My Name Is
Daniel Leek

Brennan Gilmore

Brennan Gilmore’s life and work resist easy categorization. A musician, diplomat, activist, and outdoorsman, he has spent decades moving between worlds that are often kept separate — Appalachian mountain music and African and Arab musical heritage, rural Virginia and international conflict zones, deep tradition and restless experimentation. His debut solo album, My Name Is Daniel Leek, is the record that merges these worlds.

Gilmore grew up in Rockbridge County, Virginia, steeped in the region’s deep Appalachian traditions. He co-founded Walker’s Run in the late 1990s during a vibrant period for Virginia bluegrass, but made the pivotal decision to join the U.S. Foreign Service rather than pursue music full-time — recognizing, as he later reflected, that he lacked the life experience to write songs of real substance. He would go on to fill those gaps in extraordinary ways.

His diplomatic career took him across war-torn Africa, where music remained a constant companion. In Sierra Leone, he played guitar in an Afropop band and helped organize HIV/AIDS prevention tours by helicopter into former rebel-held diamond mining regions. In Tunisia, he formed Kantara with oudist Riadh Fehri — blending Appalachian forms with Tunisian Malouf, and earning a State Department award for cultural diplomacy.

My Name Is Daniel Leek traces back to 2009, when Gilmore was stationed in Jonglei, South Sudan. Walking into a crumbling building sheltering hundreds of refugees, he saw scrawled in chalk on the wall: My Name Is Daniel Leek. That declaration — by a Sudanese refugee he would never meet — became the conceptual core of the album, its 12 tracks building a fictional biography of Daniel from two decades of relationships and stories gathered across the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and Sierra Leone.

But the album is ultimately autobiographical too. Returning to the United States after fifteen years abroad, Gilmore found a country in upheaval — and found himself in Charlottesville on the day of the Unite the Right rally, recording a deadly attack on counter-protestors before becoming the subject of far-right conspiracy theories. The America Gilmore returned to felt uncomfortably familiar, with echoes of the borders, fault lines and conflicts he had spent years negotiating abroad. The album would become a meditation on the unity, darkness and hope of both worlds.

Recorded at the Galax, Virginia home of Dori Freeman and Nick Falk (Caamp), who co-produced the album, My Name Is Daniel Leek features fiddler Nate Leath, singer Davina Jackson, keyboardist Bryan Holmes, saxophonist Charles Owens, and Steve Hoke. It is a richly layered, deeply personal project that challenges listeners to reconsider how they understand identity, conflict, and connection.