True Green is Dan Hornsby's masterful storytelling set to indie rock
April 13, 2026
Everyone needs a “loser” phase in life, at least according to Dan Hornsby, the songwriter behind True Green. “If you have an uninterrupted narrative of success and getting what you want, you just become demonic,” the 36-year-old says while sitting in a booth under a fluorescent light at Eagles #34 in Minneapolis. “You become a monster.”
The necessity of self-discovery before success is a prevalent theme of True Green’s debut album, My Lost Decade, released in 2024. After graduating with his Master’s in Fine Arts in fiction at the University of Michigan, Hornsby was still searching for professional and creative direction. “My golden years / my Jesus phase / my lost decade,” he sings sarcastically on the title track off the low-fi, indie-rock album full of strikingly clever lyrics.
“I came out of my MFA, and there was somebody [who] went and worked for the New Yorker and became super famous, and somebody else wrote these best-selling novels, and then I was waiting tables,” Hornsby says. “I eventually went to [divinity] school. I had a long period of trying to figure out who I was as an artist, as a person, and kind of floundering.”
Prior to My Lost Decade, Hornsby published two novels, Via Negativa (2020) and Sucker (2023). True Green manifested after years of songwriting when Hornsby noticed people connecting with his songs when played live. “It just took a while to get my s**t together with that, and then once I did, I felt like I could have the pieces in place to keep going,” he says.
Hornsby returned in March with his sophomore album, Hail Disaster, a project with more polished production and darker themes accompanying the often smooth and cheerful melodies. While writing the album, he sensed a reckoning with catastrophe in the world and wanted to insert “a bunch of little apocalypses in the songs.”
Hornsby, who lives a few blocks from Eagles #34 in Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood, is reading The Summer Book by Tove Jansson when we meet at the bar. He’s wearing a polo, green barn jacket, and baseball hat with the words “The Village,” an Italian restaurant in Chicago, written across the crown. There’s a swing dance class in the room across from us, and Hornsby remembers when he worked the door at Eagles for events like swing and tango nights.
The musician moved in 2021 from Memphis to Minneapolis with his wife, also a writer, for professional and parental opportunities. Plus, the couple met at a work conference while attending a reading at Grumpy’s in downtown Minneapolis, and have friends in the city. “It was kind of blessed for us in a funny way,” he says. “I just remember it seemed like a great place to live. Everything seemed like a big, small town, or a small, big town where it's manageable and navigable with a lot of cool s**t, but not overwhelming.”
Hornsby has migrated around the U.S. a bit in adulthood. Before his Minnesota residency, he completed his undergraduate studies in Kansas, relocated to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan, moved back to Kansas City briefly, graduated with a Master’s of Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School in Boston, and traveled to Memphis where his wife taught. He also teaches MFA writing in remote Tennessee at Sewanee in the summer.
Growing up, Hornsby attended a strict, conservative Catholic school in Muncie, Indiana. He wore a uniform, went to mass every day, and had leaders who made students pray that George W. Bush would win the presidential election. The K-12 religious education, coupled with a degree from Harvard Divinity — which had to do with his interest in the history of religion and spirituality, not becoming a minister, chaplain, or “wizard” — makes the religious themes on his records even more apparent.
On Hail Disaster, the somber track “Consider the Priesthood” is an explicit reference: “I had some priests when I was growing up, who you feel like they want you to be a priest, too.” Hornsby says “predatory” isn’t the right word, but there was a sense of leaders grooming young people for something. “You’ve been selected / You’re just what he needs / Plucked like an earring / From a pile of leaves,” he sings.
True Green’s songs morph anecdotes into music that reads more like fiction than a straightforward narrative. “Italian Lighting” unfolds a story about Hornsby’s great-grandpa, an Italian man who moved to Georgia, and through his mafia ties, he managed a movie theater that mysteriously burned down.
“Terry’s Parrot” stems from memories of Hornsby’s uncle, who owned a macaw and died from complications of AIDS when the songwriter was five or six years old. Because parrots repeat words and phrases, Hornsby has often wondered, “What happened to the parrot? What does it mean to carry around memories of the dead like that?” Years after his death, Hornsby talked to his uncle’s partner about the couple’s relationship and wrote the song through the partner’s point of view.
Hail Disaster’s title references a poster made by Bruce Witsiepe during the AIDS epidemic. Over an image of a disturbed monkey in an Elizabethan garment, the poster says, “Hail Disaster. For I am twisted. Let it come down.” The last statement is a line from Shakepeare’s Macbeth, a command to attack. Hornsby enjoys the idea of inviting disaster to destroy something evil.
