seems apropos.
Some of the other songs deal with loss and change. It is
a normal subject, loss and change, persistence and fear to an extent, (as well
as) persistence through fear. (It is also) curiosity, what the hell is on the
other side. (He starts to chuckle)
Right now it is what is on the other side of Act Three; it is not what is on the
other side of this finite wall yet. My stuff is not death obsessed even though
there has been death in my life lately (His father in February of 2014). It is
really life obsessed, which is, there is more out there that I want to do and
how much of my baggage am I carrying around with me and how much do I let go?
How much of it is baggage and how much of it is just luggage?
Everybody old has luggage. It’s baggage that you don’t want.
Give me a nice leather roller bag. You know what I am saying? (Laughing
he says) One with high quality leather, twenty-one inches, just a little bit of
luggage and a little utility belt. If you do it right, you can pull things out
and then stick them away and go, okay this is for this situation.
There is a song called “New Year’s Day,” and it is all
about starting over. It is not like I am sitting there going let me write about
starting over. When I write lyrics I write about what inspires me and what gets
under my skin at that moment. In this situation it feels like it is worth
writing about. Right now it does have to do with persistence, renewal, memory
and here comes Act Three.
The album is not finished yet. I have taken way too
long. I took too long to start it. I took too long to record it. It will
probably be the anticlimax of the year when it happens, but to be honest, some
of it is I am busy with other things and some of it has been money issues. I
haven’t used Kickstarter; so far I have been able to resist that. I may be able
to pull this off alone. If not then I probably need to go to the well for
promotion or publicity or radio or whatever.
I am making it the way that I want to make it and it
took me a while, but I have a lot of great friends who are producers. It took me
a while to find somebody who was able to make it as acoustic as I want it and as
pulled back as I wanted. I wanted it to be very big sounding, but not with a lot
of bombastic instruments, but close micing and a lot of space. I want it to
sound intricate without sounding busy or ornate. I wanted to make sure that it
had something that moved on a lot of levels. So far, so good.
The songwriting is as good as anything that I have ever
been associated with. There are two factors to that. One of them is that I chose
to do outside songs for four of them and just because I wanted to. One of them
is a well-known standard, two of them are songs by friends and the fourth one is
a song that I heard years ago and I always wanted to do. I am doing a Billy Idol
tune, I am doing a song by Kenny Edwards and another one by Tom Wilson of
Blackie and the Rodeo Kings and on that one I am doing a duet with Janiva
Magness and it is really cool. That one is
more like a coming together. I have been friends with Tom Wilson for a while and
Blackie and the Rodeo Kings opened for Lowen and Navarro a couple of times. Tom,
solo opened for us once and I heard a song he called, “I’m Gonna’ Stay That Way.”
I’m going to call it “He Drove Me
Crazy.” I discovered when I got together
with Janiva that she had pictures of Tom Wilson on her Facebook page and I was
doing that song as a solo, but Tom did it as a duet with Margo Timmins of the
Cowboy Junkies. I thought wouldn’t this be
cool to do with Janiva, because she knows Tom and she has the energy for it. It
came out great. That was the beginning of this little ping pong thing of singing
for each other. I asked her to do that and then she asked me to sing on her
record. She did mine first, but I asked her first. Then we did hers and that is
on there.
The Kenny Edwards tune is just one that I have loved
since he passed away four years ago. It
is a song that I didn’t get to do at his memorial, because I was working, but I
put the song in my set and it never left.
I’m doing “Wichita Lineman,” because I can (he
chuckles). It’s Glen Campbell, but to me it’s Jimmy Webb (songwriter,
composer, singer), no offense to Glen Campbell. It’s bizarre, it doesn’t
have the (he then interjects the sound of
the instruments). It doesn’t have that opening at all, but it is one of the
best songs ever written.
The flip side of doing songs by other people is after
thirty years of collaborating, all of the songs that I bring to the party are
written completely alone and I did it on purpose. I think I am doing fourteen
songs (total). I think I have got twelve (so far). I am excited about that and
it is part of what Shed My Skin is
all about. It is about getting out of the way of my own point of view and
crafting it alone. If that means it is going to take longer then it is going to
take longer. We need to finish it. With any luck it will be before the end of
the year and I am not holding my breath on anything. It will get done when it is
done and no one will care, but I will. I am really happy with it,” says Navarro.
