It’s a comeback story with a vexing beginning. After being shelved by a label that wasn’t interested in her having her own voice, Baylee Barrett—now known as dani mack—found her career in limbo with no path forward.
Taking on the moniker of dani mack and finding a home with a new label Future Gods, she’s poised to capture the attention of indie lovers far and wide. With her star on the rise, mack is getting traction from all the right places—“Someday” her latest single has a slot on Apple Music’s “Mellow Days” playlist as well as Tidal’s “Rising” playlist, and she’s made an appearance on NPR’s All Songs Considered. It’s the kind of attention an artist hopes for, but Barrett’s start was anything but idyllic.
Losing her mother in her early teens gave mack the perspective to spend her life doing what she loves—music. Growing up in Lubbock, Texas, the town that gave us Buddy Holly, she took vocal lessons at the encouragement of her mother who sang in their local Southern Baptist church. Showing promise at an early age, she soon became the coveted Sunday Service soloist. Her father—who raised her through the most difficult and pivotal years of her life—sacrificed and nurtured his daughter’s dreams, including her desire to move to Los Angeles to pursue music. It is in his honor that she chose his first and last name, dani mack, as her new monicker.
“Someday,” her first single, is a 100% self-produced indie-bedroom track orchestrated with her bandmate Chris Reagan and mixed by Greg Uhlmann (Perfume Genius, Hand Habits). High falsettos and distorted guitars; it’s an introspective and light approach to the blissful denial that as relationships fall apart, it’s people who resist change. “People don’t really change, their situations do,” she explains. Akin to Phoebe Bridgers in her lyrical content and sound, dani mack is set to consummate her own ascent.
