Danielle Nicole Schnebelen spent decades honing her version of the blues in humble Kansas City barrooms.
So it was her dream come true when almost 1,000 fans bought tickets in November to hear Danielle Nicole preview her new album at the elegant Uptown Theater.
“That was a bucket-list for me,” said Schnebelen, who drops the last name when she performs. “I wanted to do my own show at the Uptown for a long time.”
It was a chance, she said, to perform for family, friends and fans who “know how hard of a climb it's been.”
The new album, “The Love You Bleed,” released Jan. 26 on Forty Below Records, finds Danielle Nicole shaking off an old blues. Her powerful voice and relatable songs are admired around the world, but she’s rarely felt empowered, she said.
Now, she’s taking control.
“After 20 years in this business and literally clawing from the bottom twice, I'm at this point where I know my worth,” Danielle Nicole said. “It is a new phase in my career.”
She was immersed in music from an early age, and she grew up fast. Belting out the blues was often painfully appropriate.
“I had a pretty chaotic upbringing, to put it mildly,” she said. “I grew up going to blues jams at 10 years old.”
“Kids were going out to parties — I was in the band at the party. I always sang about grown stuff,” she recalled.
Danielle Nicole related to the songs she sang.
“One of the things of blues that I gravitated to was working through the pain,” she admitted. “And for a lot of years, instead of working through it, I was wallowing in it. I could identify with that pain, with the loss, with the anger, with the depression and all that.”
About two decades ago, Danielle Nicole played bass and sang in Trampled Under Foot, a band she formed with her brothers, guitarist and vocalist Nick Schnebelen and the drummer and vocalist Kris Schnebelen, who died in 2022. Named for a Led Zeppelin song, Trampled Under Foot played what Danielle Nicole characterized as “heavy blues.”
The trio’s first show was at the Grand Emporium in 2002. After being named Best New Band at the International Blues Challenge in 2008, Trampled Under Foot became one of the blues circuit’s most prominent acts.
But when the group broke up at the height of their popularity, Danielle Nicole had to start over.
For her first solo album, 2015’s “Wolf Den,” she replaced Trampled Under Foot’s hard-edged guitar sound with a slinky, old-school R&B. The album showcases Danielle Nicole’s affinity for classic soul on songs like “Take It All.”
In 2018, Danielle Nicole’s album “Cry No More” was nominated for a Grammy Award. The honor was bittersweet.
“Six months before my Grammy nomination, my manager and booking agency dropped me,” Danielle Nicole said. “I had no representation when I got my Grammy nomination. I was just, like, completely abandoned at the same time.”
It got worse when her record label dropped her.
“Art is so easily exploitable,” she sighed. “You really got to love it to do it as a career.”
Fed up with the music industry, Danielle Nicole sought guidance from Ken Shepherd, the father of the accomplished blues artist Kenny Wayne Shepherd. This advice resonated: Own the masters to her future recordings, he counseled her.
In many circumstances, a record label will retain ownership of the master recordings, she said, “and then you can't record those songs for 10 years after, without their permission.”
In an especially egregious scenario that Danielle Nicole cited, “I wrote this (song) about my father dying of cancer, and I can't rerecord this for 10 years without permission.”
“I've always felt like not owning your masters, as the creator of the music, is absurd,” she said. “That’s where they get you.”
Danielle Nicole’s new outlook shines through “The Love You Bleed.”
“I've put out 10 records between Trampled Under Foot and my catalog,” she said. “And this is the first time I haven't felt screwed, and it's because I own my stuff.”
The newfound optimism is reflected on the standout track “Make Love,” showing Danielle Nicole is finally able to assess her career with confident conviction.
“I can't help that I am 41 years old. I don't know if it's like, I just got into the ‘zero effs’ era … or whatever,” Danielle Nicole said. “I'm worthy — and I don't know if I know I've felt that necessarily before.”
“I put on a really great show, I've got a great band and I've got great songs, and we deserve the world. And we're getting it.” she said.