With all the life changes and now that he is back to
writing songs alone, we wondered what kind of a songwriter is Dan Navarro?
He says, “I used to write all of the time and I used to
write about things that I thought of. Now I write rarely and I write about what
moves me. It usually winds up, I have music swimming in my head all of the time
and ideas swimming in my head. I will play and I will make stuff up. What I am
finding is the ones that get finished are the ones that stick in my head without
me writing things down. If I have snippets, I can bash the song out right now.
The things that get finished are things that come out to express a particular
feeling that I am keen on. The most recent one is one called “Arrows,” subtitled
“I Got Your Back.” It is bizarre, because it is a contradictory story.
It is someone saying it is time to end and I will always be looking out
for you. It sounds a little weird and it is generated from a real experience.
The result in that case wasn’t that I was looking out for that person always, it
was in some ways wishful thinking, but the idea of this was the way that I could
deal with a change and I wasn’t
happy about. In some ways I romanticized about it and that inspiration got me
through it.
In the last five years, since Eric retired, I write when
I feel like it. I don’t write as disciplined. My output has dropped
dramatically. I was writing fifteen or twenty songs per year and right now if it
is five I am laughing. I think there is a little less need for them. As a
songwriting coach I would tell people, write, write, write. At this point I like
this feeling of saving it up and spitting out a few that feel, super, super
strong to me when I do it, because they are stored up. It is what it is with no
self-aggrandizing intended. It has been a long time since I have written a
clinker, because I am writing less. That is not normal, but that is the way it
has turned out for me. I save it up and it comes out pretty good, it goes into
the set and people like it. It is not like I am churning them out. Everything is
there and is considered in terms of what it is going to be saying and then when
it happens it feels amazing.”
Navarro has been doing voice over work for animated
films for many years, but in October (2014) he has his first speaking part that
has a little bit more meat on the bones so to speak.
He explains, “An audition came for a speaking part in
this animated feature called
Book Of Life, which will be out in October. It is my
first credited acting role in a movie. It is a day of the dead theme.
It is produced (and written) by Jorge Gutierrez. It is a great cast (editor’s
note: the cast includes, Ron Perlman, Zoe Zaldana, Ice Cube, Christina
Applegate, Cheech Marin). I was invited to audition for a particular part,
as a villain. It is not a huge part, but it is a great part. It is fun. The
other movies that I wound up in, just through being a singer in the local
community are the Emperor’s New Groove
(Eartha Kitt, Tom Jones, John Goodman),
I was on The Mexican (2001), two of
the Happy Feet pictures (2006), two
of the four Ice Age pictures, the
Ice Age TV show,
Envy (2004),
Robots,
Rio (2011),
Turbo Fast (TV – 2014),
The Lorax (2012). Sometimes I sing
and sometimes I act. It is a very bizarre way to make a living.”
Navarro recalls how he first got started, “The first
part of (my film career) was as a singer in films. I got really lucky and I met
somebody who contracted voices for commercials and for movies in Spanish. I met
this person in mid ’88 and I did a session with her and she started calling me
for other things.
From there it started expanding little by little into
speaking roles. I started doing a lot of
Spanish vocals between ’88 and ’93. Around ’93 I started doing some work as a
voice over, which suddenly became a thing for me. Someone called me who had
hired me for the jingle and they said, we thought you would be great for the
voice over, so I got moved into voice over by accident. In early 2000, a friend
who had been a friend of Lowen and Navarro’s knew that I had done a lot of this
work as a singer and asked if I had ever thought about doing background voices,
so I started doing that on a couple of live action series. I moved into
Family Guy in 2000 and it became a
huge hit. I was with (the show) before it was canceled and I was with it after
it was brought back. With every little new thing there was a portion of work
that was viable and it literally evolved from there.
Getting that one Toyota voice over in ’94 led to getting an agent and
through that agent I discovered there is more that I can do, so I expanded the
range of what I put out there for and some of my auditions came through.”
