Daniel Sahad, the dazzling vocalist of exuberant Austin pop-rock band Nané, has left this earth. The band broke the news this afternoon on social media.
“It is with unbelievable pain that we have to share our beautiful leader, Daniel Sahad passed away last night. Please give his family and friends the space they need to process this tragedy. Thank you all.”
Nané had been ascending in popularity in recent years. Their single “Always On My Mind,” which anchored the band’s self-titled debut in 2020, had amassed 2.5 millions streams on Spotify and they’d been booked to open the main stage at ACL Fest last October.
Sahad, a first generation American whose parents emigrated from the Dominican Republic, possessed an exceptional vocal range – and powerful falsetto – that matched his flamboyant stage presence. He also shined bright in the band’s videos, including “Seventeen” which he co-directed. Friends knew Sahad, who came up in Amarillo before attending college at UT, as a highly vibrating spirit with a warm nature and an excitement for life. The cause of his death is unknown at this time. He’d just turned 29.
Ahead of ACL 2021, the Chronicle’s Morgan-Taylor Thomas wrote of their self-titled LP: “Likewise, the group’s 2020 self-titled debut, engineered by Black Pumas maestro Adrian Quesada and produced by Grupo Fantasma/Brownout beatsman John Speice IV, gloriously captured Nané’s ornate style, littered with easy, tender intros and finished with punchy explosions of passion and pure, unadulterated rock. The highly streamed album… lays the groundwork for a new wave of modern nostalgia focused around the band’s deep-rooted family connections and life’s cherished refrains of love and the unknown.”
Of “Always on My Mind,” Sahad told the Chronicle: “The melody of it all came to me right before I was falling asleep. That’s something I do, try to write in that space between being awake and asleep. That song proved to me that I was a musician. Music can come to you however you want it to. Being able to write that song revealed to me, ‘Oh, there’s music inside you that’s valuable.’”
Nané, launched in 2016 as a collaboration between Sahad and guitarist/arranger Ian Green. In 2020, Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes selected their “Blue Velvet” music video as one of her top picks in the NPR Tiny Desk Contest. The group was also featured, in concert, on the Netflix reality show Twentysomethings.
With considerable momentum in 2022, the band was recognized last December with a grant from art-supporting organization Black Fret, and was recently celebrated with an official City-recognized “Nané Day” on April 7. Following a performance last Thursday at the opening party of the new Tesla Gigafactory, the band was booked for upcoming tour dates across Texas in April.
In another interview with Chronicle contributor Morgan-Taylor Thomas, Sahad once mused on the impact music has had on his life:“I think it just flows through every single part of me. Like, there’s always a song playing in my head. All of the songs that I write, I am snapping to or bobbing my head to before I’ve written them. So how has it changed my life? It’s what guides every single bit of my life. I think it does so many different things. I mean, people use music as a tool for activism, as a tool for coping with pain and sadness, or trauma, and as a tool to celebrate joy, in you know, good moments of your life and as a tool to amplify the best things in life and to dance. So like, it made sense of every single range of emotions on the entire spectrum.”
This article appears in April 8 • 2022.