Soundbites: Madaila Celebrate a Decade of ‘The Dance’

The anniversaries of albums bring on a specific type of panic. I call it “There’s no way [fill in record of great import] came out 15 years ago” syndrome. It generally starts in your thirties as you notice with increasing alarm that artists you loved as a teenager are suddenly touring on the premise of playing a “classic” record in its entirety.

“That record only came out a few years ago,” you might say in disbelief. “Isn’t it a little premature—”

That’s when a more linear-thinking friend steps in: “No, dude. It’s been a decade. You were a college freshman with no debt, your grandparents were alive, no one talked about AI other than dweebs, and you thought Wolfmother was the future of rock and roll.”

It only gets weirder with time. When the internet let me know recently that it’s been half a fucking century since Bruce Springsteen dropped Born to Run, I was sure something had gone awry with the overall time stream, that maybe a mischievous Swiss scientist at CERN had activated the Large Hadron Collider — but nope.

While the syndrome hasn’t yet been added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I’m sorry to say it’s spreading into the local music scene. One of the more notable Vermont releases of recent years — Madaila‘s debut LP, The Dance — turned 10 years old in March.

To celebrate the occasion, the band will perform the album in its entirety on Halloween night at the Higher Ground Showcase Lounge in South Burlington. It’s far from a simple reunion show, however. Let’s recap for the uninitiated.

Back in 2015, singer-songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Mark Daly gathered some of the best local musicians — drummer Dan Ryan, bassist Jer Coons, guitarist Willoughby Morse and keyboardist Eric B. Maier — to create a dance-rock force. The Dance put the band on the map, garnering millions of streams on Spotify and popping up in the pages of Paste and Relix, where it was hailed as the next big thing. Clad in neon suits and popping with an ’80s-inspired aesthetic, Madaila became a touring machine, dropping Traces in 2016. That same year, the band staged Madaila on Main, drawing hundreds to a massive block party on Burlington’s Main Street.

After that meteoric rise, Daly pumped the brakes in 2018, putting the project on “indefinite hiatus” to focus on his family and raising his kids. He relaunched Madaila as a solo project with 2020’s West, but four years later, he decided to get the band back together — sort of. Coons had returned to the fold, now on guitar, but otherwise it was a whole new crop of Vermont talent: Matthew Mercury drummer Steve Hadeka, Kat Wright bassist Josh Weinstein, former Villanelles keyboardist Zane Gunderson, pedal steel player Tony Naples and violinist Ben Lively round out Madaila 2.0. The band released The Suite in 2024.

It was Coons who noted the approaching anniversary of The Dance and suggested celebrating the occasion. Daly, now 39, also noticed former band members posting callbacks to the record on social media, such as Ryan showing off some of the drum parts.

“It felt so sentimental and sweet,” Daly told me last week. “The more I thought about it, if we were going to celebrate this record, I wanted to honor the guys who started out with me and how they shaped Madaila into what it was and what it is today.”

So Daly reached out to his old bandmates and asked if they’d perform The Dance one more time. The old crew quickly agreed, setting the stage for a night of Madaila love, past and present.

“The night is going to start out a little like Stop Making Sense,” Daly said, referencing the 1984 Talking Heads concert documentary. “I’ll come out solo at first, and we’ll just start adding band members as we go until the stage is full.”

The first set will see Madaila 2.0 slowly assemble and play the band’s recent material. In the second set, the original lineup will perform The Dance. The third set promises to be a wide-ranging mega-jam, with members from all iterations of the band and maybe even a few special guests, Daly hinted.

Returning to the songs he wrote a decade ago has been an intriguing experience for Daly, though he doesn’t see a massive change in his work from 2015 to today.

“I’m not sure that I’ve changed as a songwriter, but playing the older stuff has certainly reinforced the notion that these were good songs. I can see why people liked them in the first place,” Daly said. Then he laughed, admitting to the practical difficulties of revisiting the material. “There are some really high notes on songs like ‘I Don’t Want to Rest’ and ‘The Dance’! I can still hit ’em, but it’s not quite so comfortable for me now.”

Daly is acutely aware that his audience has aged with him.

“There were some tough times in the last five years where I wondered where the fans that would come out for those big Madaila shows were now,” Daly said. “I didn’t want to get jaded — people were still coming out — but the energy of those early days was just so intense. But then I zoomed out and realized that a lot of those fans grew up, as well, and started families and serious jobs.

“It’s not 2015 anymore,” he continued. “But hopefully this show is a chance for those older fans I haven’t seen in a while to come out. That would be amazing.”

Note to the OG fans: Don’t get your hopes up about seeing the band clad in those signature neon suits.

“Oh, those suits got so nasty eventually. Just disgusting,” Daly recalled. “I’m pretty sure we threw them away. Man, I hope we did.”

As for the future, Daly isn’t looking too far ahead.

“To be honest, I rarely think of what comes next with this band,” he said. “I know I want to make a soul record and even a house music record one day. But for now, it feels really sweet, really tender, to play these songs again and know that they still resonate with people.”

The original print version of this article was headlined “Time Bandits: Madaila Celebrate a Decade of ‘The Dance’”

This article appears in Oct 15-21 2025.

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