We recently connected with Daniel DeRusso and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Daniel thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

The most meaningful project I’ve had the pleasure of working on was creating the album artwork/full vinyl and CD design layout for a band called Young Culture. I’ve had the honor of working closely with Young Culture for the past 8 years now and this was their first full length record. I’ve done almost every tour they’ve done along with doing most of their promotional photos/social media. I consider them my best friends and we’ve been grinding in the music industry for years together now and it was incredibly rewarding to have the chance to design everything for the first full length record released on a label. It was a huge goal shared between all of us and an incredible feeling to see it out in the world and have people able to get their hands on it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hi! My name is Danny DeRusso and I’m a photographer based out of beautiful Upstate NY. My main focus for the past 8 years or so has been working with bands, whether it be heading out on tour for weeks with them to document every day tour life and shows along with designing album artwork for bands, shooting promo photos for them and managing social media for them while they’re on the road.

I started my journey back in college in 2014 shooting for my friends local band at a small local bar in Albany,NY. I had a love for music and photography and this was the first time I was able to put them together. From there I shot more small local shows, mostly at small bars that you didn’t need a photo pass for and just doing the work for free to gain some experience and build a portfolio. In 2016 I transferred colleges to the State University of New York in Oneonta where I was able to join the Music Industry Club. Joining this allowed me to shoot bands and artists who came to play at the college and keep building my portfolio. Following my graduation in May of 2017, I went on my first small tour in the Northeast with a band called Young Culture who I still work closely with today. This gave me my first glimpse into the touring world and I fell in love with it. The music industry is a lot of networking and once I began touring and continued meeting more and more bands and building a solid portfolio, everything sort of snowballed and I was able to work with more clients and tour more frequently. Over the past 7-8 years, I’ve toured the country over 30 times, spending much of my years on the road traveling and documenting everything.

I feel that I have a very documentary/photojournalistic style that I love bringing into the world of music. It’s incredible to be able to capture these everyday moments on tour that the general public doesn’t get to see. The list of bands I’ve worked for include Young Culture, Mom Jeans, Hot Mulligan, Knuckle Puck, State Champs, Boston Manor, Arm’s Length, Just Friends, Bearings and many more over the years.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

For me, I would say the most rewarding aspect is capturing all these moments for other creatives and their fans. It’s an honor to travel around the country for weeks at a time with an artist or band and capture all these important moments in their life. I get to give them photos they can look back on and cherish for years to come. Along with that, being able to capture fans and the energy at these shows and have the fans be able to see themselves in a social media post or an article.

Along with this, creating album artwork and designing vinyl/CD packaging is incredibly rewarding. To be able to hold a physical product that you’ve put so much time in effort into creating, there is no better feeling. I’ve toured with bands whose artwork I’ve done and watching people buy a vinyl or CD and knowing that they now own a piece of your art, whether they know it or not is so rewarding. I listen to a lot of the bands I’ve done artwork for and not going to lie, it’s really cool going onto Spotify and seeing your artwork while you listen. Also, being able to bring the vibe and aesthetic of an album to life as something you can see rather than just hear is such a great feeling. Without the artwork, you’re just listening to the songs. The album artwork gives you something to picture and associate with the music and I think that’s really incredible.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Did my side hustle turn into a full time career? No, it did not! While I have spent a large part of the past few years on the road and working in the field I love, it it a hard field to make into a sustainable money making career. To be frank, not a lot of bands make a lot of money as there is a long list of expensive expenses to make a tour work. When I first started touring back in 2017, I was making little to no money, just doing it for the experience and for the love of it. Over there years, I have been able to make a decent living from touring as the tours have grown bigger and bigger along with the bands I’ve been working for. And then when you get home from a tour, sometimes you don’t always have another project or tour lined up for the near future and I’ve had months between tours before where I needed money while I was home. I currently work at a restaurant/brewery in my home town for when I’m home and to be honest, it is nice to have another job separate from your creative career. A few years ago I was trying to make full time photography work, both with my work for bands and my personal photo work and I burnt myself out big time. I like having another job where I don’t rely solely on myself to make ends meet. It can be exhausting trying to find clients and ways to make money and in a creative field there are lots of ebbs and flow of work where sometimes you’re incredibly busy and the money is coming in and then you may not have a large project for a substantial amount of time.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dannyd__/?hl=en
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-derusso-4a872aaa/

Image Credits

Photo of me is by Jacob Moniz