Daniel Donato's live album Ryman to Robert's runs past three hours

Daniel Donato has released Ryman to Robert's, a three-disc live album with his band Cosmic Country that runs past three hours. A mini-documentary about the shows follows it.

Everything on it was taped on August 22, 2025. The band played a full 20-song set at the Ryman Auditorium, then walked down the Ryman's artist staircase, across the alley and in the back door of Robert's Western World for a late-night jam. Rolling Stone describes it as Donato's career told backwards, from Nashville's most famous room to the postage-stamp stage he came up on.

That stage is not a metaphor. Rolling Stone's Joseph Hudak first watched Donato at Robert's in 2013, when he was the teenage lead guitarist in the Don Kelley Band, soloing through the Allman Brothers' "Ramblin' Man" for a beer-drinking crowd on Broadway. Donato is 31 now.

The set list moves between the two rooms. There is the chugging original "Blame the Train" and the gospel traditional "I Saw the Light" for the country listener, and long-form playing for the jam crowd: a 15-minute "Fortunate Sparrow" that gives way to a piano and organ break from keys player Nathan Aronowitz, and an 11-minute instrumental "Hangman's Reel."

Cosmic Country carry Old West nicknames, with Will McGee on bass as Mustang and drummer William Clark as Bronco, and the playing has the same lack of self-seriousness. Hudak's read is that these are freewheeling experiments rather than technique for its own sake.

The album is logged on the release calendar with the rest of the country and rock autumn. Both of its rooms have been in the news lately: Robert's Western World is opening an outpost in Nashville's new stadium, and the Ryman recently hosted a Sho-Bud steel guitar show with Marcus King, Slash and Marty Stuart.