Grahame Lesh and Daniel Donato

“Daniel Donato is a true 21st-century guitar hero, having learned his first riffs and solos from, well, Guitar Hero — yeah, that’s right, the video game.By the time he was 12, Danny had broken all kinds of records with the game and had pretty much maxed out its ability to challenge him. So Danny’s father started encouraging him to start playing a real guitar, and within months it was clear to Mr. Donato that he had a child prodigy in his house. Dad graciously surrendered his Martin D-28 to his son and began driving him down to Lower Broadway in Nashville, where Daniel would play in the streets for tips. The little guy with the lightning-fast fingers started drawing big crowds, and in short order he moved inside to become a regular on the Broadway honky-tonk circuit, blowing the drunks and tourists away with a blistering lead guitar style that would inevitably steal every show he played. Now 23, he is in high demand as both a live and studio guitarist, and has recently begun stepping to the front and center of the stage where he belongs, singing his own songs and leading his own band. I had the good fortune to catch him this past Friday night at the Basement, where he played his first ever AmericanaFest show as a front man, and I’m here to tell you he rocked that little room like there was no tomorrow. Though Donato is unquestionably one of the hottest young guitar players on the music scene right now, with a supreme command of his instrument and a flashy style that’s two parts Danny Gatton and one part Eddie Van Halen, it is his stage presence that really grabs you. You find you have no choice but to hold on tight while he takes you on a wild ride up and down the length and breadth of his fretboard, blazing through chromatic runs and octave riffs, and wringing string bends for every last drop of blues-juice. Leaping around the room like a kid who just ate three bowls of Cap’n Crunch and washed them down with six cans of Coca-Cola, twisting and bending and writhing like a white Jimi Hendrix weaned on the Grateful Dead and Guns’n’Roses and air-dropped into a country hoedown, Donato makes you feel every single sixteenth-note he plays as it courses through his body, into his fingers, and out through the amplifiers. He snarls, grins, roars, and laughs, seeming at once in total control of and perpetually surprised by the music he is making. Watching Daniel Donato onstage reminds you why you fell in love with rock and roll in the first place. “