DAN WHITEHOUSE – ONLY LOVE - ALBUM OUT 16 OCTOBER 2026
Dan Whitehouse performs with Swedish multi-instrumentalist Gustaf Ljunggren | Ashburton Arts Centre, West Street, Ashburton TQ13 7DT | Details
Praise for Dan Whitehouse “Intriguing… gorgeous” – The Guardian “A stripped-back, unflinching species of songcraft” – CLASH
DAN WHITEHOUSE FINDS JOY ACROSS CONTINENTS ON NEW ALBUM ONLY LOVE
Image credit Peter James Millson
Written between England and Japan, Only Love is a warm, spontaneous piano-and-vocal album by acclaimed Black Country singer-songwriter Dan Whitehouse and pianist David O'Brien.
Its songs grew from the realities of long-distance fatherhood, but are focused squarely on positive connection – the rituals, journeys and flashes of joy that keep love alive.
Whitehouse's young son lives in Japan with his mother, while Dan's work and music remain in the UK. A 90-day tourist visa shapes the pulse of their relationship – arrival, concentrated time together, departure and return. The album finds meaning and poetry not only in the difficulty of that cycle, but in the vivid ordinary pleasures inside it: shared meals, football, city walks, jokes and the rare full days when father and son can simply be together.
"Only love leads me away from you / Only love guides me back," sings Whitehouse on the title track. "I think of our relationship as a boomerang. I have to leave Japan to remain independent, develop my creative practice and be the father I want to be. Then we’re reunited and the cycle is complete again. It hurts, but the return is part of the love too."
Only Love was recorded across two London sessions, with no overdubs and no safety net. Whitehouse brought fully written songs into the room. O'Brien responded in real time, reharmonising and reshaping them live at the piano, drawing on his work with spoken-word and improvisation collective Tongue Fu.
"When David plays I feel like I'm levitating," Whitehouse says. "Sometimes he hits a chord – like the G minor six on A Thousand Lives – and it feels like we’re on a magic carpet ride."
While parental love is the album's spine, Only Love refuses to sentimentalise it. Every Brick confronts the pain of leaving head-on, written one morning in Tokyo when Whitehouse finally stopped searching for distraction.
Elsewhere, Bird of Paradise uses a flower as a metaphor for commodified intimacy, exploring loneliness and sexual alienation without offering easy resolution. Are You There?, inspired by a real-world murder case, reflects a darker psychological truth about feeling like an observer in your own life.
Much of the album was written in Minatomirai, a hyper-modern district on Tokyo Bay, a place Whitehouse describes as "beautiful, unsettling, and unreal." Robots serve meals. Automated voices speak from walls. Even silence feels engineered. An instrumental, Mina Glass, nods to minimalist composer Philip Glass, whose temporary stay in the same neighbourhood inspired a piece built around stillness, repetition, and quiet awe.
Only Love is not just an album about absence. It is about the practical, imaginative and sometimes joyful work of remaining present.