Dan and Claudia Zanes Make Beautiful Music Together

The concept of soulmates is, admittedly, far-fetched. This idea that there is one perfect person out there for you in all the world and that the universe will strategically align itself to bring the two of you together is the stuff of fairy tales. And yet…spend some time with husband-and-wife musicians Dan and Claudia Zanes in their cozy Baltimore County home, and you might become a believer.

They’re both musicians and multi-instrumentalists. They both champion the transformative power of music—not just in an abstract way, but in practice. (They bring their music to the neurodivergent, the unhoused, the sick, the elderly.) They both love Haitian culture—which makes sense for Claudia, as her people are from Haiti, but less sense for Dan, who is a white guy from New Hampshire.

They love folk music and the blues there’s a giant painting of Lead Belly in their living room. They love to entertain, so much so that they turned their garage into a theater—a place for people to gather and perform and just be together.

Although Dan is 63 and Claudia is 45, they share a similar vibe—a kind of relaxed, cheerful, hippie-ish warmth. And, as I quickly discover, they physically gravitate to each other, too.

When setting up for this interview, we assemble in their living room, where there is one large couch and one comically small love seat. Claudia immediately sits on the love seat and gestures for me to sit on the couch. Then Dan sits next to her, leaving me alone on the expansive couch. Then, their dog, Rezi, a supremely floppy sheepdog/poodle mix, jumps on the love seat and curls up on top of them. One big happy, albeit cramped, family.

Although they met in Brooklyn in 2016—by then, Dan was married and divorced and had a grown daughter—they discovered that they were actually born 18 miles apart in New Hampshire.

Okay, universe, we get it.

When I ask if music brings them together when they have a fight, they exchange a curious look. Then they chuckle. “We don’t really fight,” Dan explains.

But before there was Dan + Claudia Zanes (the name of their touring band), there was Dan Zanes and Claudia Eliaza, two people who were, perhaps, destined to meet each other.

CLAUDIA
Claudia Eliaza was born in New Hampshire but her family was from Haiti and her home was a hub for New Hampshire’s surprisingly large Haitian community. There was always Haitian food on the stove—like diri kole (rice and beans), often mixed with chicken, fish, or goat—and the sounds of Creole music and language emanated throughout the house.

“I joke that I really didn’t know I was raised in the U.S. until I went to school,” says Claudia.

Claudia showed an aptitude for singing and all kinds of music-making as a child. She sang at home. She sang at church. She sang at her mostly white school—although she immediately noted that the music the kids were singing there was very different from what she heard at home.

She says she didn’t have much of the immigrant’s sense of being “othered,” because a “strong sense of Haitian pride” was instilled in her at a young age. Plus, when her school friends came over, they were immediately taken with the food, music, and warmth of the Eliaza home.

A formative moment was seeing gospel singer Shirley Caesar on stage in Boston. “That blew my mind,” says Claudia. “Just witnessing how this woman could bring these people together, and to feel this emotion pouring out of her, and how it was connecting with the audience—that impacted me greatly.”

She ended up attending the prestigious Berklee College of Music, where she studied music therapy and started thinking about music as a universal language.

“I was very interested in the healing modality of music, how music can be used to connect us, to set apart our difference, and bring us together in a unifying way,” she says.

She was still singing—jazz music in particular—but uplifting and healing people through music became her life’s calling.

After graduation, she began practicing music therapy. She tells a story of a nonverbal little girl who came to her practice—the child was 7 or 8—who spoke her first words during a music therapy session. Her parents were as stunned as they were elated. Similarly, she found that aging adults with dementia could connect to and be soothed by music in a way that nothing else could.

In 2013 she became the director of the arts nonprofit Community Music Center of Boston. She was the center’s first Black female director. She thought she had fulfilled her destiny—but the universe has a way of surprising us.

DAN
Dan Zanes could have—and in some ways, should have—been a conservative guy. Again, he grew up in preppy Concord, New Hampshire, and even went to the famed Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for two years.