Knowing that our readers would be wondering just how on
earth someone prepares to become the voice of a character in an animated film,
we posed that question to Dan Navarro.
“If you are lucky they will send you a cartoon of the
character, so you know the body that you are trying to fill. It is then just a
matter of trying to fill that body directly or indirectly.
A lot of the characters that I have been asked to voice are big giant
guys with big giant voices, because I can get down here and do this (he
deepens his voice considerably) and do this sort of thing, so they want
something huge (he goes into character)
and every once in a while I might do this kind of a guy (his
voice changes again) in a big body and make it different.
I prepare by trying on voices and I prepare by reading the script and
singing. They usually give you a description
of the character and above all their manner, what they are like. Are they mild?
Are they bumbling? Are they haughty and think they are really hot shit until
confronted and then they break down. Are
they the opposite and are there puny little things that break out later? It will
usually tell you a certain amount about who your guy is. To me it all speaks to
a tone color that sounds natural coming out of them. I just try stuff on and at
some point there is something that I will feel is appropriate for what it is.
When I am auditioning, that is what I shoot out to the universe, sometimes it
works and sometimes it doesn’t. When I am working with somebody on a voice they
are usually there helping me to shape it. We have a lot more latitude to our
voices than we think and since I have been a little kid I have been practicing
doing sounds from way down here (he
deepens his voice) to this kind of a guy (changes
to a higher pitched, quirky voice) and it is kind of funny. A lot of it is
the shape of the mouth and the diction. You sort of put yourself into
character.”
Navarro quickly dismisses the notion that he spends his
days behaving like the characters whose voices he becomes in the films. “Nothing
quite that method acting or that spooky. I don’t prepare that way for a role. I
usually prepare when I am sitting in front of a computer or reading a script and
I try to put myself inside it. I am discovering that the longer I take with it
the more it evolves and the better it feels, but I don’t always have a lot of
time to audition. The funny thing about auditions is I get about 150 a year and
you want an audition to take ten to fifteen minutes to record and then another
fifteen to twenty minutes to edit and to send out.
It is a lot of auditions and it also
means that I don’t book that much.
I do a couple or three a year, but what is getting fun is, every time that I get
close my agent ups the ante and starts sending me out more and gets a little
more focused. The role in Book of Life
is a first for me, because it is a credited acting role. If you look at my IMDB
credits I have credited acting roles, but this is the first one when I
auditioned for a speaking character as opposed to being just hired to do it.
I had others that I auditioned for that I didn’t nab. This one came
through and I got the call for it the day after my father died in February. What
is funny about that is I got the voice over call to begin my voice over career
on the day after my mother died twenty years ago. I decided there is a
connection and it is all good. (He
chuckles) You can’t argue with results. It feels good. It feels really good.
When I went back to do pickups and I actually saw the character with my already
recorded voice coming out of it I was looking at it going, this is great. It’s
big and it’s loud. If it leads to more work, it leads to more work. What I
really want it to lead to is more fun in Act Three. It is interesting to have
brand new stuff going on in this stage of my life.”
There are advantages to having a career with so many
facets to it. “It is very cool. Diversity in career does the same thing as
diversity in investments does. If one area goes foul, you have something else
that you can do. The good part for me is all of these things that I do, I happen
to really like. In some ways it is no different than an actor waiting on tables.
For me the main role is going on the road and being an artist and people pay
money to see me and under my own name. The acting stuff is kind of my day job.
It’s like my waiting tables career, which is when you actually wait tables in
hopes of acting. It is not that I don’t care about it, but it is this salaried
work that I can do and that I have fun with and that gives me the freedom to do
this other entrepreneurial thing that is really fucking risky and that doesn’t
work out for most people. I am awfully lucky. I’ve got at bats. I am one of
those guys that think that the only way to make it work is to continue to have
at bats and opportunities to swing away,” he says.
Films are not the only thing that Dan Navarro has been
lending his voice to, as he has been active and passionate about defending the
rights of artists concerning their music.
