Schott Sounds | Daniel Romano

July 2025

Daniel Romano (@danielromano_official) has made *a lot* of music. How many albums? Don’t ask because he’s not even sure. The Canadian musician has been molding an eccentric catalogue since 2003 through various bands (latest with The Outfit and Pig Pen), solo, and side projects that explore and blend genres with a considerable amount of unpredictability. All we know as he describes it, “it’s meat and potatoes Rock’n’Roll.” Sounds like something we can get behind, DR.

Earlier this summer, Daniel was looking to sell his embroidered 'Preservers of the Pearl Emblem' 618. Once we got word of it, we had to add it to our archive. With a recent show in NYC with his fellow North-Of-The-Border boys Pig Pen, we got the chance to talk jackets, his beginnings, and his latest projects.

"I got this jacket in Halifax at - I can't remember the name of the store. It was a vintage store and was leafing through the leather jackets and then I saw the sort of sheen that I liked and once I got to it, saw what it was it was a no-brainer after that.

I put a lot of time into imagery in general and symbolism - like a patch on the back of a leather jacket is as classic as it can get and I really want that to be what we dawn."

"The ethos has always been the same. It's been very much punk ideology. We do everything ourselves. We have our own record label. We don't do stuff we don't believe in. We don't do stuff we don't want to do.

We try to honor the sort of aesthetic and the scene and the people and the community that we came up with and to maintain that and bring that through to a generation that's pretty removed from each other and anything that has to do with community."

On Pig Pen

"It was midway through the first kind of wave of the pandemic. Matty [Matheson, chef and actor on The Bear] had hit us up about doing a record because he's so busy all the time and was just kind of home.

I think he hit up Wade [McNeil, of Alexisonfire and Thursday] first and was like 'Okay, well, let's get the Romano brothers.' We just went in knowing that we were going to make something heavy and not really knowing anything else.

Matty had a couple references as far as where he wanted it to go and we hammered it out real quick without thinking too much about it, and it turned out the way it did which I think is pretty good."

Comparing Pig Pen with The Outfit

"I feel a lot more like a fly on the wall in the hardcore scene because I don't feel necessarily akin to it, but I also grew up in it. It's evolved and I've evolved adjacently so there's elements that I obviously understand and I think musically, I'm able to do it because I used to do it.

But The Outfit, there's singing and longer songs - it's definitely more difficult, but it depends who you would ask. I think some people might find playing that fast, blistering hardcore more difficult or whatever, but it just feels really natural - almost like it's just in there and there are no wrong notes in hardcore so that makes it easier, you know?

It's just like pick what's most sour and roll with it. And Matty and Wade do the lyrical part of it so I'm really like, 'Great that'll [guitar parts] work for that part and then we probably slow it down.' It's just 'don't think and go' which honestly The Outfit is that way a lot too because you can get in your own way pretty quick."

Check out the full interview with Daniel Romano below: