According to a pre-K teacher, who told his parents he wouldn’t stop tapping on things, Dan
Newhauser was destined to be a drummer. She was right. He hasn’t stopped tapping on things
since, to the annoyance of many a grade school classmate seated in front of him or car seat
passenger seated beside.
The product of a musical family (his grandfather and great-grandfather were Hungarian
composer/conductors and his mother a classically trained singer), Newhauser endured a brief
stint playing cymbals in an orchestra band before deciding at age 15 that drum kit was his
percussive passion.
Since, he has played in punk bands in his native Texas, as well as North Carolina, Arizona,
England, and finally Washington, D.C., where he now resides. When not performing session
work in the area, Newhauser drums for the post-hardcore quintet Pickaxe. Previously, he
released a few albums with the DC-based garage-surf band Shark Week, which toured North
America and was invited to play such festivals as SXSW, CMJ, NXNE and Sweetlife.
After catastrophically breaking his left arm in a freak bicycle accident, Newhauser toured the
country playing with just his right arm for way too long. After several surgeries and countless
hours of physical therapy, he’s playing better now that at any time in his life and loving every
minute of it.
Newhauser deploys a punishingly hard yet technically interesting and sometimes dangerously
loose playing style, synthesizing the work of some of his earliest and greatest influences, like
Jimmy Chamberlain, Danny Carey, Dave Grohl and Mitch Mitchell.
When not drumming, Newhauser worked for many years as a journalist, writing (occasionally
even about music) for Vice and many other politically focused publications.