There we were in a dark auditorium, surrounded by a couple thousand screaming fans waving glowsticks that lit up the concert hall like a starry night in the middle of nowhere. On the huge video screen behind the stage, a digitized clock counted down the minutes until the main event would begin.
A large contingent of people were wearing bearhead hats, while others donned old-school pilot caps with fake leather goggles. As the clock ticked closer to zero, the anticipation in the room was so kinetic that the tiniest spark could’ve set the whole place ablaze.
This wasn’t a Pretty Lights show at Coachella at 2 a.m. This was Danny Go at a symphony hall in Baltimore at high noon.
“It’s like seeing The Beatles in their prime,” my wife, Caitlin, said, and who could argue that it wasn’t?
Most of you are probably wondering: who or what is a Danny Go? If you’re not a parent of a young child, or aren’t close with someone with a young child, there’s little chance you’ve heard of him. I didn’t know who he was until about a year ago, when we learned our son’s preschool teacher was using his videos to give the kids some exercise on rainy days.
The first time we watched Danny Go at home, our reaction was similar to that of many parents: what the hell is this?
Danny Go (real name: Daniel Coleman) resembles a guy who might try to sell you the Bhavagid Gita, and several hits of dirty acid, at Bonnaroo. He’s profoundly skinny, sports a five o’clock shadow, often has dark circles under his eyes, and wears an old-school pilot’s cap that looks like something a burnt-out hippie might sport at a Phish set. His music videos blur the line between children’s entertainment and trippy adult content, the best example being “Glow in the Dark Shapes Dance!” which features a bass drop that wouldn’t feel out of place at a 24-hour club in Miami.
We were wary of Mr. Go at first. His videos, which feature bright lights and loud sounds and frantic dancing, initially seemed over-stimulating to the point of meltdown, and truth be told we weren’t sure if he was even the type of person we should entrust to entertain our child.
That’s the thing with these YouTube entertainers: is anyone vetting them? The guy who played the original Blippi, one of our son’s former favorites that we had to wean him off of, posted a crude shock video under the moniker Steezy Grossman shortly before he became beloved by millions of children worldwide.
It’s hard to differentiate between the people who make videos because they genuinely care about children and those who are producing addictive content just to make a buck. In short, we judged Danny Go before knowing much about him, based partially on his disheveled appearance, but also because we’d developed a knee-jerk reaction to mistrust anyone who’s become famous, and potentially wealthy, by tapping into the lucrative vein of kids entertainment.
We eventually came around to Mr. Go, evolving from skeptics to full-on DannyHeads, as it were. We were arguably, perhaps not even arguably, just as excited to see him in Baltimore as our 4-year-old son, Conley. The quality of his music first hooked us, which makes sense, given that Mr. Go played in a legit band before assuming his current persona.
Listen to a song like “Razzmatazz,” which is Caitlin’s favorite and bears resemblance to Owl City’s megahit “Fireflies”: with some tweaking to the lyrics, and the removal of the extended spoken-word part in which Mr. Go asks the listener to pretend to be, among other things, “an elephant with two trunks,” it could easily receive heavy rotation on FM radio. “Happy Moon,” a bouncy tune about Mr. Go landing on the face of an anthropomorphized moon and asking it various questions (“Why are you smiling? What’s so funny?”) is also a banger, and features a positively ethereal bridge section (“No gravity can hold me down, I’m just floating off the ground!”).
These songs, like most of Mr. Go’s works, have withstood the rigor of multiple listens, a testament to the nuance of his music and the high production quality. If you were to put “Razzmatazz” on a bluetooth speaker right now, Caitlin and I would dance along unashamedly, whether Conley was present or not. It’s easy to envision a future in which Mr. Go, after his kids are grown, transitions into the adult EDM space and, capitalizing on his popularity with parents, headlines Coachella in 2035. I’m kidding, but honestly, I don’t think it’s out of the question.
Even after being lured in by his music, we still had our reservations, based mostly on the aforementioned fact that Mr. Go looks like he stayed up until six in the morning and woke up on a stranger’s couch. As my sister-in-law put it: “I think I saw that guy at a rave in D.C. last weekend.” More research was needed before we were willing to fully trust him.
