Daniel Does America

Along with the glamour of performing on stage comes the hard slog of touring. Three hour drives or even six-hour plane rides are commonplace before and after a concert, and this year Daniel's wife Majella has decided to sit it out.

"Touring is not for everyone but we're never away from home that long. There's not many couples who get to spend as much time together even though they're living in the same house," says O'Donnell.

"We may be apart for a month of the year when I'm on tour but otherwise we spend an awful lot of time together."

Daniel met his wife on holiday in Tenerife in 1999 when he went to a local bar run by friends of his, Tom and Marion Roche. Their daughter Majella had been in the restaurant during one of his visits and they were briefly introduced.

"I felt like we had known each other all our lives. It was a very laid-back evening and I regarded Majella as a woman who was great craic (fun) to be around," he remembers.

Starting out in the 1980s as a country and western singer - it's still the basis of his career - over the years Daniel has branched out to sing an occasional pop song or ballad, but he's stayed true to his roots. When it came to releasing his first single, he went for "My Donegal Shore" and "Stand Beside Me." It was certainly humble beginnings because he sold every one of those records himself.

Says O'Donnell, "I always sang from when I was fairly young. I always thought of it as something I would like to do as a career.

"Even though I did go to college in Galway I only stayed for a couple of months. Instead I started singing in 1981 when I was 19. I sang with my sister Margaret's band first, then I started my own group in 1983. It took until 1986 for things to really start to take shape."

From the beginning, though, he was always a little different from other Irish country singers. For one, he wore tailored suits and ties rather than the usual cowboy boots and 10-gallon hat, and he took an interest in his image that was fairly new to the scene. All that attention to detail was eventually rewarded with concert houses full of cheering fans.

Beneath O'Donnell's famously placid exterior lies a deeply ambitious man, and he'd be the first to tell you so himself. At the start of his career he received no encouragement at all from the music industry in Ireland, and its leading lights back then - he won't mention names - told him there was no market for the old time music he liked to sing.

But Daniel felt they were wrong. He was right, and his whole career has been a triumph over the (many) nay-sayers.

"I believed in what I was doing and I went with it. I didn't envisage doing it at the level I'm at now," he says. "I just enjoyed singing and I thought that if I could have a career doing that I'd be very fulfilled."

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Nster.com