“It seemed like the right thing. There is a delusion out
there and it is the pervasive misperception that people who do what we do are
wealthy and overpaid. I am pretty much a journeyman doing this and I can tell
you it is not overpayment. It is true that you can make a lot of money on a hit
and they can be used a lot in a lot of different ways and all of the time. “We
Belong,” (The song co-written with Eric
Lowen and recorded by Pat Benatar) gets played; I want to say, close to a
quarter of a million times a year on radio, television and every place. That’s a
lot. For it to generate a lot of dollars to me is not unfair. In the new era of
digital transmission of all kinds and not just as simple as satellite or MP3s or
whatever it is the notion that you are no longer tied to a physical entity and
that the internet operates differently. The parameters for the possession of
music and for the transmission of music, especially for profit, which I support,
became really cloudy and really difficult. It has changed dramatically. One
thing about music for profit is there is a generation that believes music should
be free and some of it is a generation that grew up on paid television,
interestingly. What did you pay for your cable subscription? My generation grew
up with the notion that you paid for music and grew up on free television, which
actually wasn’t free. You watched advertisements and that is what paid for it.
Nothing is free. Music is expensive to make and the ability to generate income
with it is paramount to being (paid properly). I really do believe that to work
it properly, it is hard to do, if you have a career doing something else. I am
not saying it is impossible,” he says, making the point that for quality music
to be sustainable, as a fulltime career, artists should be and need to be
compensated fairly.
Dan
Navarro has come a long way from being the native Californian who moved to LA to
attend UCLA, so he could study music. It was during this time that he first
started playing gigs and tried his hand at songwriting. He decided that school
was not really where he wanted to focus and he became a sound technician for a
record company and he started writing songs.
“A song that I wrote got picked up by an artist named
Rusty Weir, who was part of the Outlaw Country scene in Austin, Texas. It was
the first time anything happened. I rode
that straight into the poor house (he
laughs). It put me on the map a little bit.
I didn’t make enough money on it to quit my day job, so I kept day jobs
for seven years. I stopped doing
music between about ’78 and ’81 and then in ’81 I joined a band. I went to work
for a music manager as a second day job in LA in ’79 and I learned a lot of the
ropes there. I still wrote a little bit and I played out once in a while, but I
wasn’t trying for anything. The other
job that I got in ’77 was as a singing waiter at one of the food and beverage
company locations in Hollywood. It was there that I met Eric Lowen. it was a
great place to feel like you could stay musical and have a day job. I was a
waiter and Eric started off as a bus boy, but he ended up as one of the
managers. It was the seventies, it
was fun and I was under thirty,” he says.
Navarro went on the road with a band and by the time he
returned Eric Lowen had taken his shifts as a singing waiter, prior to the
restaurant promoting Lowen to manager.
“The basic legendary story is that I hated him on sight,
which I pretty much did, because he was real good looking and really talented,
real tall and real blonde and all of this sort of stuff. He wasn’t much of a
writer. He was really not a writer. He was a good guitar player and a really
neat singer. He had really never done lead stuff and at that point in time he
never really wanted to.
About six months in we started singing together and we realized we had a real
natural blend and a real good thing. We developed a friendship from that. We
started working on the friendship a little bit more from the standpoint that we
were a little more polite to each other and a little more engaging. We were
still unlikely partners, but we started doing stuff together. I asked Eric to
start a band together and he said no.
I broke up with my girlfriend in the middle of ’79 and
now my other boss was moving to England, so I said fuck it, I am going over
there. Right before I left Eric says let’s start that band that you talked
about. I said I’m leaving. I’m out of here.
I left.
I discovered that the phone bills in England were not
itemized and they came out quarterly. They were a bottom line bill. I thought
this is great and I started using the company phone, at the place where I worked
as this manager’s assistant and I called Eric three times a week for the whole
year that I was there. (During) the phone conversations I talked to him about
what I was doing musically and he talked to me about what he was doing in LA and
we clicked. It was a really important thing to us.
When the end of that year came, I went back to America
and I joined a band that he was a member of.
We were side guys and we started writing together, because the lead guy
had pretty much stopped writing or he wasn’t writing and we felt by the time we
got to the eighteen month mark that we needed new material, so Eric and I
started writing together a little bit, a couple or three songs.
