Amid Hollywood success, Baltimore’s Dan Deacon is ready to make music for himself again

You never know where musician Dan Deacon will pop up in Baltimore.

There he was in late 2024, conducting more than 40 musicians across multiple floors inside the National Aquarium. And who could forget his viral, voice-modulated rendition of the national anthem last year at Oriole Park that polarized baseball fans around the country?

Deacon has also brought his trademark brand of exuberant and propulsive electronic music to the city’s larger stages, recently performing for thousands at WTMD’s First Thursdays Festival and Pier Six Pavilion.

But this weekend, Deacon returns to his more intimate live roots. For the first time, he’ll perform at the 8x10, the veteran Federal Hill venue that reopened last month after it was sold and renovated. With a capacity of 300, the Saturday and Sunday shows are sold out; out-of-luck fans can join waitlists through the 8x10’s website.

“Doing a small room is always fun,” Deacon said with a grin last week while on a video call from his Bolton Hill home.

That’s an understatement in Deacon’s hands.

The transplant from West Babylon, New York, became the face of Baltimore’s alternative arts scene in the mid-to-late 2000s as a founder of Wham City. The arts collective of outsiders descended on Charm City in search of affordable rent and the freedom to create music, theater, comedy and other media as weird and surreal as they could imagine.

He quickly built a word-of-mouth reputation for his novel approach to live performance — Deacon took the attention off himself and made the audience the focal point.

Smaller spaces, like the Copycat Building in Station North, allowed a Dan Deacon show to morph into a sweaty, shoulder-to-shoulder party where inhibitions were ripped up and danced all over. With his dizzying digitized music, Deacon was the ultimate host, instructing the crowds through dance battles and formations while singing songs with titles like “The Crystal Cat.”

“I’m gonna turn all snakes into bone!” he declares on the 2007 track, pitching his voice up to sound like a chipmunk singing through a dial-up modem.

Like many in their mid-20s, Deacon pictured doing it forever.

“I was living in the Copycat,” he said. “I was totally broke. I was ready for that to be the next 50 years.”

Five increasingly ambitious and intricate full-length albums later, Deacon is, at age 45, a not-so-elder statesman of Baltimore’s music scene.

But over the last decade, his career has expanded to include scoring films after director Francis Ford Coppola — yes, the same Coppola behind “The Godfather” — reached out to Deacon after hearing about his music on NPR.

In 2011, “Twixt,” Coppola’s horror movie starring Val Kilmer, premiered with Deacon’s first Hollywood credit as co-composer.

Since then, Deacon has remained busy writing music for movies and TV series, including the recent John Cena comedy “Little Brother” and the HBO crime drama “Task.” Technically, he’s even part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Deacon’s most high-profile movie, 2024’s “Venom: The Last Dance” grossed nearly $480 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

Deacon, now a husband and father, said his work in Hollywood reflects his “quest for stability.”

“In the most positive sense, it has a job-like vibe to it,” he said. “I can keep regular hours. I can maintain a family life and a personal life. I’m not on the road 300 days a year, but I still get to do shows.”

Filmmaker Amanda Mustard didn’t know much about Deacon’s life as a solo artist. She just wanted to work with the guy who figured out how to make rats play music. (For 2016’s “Rat Film,” Deacon recorded the rodents running around to create sounds through a theremin, an electronic instrument that doesn’t require touch.)

They worked closely together on Mustard’s “Great Photo, Lovely Life,” a deeply personal documentary from 2023 about her grandfather’s sex abuse crimes. Despite the heavy material, Mustard said working with Deacon was “a very joy-filled process,” like when they turned a noisy leaf blower in a background shot into music.

“It takes a very, very specific person to balance the emotional weight of what was involved with my story and the joy and playfulness of the creative process,” Mustard said.
“So I want to work with Dan forever.”

The Hollywood jobs keep coming, including composing music for the second season of “Task.”

“I’d say the docket is looking good,” Deacon said of his scoring in 2027, though he added that it’s too early to give details.

Lately, though, Deacon has also felt inspired to work on new solo music. He credited “Dreaming,” his cover of the Turnstile song that appears on the Baltimore band’s compilation “Never Enough: Versions,” as the catalyst.

“I write hundreds and hundreds of pieces of music on a regular basis, like, multiple minutes of music a week — finished, mixed, mastered, delivered,” Deacon said. “But they’re not songs.”

In particular, singing another writer’s lyrics reminded Deacon just how fun the songwriting process can be.

His frenetic version of “Dreaming” will make it into this weekend’s setlist, he said. Deacon has never stepped inside the 8x10, which largely booked jam bands before new owners Rising Sun Presents, veteran Baltimore musician Cris Jacobs and Jeremy Rusen took over in June.

Reopened in October, the 8x10 has made a concerted effort to expand its music offerings, booking acts like the Chicago house DJ Mark Farina and the extremely heavy grindcore band Pig Destroyer, said Chris Perella, managing partner of the Pennsylvania-based live entertainment company Rising Sun Presents.

Deacon was an obvious choice for the new ownership to approach, particularly given his local ties, he said.

“He’s a little bit of a metaphor for what we’re trying to do with the 8x10, to just be kind of accepting and supportive of all things musical and independent,” Perella said.

While he hasn’t released a solo record since 2020’s “Mystic Familiar,” Deacon said he has not one, but three new albums in the works. One, or all, could be released next year — he’s not sure yet. Deacon is less worried about logistics and more excited about the process of writing full-length albums again.

“I want to make music for me again,” he said.

But in true Deacon fashion, he’s already thinking of how to add to his overflowing plate.

After recent jobs in the world of ballet, like reimagining Vivaldi’s ”Four Seasons” with Philadelphia’s BalletX company, Deacon wants to bring more of his music to formal, seated settings. Consider it another example of Dhis refusal to be boxed in.

“Concert music is something I’d like to do more of, but I haven’t cracked that nut yet,” he said.

Something tells us it’s only a matter of time.