Dan Wilson Shares Full Album Visualizer For 'good night, los angeles'

05-09-2025

(MPG) GRAMMY-winning musician, songwriter, and producer Dan Wilson released his new album good night, los angeles, his debut instrumental album born out of a regular series of Sunday evening recordings he would post to social media. The album's 18 solo piano instrumentals feature titles taken from street names in his adopted home city of Los Angeles, CA.

Along with the album, Wilson released a full album visualizer by art director Yazz Alali and illustrator/animator Sarah Nelson, who paired the music with hypnotic animations of mushrooms growing and interacting, their mycelium spreading out through the soil and entangling together to create increasingly complex neural networks.

"These tracks are all named after streets that are important to me in LA," explains Wilson. "Each of them has a video attached to it that depicts a native Californian mushroom species in its natural (or psychedelic) habitat. The videos are by Sarah Nelson, who is a scientific illustrator by day. But by night, apparently she paints freaky pictures of psychedelic mushrooms."

This week, Wilson spoke with SPIN Magazine about the songs that inspire his work as a GRAMMY-winning songwriter and his new record, which they called "an album that captures the quietude of Wilson's Sunday nights and makes it transportable." Wilson also spoke with Bobby Bones on the BOBBYCAST who called him "one of the best songwriters of this generation."

Recorded entirely on a 1918 Vose & Sons upright piano that was found on the streets of Hollywood, the record marks Wilson's first instrumental release and offers a rare glimpse into the award-winning songwriter's raw, unvarnished creative process.

An instrumental piano album may seem like an unlikely project for an artist so known for his way with words, who last year alone received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song ("It Never Went Away"), won his first CMA Award for Song of the Year ("White Horse") and took home the GRAMMY for Country Song of the Year ("White Horse). But in the end, the result is classic Wilson: an evocative work of deep emotion and thoughtful beauty, one crafted purely for the love of the creation and shared in the hopes of forging meaningful connection.

"Lyrics are always the greatest challenge for me as a writer, so to devote a whole project to instrumental pieces was really liberating," Wilson explains. "It also allowed me to tap into the kind of wistful, early 20th century piano music that I've always loved but never really had the room to explore in my own work."