In
the meantime my uncle who I worked for in advertising went through a pretty big
personal tragedy, so I wound up having to nearly take over the company, just to
keep it going. As such, my commitment to the band was lagging and they noticed
it and they didn’t like it. At one point they confronted me and they said you
have to make a choice. I had no choice, but to choose the agency, because I was
over thirty. It was a family business and I was needed there. I thought that I
was rich, because I was making thirty-three grand a year there, which was pretty
good in 1983. I started out as a bookkeeper and I became a copywriter, an art
director eventually and an accounts guy. I was doing bits of everything.
In the midst of all of us this is a really dark period
when I am over thirty, approaching thirty-one years old, no longer with my band
and the band starts faltering. Once I was out, suddenly all bets were off and
heads started rolling. Suddenly nobody was sacred and the bass player didn’t
play well enough and what about this and what about that. They went through a
lot of personnel changes in the last six, seven, eight months they were
together. They eventually broke up. I think I was kicked out in April. By
September, Eric and I hadn’t spoken for a couple of months and he calls out of
the blue and he says, let’s get together to write a song. I thought we had done
this a couple of times before, so sure.
It was an olive branch of sorts, but it wasn’t to try and pull me back
in.
We got together and on that day we wrote “We Belong,” in
about ninety minutes. A year later it
was top five all over the world. We wrote it at a point when we had pretty much
stopped working together and we hadn’t spoken in a long time. We got together
for the first time in a while. At this point, it was 1983. After we wrote the
song we knew we had something really great, but we had no idea what on earth to
do with it, so Eric starts taking me around to the publishers. It was against my
better judgment, but I let him do it, because I didn’t have a better idea. I
remember telling him whatever you do don’t put that ballad on there, put on all
the up-tempo stuff. It wasn’t like we were going out to capitalize on “We
Belong,” because the band broke up. We had done so well, just in how “We
Belong,” sounded we began to get together weekly to write. Pasta, wine and bash
out a song and we wrote a bunch that way. I am not sure any of them ever got
cut.
Within five or six months of Eric taking the tape
around, somebody contacted us out of the blue and said I want to do a handshake
deal on one of these songs. (Back then) we were led to believe they were going
to pitch the song and I am of the impression (now) that they had already pitched
the song and they realized they didn’t have a firm deal on it. The bottom line
is a week after Eric took that meeting on and we did the handshake deal we heard
that it was going to be (Pat) Benatar. Five months or six months later
"We Belong” was a top five all over the world." It was
really bizarre, one of those rare and flukey things that never happen.
When we first heard it we thought wow look at that and
at the same time we thought this is going to be huge and it was out of the box.
The feeling at that time was what on earth just happened? It was the whole prior
year compressed into seconds. We felt like we had come from completely out of
nowhere to a major hit, because it was true. It was terrifying and exciting and
wonderful and a freakout. A lot of
things started happening in rapid succession. I still worked my day job. I
didn’t leave JR Navarro until six months after the song was at its peak on the
charts. That was by design, because
I had become pretty important to the company, so I had to do that,” says
Navarro.
“In the first year, I got three fairly high profile
cuts, not just the hit. We spent the period from about ’83 to ’87 as pro
songwriters. Additionally at that time to capitalize on “We Belong,” we put a
band together, but I wasn’t actually in it. When it started, I was still working
my day job and I didn’t feel like there was a role for me. I was pissed, because
I was the co-writer of this tune. I
went through a period from ’83 to ’87 being the silent partner and partial
member of the band 20 Times. I
co-wrote the material and I co-produced it up to a point and they tried really
hard to get a deal. I was very frustrated with not performing.
‘86ish
Eric and I apart from this other band, started working with The Bangles. The
strange thing about the other band situation was we added a third member to our
writing team. The period from 1983 to 1987 was characterized by nearly
everything being written in combination with Rick Boston who was the co-writer
and lead guitar player in 20 Times. A
lot of the songs that Lowen and Navarro succeeded with were songs that
20 Times couldn’t get signed with. It
is kind of interesting the way that it went.
