NOVAK, Daniel T.

[danny novak]

DANIEL TAYLOR NOVAK Daniel Taylor Novak (born 5/15/1988 in Lowell, Massachusetts) is an American musician and songwriter. Novak is the frontman of Los Angeles based pop punk band Real Friends, for whom he sings lead vocal and contributes lyrics

- "Real Friends Are The Best Friends (AP Magazine)"

- "@PavLove: How many cats do you actually have tho #catlady"

- Danny Novak Real Friends
Danny Novak instagram
Danny Novak twitter

your signature: Sweatiness.
your coffee order: Reg, cream and sugar. Dunks or nothing, though.
your go-to magazine: AP Magazine
your favorite brand: Currently, Still Alive Clothing
your ultimate goal: Have fun.

I absolutely don't understand: String theory.
I've always looked up to: Other young musicians
I'm most likely to feud with: No one
I'm starting to pay attention to: Other types of music
I've always wanted to hook up with: Beyonce?
I wonder what it's like to be: Beyonce.

"I don't really receive a lot of fan mail, or any fan mail at all, really. But I like keeping it personal. I love hanging out after shows and interacting with everyone. I get a pretty big range of people that I get to talk with. A lot of kids that just love the music and want nothing more than to just tell me how much it means to them. Some people who want pictures and autographs and treat me and the guys like superstars which is kind of weird but totally flattering. Then you get the fellow musicians in the crowd that just shake your hand or pat you on the back and say 'Awesome set, keep it up, man'. Don't really have a favorite, they're all important to me and the guys. Love the fans, love everyone who comes out. Gotta love 'em."

what, if anything, keeps you grounded?

Grounded? I don't consider myself in danger to be in flight. 

what do you believe was the most defining moment of your career?

Definitely a tie between getting signed and landing a spot on Warped Tour this past year. Getting signed was a dream come true and playing Warped was the dream times a billion. Still can't believe they both happened.

where's your escape from the city?

I love to go hiking and camping and outdoorsy stuff like that. Sometimes my friends and I will back up our things and hit up the closest or farthest camp sight and just spend a weekend together, jamming and what not. Good times, great things to do.

what are you like when you're out of the spotlight?

Just like I am in the 'spotlight', whatever that means. I don't take myself too seriously, I mean, I play music for a living, not perform heart surgery. My job is fun, I get to do what I love. So, I like to joke and have fun, goof around, you know.

how do you think your team would describe working with you?

My team? Like my band? I don't know, we're all friends and have been for quite some time. We've been together for our highest highs and our lowest lows. We love eachother. We're family. We piss eachother off, but whatever, we get over it.

what did you want to do with your life before you became famous?

Nothing. I've always wanted to play music for a living.

any inside details on your latest project?

Well, we just finished up a tour with some awesome guys from Mixtapes, Forever Came Calling and Pentimento. Right now, we're just hanging out a bit. Trying to book some more local shows around the LA area. Praying to a based god that we can hit up Warped Tour again next year.

father: Colin Novak
mother: Caroline Novak
siblings: n/a
other: Maria Sweeney, aunt
Zachary Sweeney, cousin


I guess like most musicians or whatever I came from a broken home. I never had any real siblings being an only child and for the majority of the time that my mother was in my life, she was an alcoholic. My dad always told me she had always had a drinking problem, but I think to her it was more of a solution to a problem; that problem being me. She always told me she didn't start drinking until after I was born, which seems like a much more likely story than what my dad was feeding me. My parents were both relatively young when they met and were married and they weren’t much older when I finally came along. So with a habitually drunk mom who was always done with her first bottle of wine by ten o’clock in the morning, my dad took most of the weight when it came to raising me. He kept me out of the house as best as he could, whether I was in school or going to work with him (he was a car salesman). My mom didn’t work, she had been fired from her job after she got pregnant with me, two mutually exclusive events though she never looked at them at way. So, she just stayed home all day and mostly just drank. Sometimes she cleaned or attempted to do useful things but, most of the housework was taken care of by my dad. Got what a trooper he was. Caroline treated him like shit when she was drunk, but he loved her anyway, which is more than I can say for myself.

They fought like cats and dogs though, it seemed more and more the older I got. Things got more and more complicated between them and they spent most of their nights, sleepless and screaming at each other. It didn’t take long before my dad kicked her out. He wanted to help her, he loved her and hated seeing her doing that to her body, but she was stubborn and it reached the point that he had no other choice. She was abusive, verbally and physically to the both of us and he felt it was time for her to leave. I was around thirteen when this happened. About a few months after this happened, my uncle Kurt died of an undiagnosed brain tumor. Kurt’s wife, Maria, was my dad’s sister and she had a son who was about my age, my cousin Zachary. So, with my dad trying to support himself and me and with the recent tragic death of his sister’s husband, my aunt and my cousin moved in with us. Being only a few months younger than me, Zach and I took to each other rather quickly and soon became inseparable.

It was a relatively odd living situation, considering everyone thought my dad and my Aunt Maria were married and that Zach and I were actually brothers, but I didn’t mind the explanation. I just hated it when people asked about my mom. Anyway, in my freshman year in high school I joined the band, always having a weird liking for music and wanted to incorporate into my life somehow. So I played the saxophone for about a year before I learned this wasn’t really the music I was going for. The Christmas of my sophomore year, I received an acoustic guitar from my mother. A weird out of the blue gift from someone who was really no longer in my life. But apparently my dad had been talking to her again which was totally bad news bears, and even though I told him that multiple times, he always reminded me that she was still my mother. Anyway, I didn’t touch the guitar. I didn’t even want it. I didn’t want anything from my mother. So Zach started using it and before we really knew what we were doing, we were doing our own thing in our rooms and our attic. We’d invite our friends over to watch us play, Zach on the guitar and me singing. We mostly covered songs some of the songs we really liked. The better we got and the more people we got interested in listening to us, the more confident we were in writing our own stuff. As Zach got more into it, his acoustic became and electric and we recruited some more people for our little band.

I guess the rest is history, right? Like we’ve been pretty much the same group of people since our junior year in high school when we started playing shows. Ever since then we’ve just been playing music, hoping someday we’ll get to do it for a living. We worked awful jobs to pay for equipment and trips to local bars and places to put on a show. We saved for months and years so that we could move out to Los Angeles. We’ve hopped around from house to house, staying with friends and family while we did our best to tour around and get ourselves out there. We put out stuff everyone on the internet and used all our connections to get where we are now. We’re signed, we’ve toured a bunch of times with a bunch of different guys and bands and hell, we’ve made it on to Warped Tour which was hands down one of the best experiences of my life. I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world and I’m hoping it only goes up from here. I love where I am, what I’m doing and who I’m doing it with. Can’t get any better than this, can it?

alias: yeezus
age: infinite
play-by: dan lambton
spotlight group: 15 minutes of fame
city: la
listening to: black skinhead - kanye west

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