Daring Greatly: Blood, Sweat, and Harmony

There’s a moment at every (rowdy and impossible to pay attention to) San Diego Music Awards ceremony where the attendees briefly remember what San Diego actually is. Not the brewery capital. Not the beach postcard. Not the sleepy little sibling to LA. A music city. A real one.

The kind built in dive bars and backstage hallways and six-hour drives and smoking alleys, broken trailers, and voices blending so tightly together they stop sounding like separate people altogether.

That reminder arrived confidently in the form of Daring Greatly. They are the Canadian-born, harmony-drenched rock band that has quietly become one of the most beloved live acts in San Diego. This year the SDMAs gave the band three nominations and one win for Best Rock or Indie/Alternative Song for “Lucid Ride.”

Anyone who has seen Daring Greatly live already knows. This band is the real deal.

Not “retro.” Not a tribute. Not a TikTok-filtered imitation of classic rock aesthetics. Real.

The kind of band where (almost) every member sings. The kind where songs evolve on stage over years. The kind where harmonies aren’t dragged into existence by software or AI but built through repetition, instinct, exhaustion, and trust. And maybe most important: the kind of band that still believes that human collaboration matters.

“I think it’s too easy to hit a button and get harmony,” says drummer and vocalist Brayden Tario. “Everything’s so automated and auto-tuned and produced, you can do so much on your own now that you can skip that step of collaborating with other artists… We’re happy to represent zero tracks, zero help, all real. Just a fucking real rock ‘n’ roll band.”

That ethos runs through everything Daring Greatly does. You can hear it in the towering vocal stacks that recall Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Little River Band. You hear it in the road-tested tightness of their live shows, which gives their songs the freedom to breathe and stretch and mutate depending on the room. And you hear it in the way the five members speak about the band itself. It’s clear they consider themselves less like coworkers and more like people who accidentally built a family while trying to survive the music industry.

That family began in Alberta, Canada.

Long before Southern California stages and SDMA wins, brothers Patrick “Patch” (vocals and guitar) and Liam Croome (vocals and keys) were playing music together with their father in Canada under an equally incredible band name.

“We were changing our name from ‘Strange Arrangement,’ Liam laughs. “I didn’t know what was strange about it. It was just friends and family playing in a band.”

Around that same time, their father and co-founder handed them a copy of Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, itself inspired by Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” speech. The name stuck. So did the philosophy. Risk everything. Try anyway. And almost immediately, the universe tested them.

“We sold everything and bought a motorhome,” Liam says. “My dad left his job. He was an oil and gas executive. Sold his truck, and we were driving the RV out of Canada.”

Then the RV caught fire. Not making a metaphor here, it literally caught on fire.

“Two hours outside of Calgary it started to blow little fireballs,” Liam recalls. “Patch was behind us in the Jeep calling us yelling, ‘Get out of the RV right now!’ We pulled over and within ten minutes the whole thing burnt to the ground.”

Most bands would take that as a sign. Daring Greatly bought a pop-up camper and drove to California anyway. They didn’t have any major shows lined up. No label and no guarantees. Just savings, blood harmonies, and an absurd amount of belief in themselves.

“That was probably the biggest ‘dare greatly’ moment,” Liam says.

Against all logic, it seems to have worked. The band slowly embedded itself into the DNA of the Southern California music scene, building an audience the old-fashioned way: one room at a time. Not glamorous rooms, either. Tiny bars. Loud breweries. Four-hour cover gigs. Places where audiences talk over the music until the band’s own energy forces them not to.

“You can usually tell right away,” Brayden says of bad gigs. “Like from venue owners. Through emails. Through language. You’re just like, ‘Yeah… they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.’”

And yet some of those nights become magic anyway. The band still talks about Guerneville, California, a tiny town that unexpectedly became one of their favorite tour stops. “We thought, ‘Oh man, this is going to be the worst thing in the world,’” Liam says. “And then it ended up being really special somehow.”

That tension between the brutal struggle and unexpected joy defines Daring Greatly’s entire career so far. They are successful enough to headline respected venues like the Belly Up Tavern and tour nationally, but still independent enough that Brayden handles booking, logistics, calendars, hotels, and follow-up emails himself. “Management, booking agent, social media…” bassist Brendan Cutrer says, listing all the hidden hats of independence Brayden wears for the band.

