Courtesy of Looking East

I met Daniel Kearney at the Old Town Coffee in Goleta looking like a natural Californian — baseball cap, flip-flops, sunglasses — so it was to my surprise that he is actually a West Coast transplant. A homage to Jackson Browne and a way for Kearney to face home, Kearney and his musical partner, Drew Gonzales, dubbed their alternative reggae studio project “Looking East.” And, after the recent passing of Kearney’s father, who greatly admired Browne’s songwriting, Looking East was hard to ignore.

“When I had the idea for that as a name, that is a perfect encapsulation of everything I’ve done and built to this point,” Kearney said.

Looking East is under two years old, but Kearney is nowhere near new to the industry. What does it all lead back to? A birthday present. 

“What’s the most expensive thing I could think of? An electric guitar,” Kearney said, reminiscing on his 12th birthday. To his surprise, he unwrapped none other than a guitar and began playing throughout high school and college before moving to California to intern at Playback Recording Studio in Los Angeles. 

Kearney jumped from interning at Playback while waiting tables to being an audio engineer for the studio and then moving to Sonos in 2015. Then, finally, he had the luxury of quitting a corporate job to go on tour. 

Kearney’s previous band, Cydeways, toured six to eight months a year across a span of four years and Kearney came prepared: dried beans and rice to eat in the parking lot. He quickly realized that was not the way things worked on the road, and he fell right into the learning curve all touring musicians must undergo. 

“The first couple tours, it’s just such a trip. It’s hard to get used to … but you adjust to it and grow to like it. To the point where when you’re back at home, after a couple weeks, you get a little stir crazy. You just want to go back on the road,” he said. 

To set up a timeline: In 2020, Kearney, like the rest of the world, experienced a global pandemic. But while most people’s lives became stagnant, Kearney’s only became more chaotic. In 2021, he lost his dad and immediately after, Cydeways toured with bands like Matisyahu and Iration. Cydeways and Matisyahu had the same manager, so not only did they open for hip-hop-reggae artist, but they also acted as his backup band. And then this entire world of touring and moving from city to city without fully being able to take a breath of air came to a screeching halt in 2024 when he and his partner had a daughter. Kearney quickly shifted gears to become a stay-at-home dad, but the music still continued, and with the birth of his daughter came the birth of Looking East. Perhaps you could call them twins. 

Kearney had known Gonzales in the past, playing in different bands in the same scene, but it was not until 2024 when Looking East was fully underway. They had made partial demos before then, and this new quiet in Kearney’s life was the perfect time to start the project. 

“It still feels like the beginning,” Kearney said. 

Like all writers say, writing is a way to understand their worlds — Kearney is no exception. While he rarely wrote in his previous bands, Looking East gave him a new creative outlet. 

“Writing is how I make sense of the world and how I am seeing it,” Kearney said. “Writing music helped me channel a lot of my feelings and thoughts on what I’d been through into something that I understood in a way I could say it.”

His writing process, though, is a different story: “I’m still trying to figure that one out.”

His (and probably “the”) creative process: toying around with different sounds and different instruments over hours and hours, only to realize that he hated what he created. And so, he walks away from his work, leaves his home studio and repeats everything again the next day. After writing and recording and rewriting and rerecording and finding something he likes, he sends it to Gonzales, who currently lives in Los Osos, and Gonzales will add vocals to the track. 

“We’re in a flow at this point where there is minimal feedback,” Kearney said when asked if not living in the same place creates a lag in communication. The only downside, it seems, is that a majority of the writing process is done in solitude.

“I started to go a little crazy,” he said. 

The process seems long, but Looking East is already in the process of recording their third album. Their first album, “Break of the Day,” is set to drop on Jan. 23. A fitting name, knowing the sun rises in the east. While a majority of the album has already been released as singles, three new songs will be joining. 

“I hadn’t never really sat down and leaned in to creating a cohesive work of art,” Kearney said. 

Still not even at toddler age, Looking East has gained widespread popularity, notably on Spotify with one of their songs, “My Way Out,” nearing 200,000 streams. The secret, according to Kearney, is collaborations. In an age where music is driven less by sound and more by algorithms, Kearney knew getting already established bands to feature on Looking East’s songs would cause the algorithm to notice them. Secrets two and three: releasing the songs as singles first (the albums can follow) and keeping in mind what people will actually listen to. 

The everlasting internal struggle: “Are they going to turn this on when they’re driving in the car and sing along to the lyrics? Or are they going to put it on at a barbecue in the background?” Kearney expressed. Struggle, though, might be the wrong word. It seems Looking East has found its groove. 

“The definition of success is a moving goal post. I’m always going to write and I’m always going to release music — that’s just how I process the world,” Kearney said. Be sure to check out Looking East and “Break of the Day” on Friday, and for more updates on the alternative reggae duo, check out @lookingeastmusic on Instagram.

This appeared in the Jan. 22 print edition of the Daily Nexus