Daniel Talton (Little Timmy McFarland of Flight 19)

When he’s not busy exploring the magic of friendship or feeling anxious around women, Daniel Talton performs and records as Little Timmy McFarland of Flight 19, often with nothing more than a drum machine, a guitar, a broken amplifier, and a fuzz pedal. Hailing from a small town in Southeast Texas, where the oil refineries grow free and as a result the sky sometimes turns funny colors, Daniel is a Recording Arts student in the Jacobs School of Music and has played everywhere from 5th grade end of the year parties to senior citizens centers.  Lately, Daniel has been mixing a new Little Timmy McFarland album, entitled 198920, on a cassette-four track.  198920 will be Little Timmy’s sophomore album, following last year’s King Felix vs. The Irrational, which is available for free if you just ask him.

The music of Little Timmy McFarland is an eclectic mix of styles and approaches, from a simple acoustic strum to a forty-five second blitz of dissonance and guitar fuzz.  However, despite the disparity of musical styles, changing from performance to performance and record to record, there is a thematic thread of anxiety and uncertainty that runs through nearly every song.  For Talton, music is as much therapy as it is art: the exploration of self through the creation of a new, darker identity, a product of the thoughts lurking in the uglier corners of the brain.  In this sense, the songs of Little Timmy McFarland of Flight 19 act as a sort of confession, with the listener playing the role of priest.  Talton hopes that by giving a voice to the darkness that lingers in the human mind, both him and the listener will be able to come to better terms with the ugliest parts of themselves.  Stephen King, in his essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” puts it another way, saying that such exploration of ugliness, “like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized…. I like to see [horror] as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed.”

 

 

 

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