But music was always a passion. He went to the library and took out records—Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan. (He bristles when I mention A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic—and Claudia laughs in a “don’t get him started” sort of way. Seeger, he notes, was much more than this folk music naif and Dylan was much more than this “genius jackass.”)

Still in high school, he worked at a summer camp where folk artists would come through and perform for the kids. Part of him couldn’t resist being the snickering cool guy on the outskirts of the crowd with his fellow counselors who preferred rock and roll. But part of him—the real par —was genuinely touched by the music-making and the way it brought joy to those kids.

He attended Oberlin and immediately started a band. If you’re of a certain age, you’ve probably heard of them—The Del Fuegos. They were a big deal in ’80s indie rock.

Dan says alternative music at the time was easing away from the post-punk scene of The Cure and New Order and onto more roots-style rock. The Del Fuegos, which Dan formed with his brother and two of his Oberlin classmates, fit in neatly to a new scene that included X, The Blasters, Los Lobos, and, later, REM. In 1984, Rolling Stone named them “Best New Band.” They began to tour, starting in grubby clubs and ending up in large concert halls. Dan served as the primary songwriter and lead singer.

“It was like the folk music I listened to as a kid,” Dan says. “Just louder, faster, and sloppier.”

He reflects on that period in his life: “It was a great way to spend my 20s,” he says. “I would say I wasted my youth, but it wasn’t really a waste. It was an incredible experience.”

That said, the rock-and-roll lifestyle took its toll—drugs, alcohol, you name it. “I’m grateful that I’m alive,” he admits. By the time he was 27, Dan realized that rock-and-roll debauchery just wasn’t for him. The Del Fuegos broke up and he did a big reset—including sobriety. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, got married, had a daughter named Anna (now the editor of Alternative Press magazine), got divorced.

He was worried that having a daughter would keep him from playing his music. But then he realized that he wanted to play the kind of music Anna would enjoy. He recruited some high-profile friends—very high profile, like Sheryl Crow and Suzanne Vega—and started a new project, Dan Zanes and Friends, that brought rootsy folk rock to kids.

As frontman, Dan, sporting colorful suits and a mop of punkish, unruly graying hair, played guitar and danced with silly glee. It was music for kids that the whole family could rock out to—and that was the point.

“People thought I was going to be singing, like, ‘The Farmer in the Dell’ for these kids. In fact, it was just an updated version of the folk records that I had listened to as a kid.”

In 2007, Zanes and Friends’ Catch That Train! won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Album for Children. He’d already had two solid musical identities—indie rock superstar and kid rock icon. But the most meaningful was yet to come.

DAN + CLAUDIA
On Labor Day weekend in 2016, Claudia was in Brooklyn visiting her friend Pauline Jean, a jazz vocalist. Jean said she knew someone that she thought Claudia would click with, a guy who did music for families named Dan Zanes. The name did ring a bell—Claudia thought maybe she had used Dan’s music in her therapy practice.

But when she and Jean arrived at Dan’s East Flatbush home, she figured she was remembering the wrong guy. She was picturing a white guy. And Dan lived in this West Indian neighborhood and, as she approached the house, she saw a giant Haitian flag flapping in front of the house. Then she saw Dan on the porch playing the ukelele.

“I was like, ‘What?’” laughs Claudia. They went inside and she was amazed to see Dan’s extensive record collection of Haitian music—music her dad used to play.

“Suddenly I was very curious,” she says. “‘Who is this human?’”

They began singing together.

“I was immediately taken with Claudia,” Dan says. “And when you sing with someone, you see them in a different way than if you’re just, say, having a cup of coffee or a meal together. You really see the person.”

“Music is a beautiful way to see into the soul of someone,” agrees Claudia.

Dan was utterly transfixed. “I just knew Claudia was the person I had been dreaming about my whole life,” he says. “Her laugh is, you know, intoxicating to me. I just pictured us making music together and being together.”