“All the things,” Brayden adds. He pauses, hand on his chin. “A booking agent would take a lot off.”

This is the less romantic side of indie music in 2026 and a reality Daring Greatly knows intimately.

The current music industry rewards content velocity, algorithms, and clear and persistent branding. How many followers do you have? What is your view count? How many streams? How many tickets can you sell? If you want to make it big, you must do everything that a label promises to do, without any of the resources. Daring Greatly operates more like a touring rock band from 1974 that accidentally got dropped into the brain-rotting Spotify era.

They release singles strategically because albums disappear in streaming culture. They grind through financially necessary four-hour sets while dreaming of opening slots in packed theaters. They juggle artistic integrity with survival. And they are deeply aware of the tension. Why not sell out? What even is selling out nowadays?

“What does selling out look like in 2026?” Patch repeats thoughtfully. “Probably writing 20 ‘Blame It on the Whiskey’ songs.” The whole band laughs.

“There are country buzzwords,” Brendan explains. “And that’s present in all music.” They are describing the seemingly cookie-cutter country-pop songs that are pre-determined to become mainstream hits with minimal songwriting effort. Buzzwords like “whiskey,” “trucks,” “girls,” and “boots.” You see where this is going. Ironically, Daring Greatly’s earliest work leaned so spiritually introspective that listeners occasionally mistook them for a Christian band.

“We overcorrected,” Patch laughs. “And tried blaming it on the whiskey.” Now they’re searching for the middle ground. That balancing act extends into the songwriting itself. Despite the band’s seemingly effortless chemistry onstage, writing Daring Greatly songs is usually painstakingly slow.

“Almost always music first,” Liam explains when asked about their process. “Then gibberish. Then lyrics.”

“Gibberish for months,” Brayden adds. Only a handful of songs came together quickly. “Trouble.” “Never Gone.” Everything else can take years, and a big reason for that is logistics. The band tours constantly, leaving little time for dedicated writing sessions. But there’s another factor, too. Daring Greatly songs have to survive the rehearsal room.

Every member contributes. Every arrangement evolves collectively. Songs either become Daring Greatly songs through chemistry or die trying.

“You play it with the group and everyone puts their spin on it,” says guitarist Jeff Starkey. Once they bring it to the full band, it takes on another life and becomes a Daring Greatly song.

The band speaks openly about “holes in the set.” There are emotional or sonic spaces they still want to fill. Ballads versus rockers. Expansive songs versus live singalongs. They think like road musicians because that’s exactly what they are, and nowhere is that more obvious than in their harmonies.

The Croome brothers have been singing together since they were able to make noises, to the point where they can immediately tell when something is wrong based solely on breath control. “You can tell right away in the first song whether someone’s not with it,” Liam jokes.

When asked why they haven’t become another famously imploding brother band à la Oasis, Liam pauses before giving an unexpectedly vulnerable answer. “My grandpa didn’t talk to his brother for the last 25 years of their life,” he says. “That was a pretty good example of how not to be.” Then he shrugs.

“We’ve had fights big enough to question whether the band was going to continue… but it’s so much bigger than one fight now.” That perspective seems to permeate the entire group. Nobody technically auditioned. Jeff learned 30 songs in five days. Brendan joined because the friendship felt immediate. Brayden, originally just a drummer and a high school friend of the Croome’s, slowly evolved into a key vocal presence despite never imagining himself as a singer.

“When I first heard them sing,” he says, “I was just like… oh.”

“Love at first sight?” someone jokes.

“Pretty much.”

The affection inside the band is impossible to miss. They roast each other constantly, but underneath the sarcasm sits genuine admiration.

When asked which member would accidentally start a cult, the answer becomes an extended argument about Brayden creating a wiener dog cult inspired by The Lord of the Rings.

When asked about their tour rider, the requests include:

• Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups
• coconut water
• hockey on cable television
• Canadian chips (ketchup flavor is a big hit)
• “a competent sound guy”

Mostly, though, they just want the music to work. Because for Daring Greatly, live performance remains sacred. Ask any musician, the smallest rooms feel the most dangerous.

“Always the quiet rooms,” Liam says immediately. “The 50-person rooms.”