To produce his portion of vocals, guitar, and drums for the record, Hornsby used a small field recorder, something you may have seen at a Grateful Dead show back in the day. Many of the other instrumental recordings come from Tailer Ransom, a musician who Hornsby calls “the other half of True Green.”
Ransom vividly remembers his first interaction with Hornsby. He was sitting in Otherlands Coffee Bar in Memphis, talking to an undergraduate student who was applying to graduate school at Harvard. “I was like, ‘Dude, don't apply to Harvard.’ I was talking about all the reasons why the Ivy League sucks,” Ransom recalls. “Dan sort of politely interrupts us… He goes, ‘Well, I just wanted to butt in. I went to Harvard Divinity to get my master’s.’” Ransom thought, “Oh no,” but to his surprise, “[Dan] goes, ‘What this guy is telling you is absolutely right.’”
Ransom was focused on his ambient music at the time, and the two musicians would eventually begin playing on bills together in Memphis, a local music scene that Ransom says intentionally builds show bills around different genres. “We were sort of well poised to be the ambient opener, then the singer/songwriter opener… And then we could get some louder bands coming on later in the evening.”
Although they saw each other at gigs and became friends, Hornsby and Ransom didn’t collaborate until Hornsby moved to Minneapolis and began developing the True Green project. The open-endedness made Ransom feel comfortable jumping in. “I didn't feel constrained by trying to fit into something he was already doing,” he says. “I could just kind of take up whatever space I perceive to be there.”
The duo’s dynamic works well because of their individual talents. “I am not a very good songwriter, but I'm a fantastic song finisher,” Ransom says. “[Dan] is really good at conjuring some things up out of the ether, and then he knows the right moment to send it on over to me.”
Now living in Georgia, Ransom takes Hornsby’s rough cuts and adds instrumental layers and textures from his home recording space. “‘Home studio’ is a generous way to describe what I’ve got going on…. I have a microphone that my brother got me that's made out of a vintage PBR can from the 70s,” he chuckles.
While recording guitar parts for “Bindi Sue,” a ballad about Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin, Ransom remembers having an emotional reaction. “Something I did kind of made me start thinking about Steve and how brave he was,” he says, trying not to sound corny. “That really sucked me in a way that I didn't expect.”
Beyond playing on every song on the album, Hornsby credits Ransom with constructing the musical spines of “Texas Instrument” and “Sparrows + Lilies,” and creating the haunting drone reverberation on “Hail Disaster.” Ransom remembers the instructions Hornby gave him: “Make a drone that sounds like the world is ending around you.”
“My musical ideal is well served by my collaborations with Dan because I like the idea of being in a successful band, but nobody knows who I am,” Ransom says. “That seems like the dream, and Dan's also just friendlier than I am.”
In person, Hornsby does have an amicable persona. His presence matches True Green’s soundscape: gentle, patient, curious. His vernacular often includes “You know?” and “You know what I mean?” in a way that feels like an attempt to ensure the comfort in conversation never dies.
The moniker True Green itself comes from the 12th-century nun Hildegard of Bingen, who coined the theological idea of “viriditas,” a divine, restorative, ever-present energy in human bodies and the natural world. “It's part of the resilience of nature after devastation, or after winter, to grow back,” Hornsby says. “I think it's really beautiful. And I like this idea of that unkillable, regenerative thing.”
For Hornsby, songwriting can be a form of life preservation; mundane scenarios are raw material for creative work. “If there's something that somebody says one night at a bar, and you're like, ‘Wow, that's amazing,’ it's like a tribute to them — to write a song that uses that. It's like a tribute to have a character say that in a story, because it gets another short little afterlife.”
The songwriter often feels a push and pull between the role of a participant or an observer in everyday life.
“By being a writer, being a musician, there's a part of me that can stay present when I would otherwise tap out,” Hornsby explains. “If some odd person comes up to you and makes conversation, I have a renewed interest in that because they're interesting, and maybe some little story or something they say can wind up in one of my stories, or a song… But then there's also the you that is the watcher that maybe has more distance from what you're doing.”
It seems as though floundering for a bit has given Hornsby time to look around and recognize moments and people who are meant to be immortal and transform them into a musical medium, even if it’s in an amusing way.
“You want to make something that has its own life,” Hornsby concludes. “You want to put something together that draws your attention away from the fact that it's all made-up bulls**t and that song feels like it is its own little world — or that story, or that novel, has real life in it.”
Hail Disaster is out now via Spacecase Records. True Green’s album release show is at Cloudland on April 18, Tickets here.