Claudia was equally taken with Dan, although romantic feelings came later. After all, Dan was nearly 20 years older than her. And there was the slight inconvenience that she was still living in Boston. But the more they played together, the closer they got, and eventually there was no denying the feelings that were there.

A year later, Dan asked Claudia to come help him babysit a friend’s kid for a while. When they got there, there “happened” to be a guitar case in a trashcan, which had a guitar in it. Dan began to play “I Only Have Eyes For You.” He was joined, spontaneously it seemed, by neighbors, one on the guitar and the other on the violin. Claudia had no idea she was being pro- posed to.

“I’m thinking, ‘Wow, New York is amazing. People just play music all the time!’” she says, laughing.

She began recording the serenade on her iPhone, inadvertently capturing the moment when Dan got down on one knee for posterity.

From there, she moved to New York. For a while, they lived there together, making music, honing their connection. Dan had always been interested in the healing power of music, but with Claudia at his side, it became more of a mission.

When they found out about Maria Lambros’ project, Our Joyful Noise, they knew they wanted to be involved. Lambros, a professor at the Peabody Institute, runs a nonprofit that brings music to unexpected places—halfway homes, prisons, cancer and Alzheimer’s units. Participating in Our Joyful Noise drew the couple to Baltimore.

“We felt like Baltimore was this really special place, with people doing exciting things and creating and dreaming,” says Dan. “It felt like what Brooklyn was in the ’80s and ’90s.”

So they moved here.

“Dan and Claudia are extraordinary musicians who are truly at the heart of Our Joyful Noise,” says Lambros. She quotes a staff member at Saint Luke’s Youth Center’s After School program for at-risk youth, who described the Zanes as a “great big musical hug.”

For a while, the couple lived in Reservoir Hill, making good friends with the tight-knit community of Black artists and intellectuals who live in that neighborhood. Kaye Wise Whitehead, host of “Today With Dr. Kaye” on WEAA, has had them as guests her show and collaborated with them on a variety of community projects.

“They are beautiful people,” she says. “And when I say ‘beautiful,’ I’m not talking about physical appearance. I’m talking about the love they have for the city, the connection they have with young people, the way they carry the reputation of Baltimore and its ‘artivism’ forward.”

The Zanes were—and still are—active participants in Baltimore urban life, but eventually the clarion call of greener space won out and, in 2023, they moved to the county.

To be clear, this is not a cookie-cutter townhouse, but an adorable Victorian set on a half-acre, with a porch and an enclosed deck and bohemian-chic furnishings—Turkish throw rugs, brightly painted walls, velvet couches. Claudia is the one with the green thumb—and there are plants hanging from the ceiling and resting on every available surface, adding to the sense that something wild and vital takes place here.

The performance space they built was simply an extension of their lifestyle. They love bringing people together, especially musicians, so why not create a space to perform and jam? Theirs is a house meant to be enjoyed and shared, much like Claudia’s house when she was growing up.

So far, as Dan + Claudia Zanes, they’ve traveled around the country performing, released two albums together, continued their work with Our Joyful Noise, and were commissioned by the Kennedy Center to write a sensory-friendly folk opera called Night Train 57.

Betty Siegel, the director of the Office of Accessibility and VSA at the Kennedy Center, was wowed by their commitment to the project. Sensory-friendly, she explains, is just a matter of giving children autonomy. If they want to bang on a chair during the performance, that’s fine. If they want to cover their ears, that’s fine, too.

“And Dan and Claudia were in from the start,” she says. “They really wanted the opera to include all children, all people, all families. They’re just about the nicest, most innovative, most artistic musicians you can ever hope to work with.”

Oh, and for the record, Siegel also got the sense that the couple were “fated to be together.”

In the end, if the universe did bring them together for a reason, it was to spread joy.

“There are so many terrible things happening in the world,” Dan says. “We can’t control everything but we can control our little corner of the world. So we’re just going to focus on the good. On what we can do in the here and now.”