Adeline Hotel – Whodunnit

12″ Gatefold Vinyl

Dan Knishkowy has never written a song like “Whodunnit.” With his acoustic guitar dropped to a deep, open tuning, the Brooklyn artist noticed a fragile melody resonating from the strings, stretching out like a neverending highway. The lyrics followed suit, emerging in a series of intimate and escalating verses almost effortlessly while he played. Delivering the words in an inquisitive hum, Knishkowky soon found himself addressing the profound, lingering questions that would become the core of his latest album, Whodunnit, the most striking and ambitious record he has ever released.

Inspired by indie lifers and fellow world-builders like Jim O’Rourke and Phil Elverum, the Ruination Records co-founder has rewritten the rule book with each new project, inviting listeners to join as he discovers new channels for his singular voice. By now the sound of Adeline Hotel is equally identifiable through Knishkowy’s dextrous fingerpicking—the aural equivalent of tracing your fingers through cool sand at sunrise—as his low, whispered vocals and autumnal melodies. As soon as he began writing the material for Whodunnit, a few things seemed instantly clear about his new direction. Imagine Neil Young’s On the Beach cast in the twilight colors of John Martyn’s Solid Air, or Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) as interpreted by the stream-of-consciousness players on Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece. Whodunnit flows as if in a trance, pulling you closer to the heart with every word, every note. Writing about the end of a marriage, Knishkowy refused the bitterness and brutality often associated with the breakup genre in favor of a kind of cosmic curiosity. These are songs full of space and silence, recurring images and textures, openness and grace. They are also among the most immediately affecting in his vast songbook. On previous Adeline Hotel records, Knishkowy cast his voice as a melodic texture interwoven with his visceral, dynamic guitar licks. Here he commands the room, even with a whisper: a fitting delivery for a set of songs where the action tends to occur in moments of crushing isolation and disconnect. “Even though I was going through something that was objectively hard, I didn’t feel lonely,” Knishkowy reflects of the transitional period in his life that inspired the record. “I was being freed to find myself, to build my own connection with the world that had been lost.” It was this sense of gratitude that led him to open the record with a simple question: “How Did I Get So Lucky?” Even when the lyrics touch on alienation and loss—when a requisite encounter with a waitress spirals into an existential tailspin, when the intricacies of fading love resemble the scattered clues in a grim detective story—Knishkowy maintains a tone of optimism, a sense of hope in our potential to start again and know ourselves better. He understands he is not the only traveler on this road, and Whodunnit will be a treasured companion for those of us seeking comfort on our own journey.

“Catarsis never sounded so beautiful”
Pop Matters 8,0

“Taking a whimsical and meditative approach to the breakup album, Dan Knishkowy makes the end of a marriage sound unexpectedly healing.”
Pitchfork 7,2