On a Friday night at the Loud, a club in downtown Huntington, West Virginia, the happy-hour crowd is ready to keep partying. After tuning up, Daniel Donato and his band launch into a cover of Gene Watson’s 1981 chart topper “Fourteen Carat Mind” that garners whoops with the line “The cabin that I built in West Virginia / Was not enough to keep you satisfied.”
As the next eighty or so minutes, the song appears in two parts, and live, he stretches it out to sixteen minutes, with two instrumental peaks that leave the audience slack-jawed. That high-wire musicianship has earned the twenty-eight-year-old plaudits from Widespread Panic, the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann, and his friend Billy Strings.