At one point Eric said, let’s just start playing for the
hell of it. This thing that we said we would do back in ’79 of going out and
just being the two of us and that we put on hold in ’81 and it has led us here.
We started playing in a bar and seafood restaurant in Mar Vista, California
called The Breakaway and it coincided with a guy booking the place as a going
concern. We wound up at the forefront of an acoustic scene. Through ’88 and ’89
we did a residency there and we played every week. That is where the Lowen and
Navarro thing got its legs. We
started writing for it, whereas previously we had written trying to get cuts for
20 Times or writing for this or that.
In 1990 we started writing for us. It took over our pro songwriter business and
that basically went away. We had some cuts in ’89 and ’90. The last cut of
consequence was one overseas in ’94 and we got a bunch of cuts in 2000. Since
then nobody has really cut our stuff, but by then we were touring everywhere and
we thought, let’s see how long we can do this.
We had many stumbling blocks. A couple of record companies went broke or
we had deals and lost them. At one point we lost a deal just at our peak and we
had just had our best show ever when the record company said we are going to
close our doors for six months and we are going to reorganize. That was the end
of that. It was dumb persistence that kept us going,” he recalls.
Dan Navarro talks about the early days after Eric Lowen
was diagnosed with ALS, “We weren’t sure how long he could go and we started
making at least contingency plans, as early as 2006.
He was deteriorating to the point where
movement and getting him around was really hard.
There was also the decision whether or not to continue when he finally
lost the ability to play, which happened in the middle of 2007. I just wanted to
dip a toe into January of 2007 (Editor’s
note: 2007 was the 20 th anniversary for Lowen and Navarro) and we blew
right through it. I had started going out solo in October of ’06 to get the
awkwardness out of my system and it became extended. Through ’07 and ’08 I would
go out every couple of months for a five day run and we (Lowen and Navarro)
would still go out every two weeks. I would go to places where he (Eric) and I
couldn’t go anymore, because travel issues were so tough or the money was so
light that we couldn’t afford to take everything that we needed. We had to
abandon certain areas and I picked those areas up. I got my practice out of my
system there. (He chuckles and says)
so depending on where you live you think that I started my solo career in ’06,
’07 or ’08. In his last year in ’08 I managed forty shows. By ’09 it was up to
sixty and then it was eighty-five and I do one hundred shows a year now.
The whole thing with Eric was the gradual nature meant
that we had time to prepare. It also meant that we had time to dwell on it and
we had time to become afraid of it. It was exhausting and there is no question
by the time it was over we were both worn out. It was worth it and it was hard,
because the persistence factor wasn’t going to let up. We had to do it, but it
was grueling. From that standpoint,
managing it was more than one-half of the battle, because it was figuring out
how to do stuff and how to get it done for him. By the end he could do very
little on his own. He was pretty
much gone from the shoulders down by about the beginning of ’08. He only passed
away two years ago and the last three years it was tough. He still could manage
a computer and he could still do certain things, but it was really difficult.
What led to his death was when he just plain couldn’t breathe anymore.
Even with someone pumping air into him at home, it was strong enough to allow
him to stay conscious. They recommended tracheal breathing and he said no. They
said this will force air into you and you will survive and he said no, I’m done.
It is time to go.
The hard part of a long partnership is also the good
part. It really had time to work itself out. It was complete in a lot of ways. I
think I may have looked at it as having to start over in the first six months
that I was out there, but now I look at it as getting to start over. It is a
blessing of its own. For better or for worse I am still here and I still have
something to say. Also, it keeps those old songs out there. Believe me a lot of
the people who come and hear me do what I do were Lowen and Navarro fans.”
Riveting Riffs Magazine is glad that Dan Navarro made
the transition back to a solo artist and that he is still expanding his creative
horizons both in music and film, while continuing to be a clearly heard voice
defending the rights or artists and their intellectual property. Many artists
who have been through far less than Dan Navarro come through life somewhat
jaded, but not this man. He is looking forward to what continues to unfold in
Act Three and what lies beyond.
Please take time to visit the
Dan Navarro website.