About the Artist
Dan Navarro is a singer-songwriter, voice actor, and activist who, at 72, still crisscrosses the country by van to play shows. With Eric Lowen he co-wrote "We Belong," the 1984 Pat Benatar hit they finished in about 90 minutes, and that has supported him for four decades. As half of Lowen & Navarro and on his own, he has spent 50 years writing songs while building a parallel career singing in films, commercials, and animation. He sits on the board of SAG-AFTRA and has put in years on the unglamorous work of fighting for fair pay for performers. His mantra is simple: say yes.
Dan Navarro
About the Episode (Episode 128)
Dan Navarro sat down with Jason English at the 30A Songwriters Festival, his favorite stop of the year. He is 72, still touring out of a van, and carrying 50 years of stories. The one underneath all of them is how close he came to saying no to the song that changed his life, and the conversation goes somewhere most don't: a long, easy talk about death, grief, and what he wants to leave behind.
Key Conversation Points
The only answer is yes. In 1983 Eric Lowen pushed Navarro out of a failing band, and they stopped speaking. Two months later Lowen called to ask if they could write a song. Navarro was furious and proud, and almost said no. Instead he said yes, and the two of them wrote "We Belong" in about 90 minutes. A year later it was a Pat Benatar hit, and it has paid his bills for 42 years. "If I had said no, I wouldn't be sitting in this chair," he says. "It's not over until it's over."
Survival is success. Navarro stopped waiting for his ship to come in a long time ago. He has never had a hit of his own bigger than a regional one, and never written a solo hit for someone else, but he loves the process and is content stringing small wins together. Negativity, he figures, only earns you the right to be correct. On the business he is blunt: streaming changed the math for good, the live show is where you now earn a day's pay for a day's work, and when Daniel Ek says the cost of making music is zero, "he's lying."
What death taught him. Navarro has lived with loss since his 7-year-old brother died when he was nearly 10, followed by a significant death almost every year until college. He calls grief a root through a dark forest with a light at the end, something you have to walk through rather than bury or drown in. His longtime partner Eric Lowen lived eight years with ALS, played until he was nearly a floating head onstage, and chose the day he would go. Navarro watched him die, and got to grieve before he was gone. What he wants to be remembered for is plain: a guy who was of value to his community and left it a little better.
Asked what he is most curious about, Navarro did not look back at the hit. He wants to know what is around the corner: whether the recorded-music model survives, what happens politically, whether the Dodgers threepeat, how the next show goes. His favorite day is tomorrow and his favorite gig is the next one, and after 50 years he still means it. He is not ready to check out, because he wants to see what happens next.