Damato
About
Damato
“Get over your self-ness.”That’s it. Damato’s one sentence sum-up of the philosophy behind his life, his outlook and his music. But it wasn’t always that easy for this surfing soul son of a preacher man. It’s taken a while to get here.
Damato grew up in a Bermuda Triangle of confusion and questioning anchored by Los Angeles, Yuma, and San Diego. Raised by his mother and his Pentecostal preacher father, Damato often found himself at rebellious odds with the ideology of his parents and found solace and a voice through music.
“I began playing music around age 10. My dad had an old guitar laying around the house and no one had used it for years. Every time I got in trouble or misbehaved my mom would take everything away from me that I enjoyed as punishment and I’d be left with a guitar which she thought would be educational and wouldn’t be immediately fun,” he recalled.
“I started writing songs around the same time. If I was having a conversation with someone as a young child and couldn’t get my point across or say what I really wanted to say, then I would go into the sanctity of my own room and I would write out what I wanted to say or what I really felt,” Damato continues. “I knew that most things I really didn’t understand and so how could this be the truth if I can’t understand it, can’t grasp it like they can. It made me a little upset and rebellious towards the fact that they couldn’t understand that, so I felt like, ‘Well if they can’t understand me then I need to go find a place where I’m supposed to be.’”
That place turned out to be Los Angeles where, at 18 years old, Damato found himself homeless, with a beat up guitar, and a half bent surfboard. He put together "Floating Down A River," a 6-song EP, with the help of industry veteran Tom Freund (known for his work with Ben Harper) along with Adam Topol (who drums for Jack Johnson) and formed the base of his once signature surfer soul sound, prompting the press to note:
“Damato's music is especially catchy and easy to listen to yet the simplicity of the music still has depth and character." ThisIsModern.net
"He does a fine job of turning life's hardships into formidable songwriting with some wisdom in the background." Austin Daze
Now 23 years old, Damato is moving in a new direction again having recently completed his debut album for Universal Motown entitled “Everybody VS U & Me”. “My music is changing just in the same way you see me [changing] as a person,” says Damato. “I’ve always been a huge fan of pop, I just never had the avenue to make more exciting pop out of what I was doing which was just bare acoustic and rootsy. I wanted to take a bit of that EP and really use it as my foundation and to complete that story.
The result is a glittering montage of tunes swirled with driving rhythms, and intermingled with tales of his life’s experiences’ of confusion and love and loss and, most importantly, hope. The album addresses so many of the demons Damato has faced in his short life. From “Run,” which tells his story of separating from his home and family and their ideals and creating his own, to “Angels” which finds him wanting to catch and save a person he loves, to the driving beat of the albums title track, “Everybody vs. U & Me” where he asks his lover to stand by him, to the self-explanatory “Broken Promises,” and ultimately to “Love Yourself,” where Damato comes to terms with having to release his own ghosts in order to move on.
So here we are, trials and tribulations in the rear-view mirror but having been used as the stepping stones to get him where is he is today.
“I’ve been thinking of a way to sum up my little young philosophy in a sentence that was very agenda-less. I have this thing I made a t-shirt out of called:” Get over your self-ness,” he laughs. “Different ways work for different people. I’m trying to help people. I’m trying to leave this world in somehow and someway a better place than when I came in. It’s something we should all embrace because that’s the evolution of who we are and who we’re trying to be. Music is usually one of the first outlets of revolution, of change, and that’s what I want to be about.”
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