By CAROLYN BROWN For the Valley Advocate Last month, local folk singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Diana Daniels performed at the Parlor Room as part of First Night Northampton, an event in which she was one of more than 100 performers playing throughout downtown. This month, she’ll be p erforming at the Parlor Room again — this time, as the headliner. “I love this venue, and I love going to shows there,” she said, “and I think it’s always been a goal of mine to play there, and I think now, having moved back here, it definitely feels a lot more meaningful.” Daniels will play at the Parlor Room on Saturday, Jan. 31 at 7:30 p.m. Bones Forever (the music project of Ben Weinman) will open. Though Daniels now lives in Northampton, she originally hails from the Bay Area. As a child, her parents signed her up for piano lessons, church choir and a community choir, and then she learned other instruments through school bands. Since then, she’s learned the clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, oboe, English horn, guitar and banjo. “I think that that’s been good for the way that my brain works, and also fulfilling, because it’s fun to have little holds on a lot of different things,” Daniels said. After she graduated from Amherst College in 2022, Daniels returned home briefly, then moved to Brooklyn for two and a half years. Only a few weeks after she moved, she joined the horn section of the indie-pop band Boys Go To Jupiter, which she described as “a really, really, really great time for me.” This was also how she met Weinman, who is now a very good friend. “It was really great for me to have those immediate music connections and community in New York, and to have an outlet to play and to continue my work with woodwind instruments felt rare and special immediately post-grad,” Daniels said. “I also love their music, too, and it was really fun to play and learn.” Daniels released her debut album, “I Wake To Birdsongs,” last May, which “translates Daniels’ perception of nature, from the coastal cliffs and waters of her San Francisco Bay home to the wooded, rolling hills of her college town in western Massachusetts, while weaving in processes of grieving across her life,” according to her press materials. Daniels wrote the songs for the album in two batches, one of which was in an open-ended  interdisciplinary class at Amherst College. One of those songs is about “grappling with the prospect of leaving a place that I loved so much and wasn’t sure that I would come back to, which, every time I sing it now, is funny, because now I live here again!” Daniels said with a laugh. Though the album started in that class, Daniels said she didn’t know where it would go after that. “Like, okay, here’s some voice notes of me singing these songs or a little bit of a nicer-quality recording, but nothing crazy,” she said. The other batch of songs from the album came from a class through the online songwriting platform School of Song. Once she had those, she realized that those songs had connections to each other, and they also felt connected to the ones she had written in college, so creating an album seemed like the obvious next step. “I just knew it was time,” Daniels said. The album came together over the course of the year “in a patchwork way,” she said, with recordings created in Airbnbs and studios in New York City whenever she could make the time for it. The album’s producer was Northampton-based Dan Langa, who’s also a composer and musician — and Daniels’ boyfriend. After this show, Daniels plans to continue being part of a songwriting course she’s in, which is “giving me a lot of tools in terms of building more artistic presence and routine into my daily life,” she said, but she’s also eager to make the most of winter as “a nesting hibernation period.” She’s working on booking some shows for the spring and summer — and continuing to work at her day job as a temp at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency — but in the meantime, she’s getting ready for her performance. “I’ve been reaching out to all my people from all my connections and trying to get everyone to come out for this,” she said, “but I think, at the same time, it’s a really nice moment for me to try and get my footing here as an artist and reach a new audience.” Advance general admission tickets are $18 at ironhorse.org. For more information about Diana Daniels or to listen to her music, visit dianadanielsmusic.com. ...read more read less