What we learned about him, however, seemed pretty encouraging, and we also discovered some parallels between his story and our own: Coleman (I’ll use his real name here) has two sons, one of whom was born with Fanconi anemia, a rare genetic blood disorder that caused him to be born without certain bones. He’s also had to undergo kidney and bone marrow transplants. (Conley also has a genetic disorder). Coleman uses his platform to raise awareness about organ donation, and was motivated to create Danny Go because he wanted to make content that would get kids off the couch and moving.
Given all Coleman is dealing with, i.e. raising two kids, including one with special needs, while also running a YouTube empire and touring the country performing physically-intensive shows, it’s no wonder he often looks like he stayed up all night doing psychedelics.
Coleman reportedly worked at Lowe’s for 13 years, where he made quirky promotional videos that were, in essence, precursors to his Danny Go persona. We received some inside info about his pre-Danny Go life from Caitlin’s old neighbor, whose husband went to high school with Coleman, and also Matthew Padgett, who plays Pap Pap, a sort of bumbling scientist in the Danny Go universe. This neighbor confirmed that Danny Go, the character, is an authentic representation of Coleman’s actual personality: he really is a high-energy, big-hearted human being. It’s hard to truly know anyone, of course, especially some stranger on YouTube, and we all contain multitudes, but based on findings extracted from various sources, we deduced that Coleman was a pretty solid dude. Armed with this encouraging information, we hurled ourselves headlong into Danny Go fandom.
***
We were sitting in the fourth row at the symphony hall watching Mr. Go sing an intense song about taking out the garbage when Caitlin looked at me and said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this happy. It’s true: from the moment we walked into the esteemed venue, past cardboard stand-ups of the Danny Go characters and the merch table selling glowsticks and mock pilot hats, I hadn’t stopped smiling.
When Mr. Go sprinted onto the stage, in front of a confetti-smoke explosion, I felt a surge of euphoria shoot through my veins and explode in my heart: the same euphoria, I’m sure, that millions of teenage girls felt while watching Lennon and McCartney perform at Shea Stadium. Our seven-year wedding anniversary was approaching, and we agreed that the Danny Go Experience, as it were, was the best way to celebrate the occasion. The lights were darkened at several points during the show, and with Conley dancing in the aisle, I gazed up at the balcony at thousands of glowsticks blinking like so many distant stars in the universe.
The show was 80 minutes of pure cocaine. It was the perfect length; my heart couldn’t have handled much more. Before his final song, Mr. Go slipped into a white astronaut’s outfit and gave a heartfelt speech in which he became emotional while thanking the parents who’d sung along, unabashedly, with his silly little tunes. Then he performed a stirring rendition of “Happy Moon,” one of the first songs he wrote under his Danny Go moniker, and as the music began, I scooped up my son and we grooved together while Mr. Go sang those timeless lines: no gravity can hold me down, I’m just floating off the ground. He was Lennon, he was McCartney, he was everything.
As the music faded and he and his fellow stagemates took a bow, Caitlin and I hoped he’d return for an encore, not as Danny Go but as Daniel Coleman, and while dressed in normal street clothes, perform a solo acoustic version of “Razzmatazz,” a lone spotlight illuminating his wiry frame perched on a stool. That would’ve been the ultimate ending, but it didn’t come to pass. There would be no “Razzmatazz,” solo or otherwise; there would be no encore.
The Danny Go crew walked offstage to thunderous applause as the lights abruptly flicked on. The cosmic sparkle of glowsticks snapped away, people began filing for the exits. Real life began again, our adult minds churning with things to do, places to be, obligations to fulfill. Yet a sense of luminosity lingered as we walked through the dirty streets of Baltimore, and this bright feeling stayed with us for several days afterward, when all Conley wanted to do was wear his Danny Go hat and prance around the living room like he was the one onstage, like he was the one who’d brought so much joy to thousands of people, kids and adults alike, on an otherwise nondescript afternoon in that Maryland metropolis by the bay.
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband, and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag. He can be reached at [email protected].
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