Large venues are really good at hiding imperfections. Reverb smooths mistakes. Big stages create distance. It’s easy to move on from a mistake when you can’t make out individual faces.

Tiny rooms expose everything.

“The little intricate things or mistakes are masked by massive theater sound,” Patch explains. “When there’s no big sound… they hear all the stupid mistakes.” But those vulnerable rooms also sharpen the band. At intimate listening-room style shows, like the beloved San Diego songwriter showcase Writer’s Round, audiences become mirrors. The band can feel every emotional shift in real time.

“If you can do it in a room like that, you can do it anywhere,” Patch says. That intimacy may explain why Daring Greatly inspires such fierce loyalty from fans. Their music doesn’t feel manufactured for mass consumption. It feels lived in and road tested.

Songs like “Trouble” have transformed over years of live performance, slowly accumulating additional vocal arrangements and crowd interaction moments until they become communal experiences instead of just static recordings. Other songs surprise the band entirely. Liam admits he underestimated “Something Coming On,” a slower, softer track that has quietly become one of their strongest streaming performers. Meanwhile, songs they expected to explode sometimes stall live.

“That’s why we haven’t played ‘Never Goodbye’ live very much,” he admits. “For some reason it never hit.” Even now, after more than a thousand shows, Daring Greatly still seems fascinated by audience psychology. The strange alchemy that determines which songs connect and which don’t. Live energy exchange is great data for bands when working out set lists, where to focus time and money, and how to market themselves. Daring Greatly is no exception.

Despite their classic rock DNA, they resist becoming nostalgia bait. Their music has a freshness, a newness, some novelty that isn’t clearly pinpointable.

“We consume enough modern music, too,” Brendan explains. “Dua Lipa, Djo, modern country, prog rock… all kinds of stuff.”

Jeff points out that the band’s sound is ultimately “an amalgamation of everything we’ve consumed.” That modern influence appears subtly rather than stylistically. You hear it in the lush chord voicings Jeff brings into arrangements. “Expensive sounding chords,” as he jokingly describes them. You can hear it in the band’s evolving approach to production. You also hear it in their realistic take about the music industry itself.

The band openly discusses how difficult it has become for working-class musicians to break through without wealth or infrastructure. Brayden references a recent Rick Beato (a wildly popular producer, musician, and YouTuber) video, arguing that “only rich artists are making it.”

“I didn’t go into this thinking I’m gonna make a bunch of money,” Liam says. “But I did think I’d live a decent life and enjoy my life.” Then he laughs. “I just want to play the music.” That statement becomes the emotional center of Daring Greatly’s story. Because underneath the jokes, the harmonies, the Canadian stereotypes, and the endless touring sits something increasingly rare in modern music: five musicians who still fundamentally believe the songs matter most. Not virality or branding or clout. The songs.

Maybe that’s why the pandemic became creatively fruitful for the band instead of destructive. While much of the music industry froze during quarantine, Daring Greatly adapted quickly through livestreams, Patreon shows, and secret outdoor concerts.

“We wrote a lot,” Patch says. “It actually inspired us in a weird way.” That era also reshaped the band permanently. Lineup changes. Home recording experiments. New collaborators. New sounds. Brendan, who had been drifting away from music professionally before COVID, credits that period with forcing him back into it. “The world stopped,” he says simply. So, he picked up a guitar again after years away from it working in corporate America. Now he’s part of one of San Diego’s most beloved rock bands. This kind of accidental destiny appears repeatedly in Daring Greatly’s history.

The burned RV. The destroyed guitar flying out of a truck bed before being obliterated by a semi. (True story.) The forgotten crew member stranded at a gas station without a phone. (Also a true story.) The endless tours. The years without label support. The nights playing for ten people. The nights playing for hundreds. The sometimes excruciatingly slow climb.

Through all of it, the band has remained fiercely independent. Not because it’s glamorous, no, no no. There are just no rules now. Patch says of the modern music industry, “It’s the Wild West.” Maybe that’s exactly why Daring Greatly works. In a cultural moment dominated by hyper-curated identities, algorithmic sameness, and AI takeovers of every single experience we are having, Daring Greatly feels startlingly human. They are messy and earnest and collaborative and imperfect and beautiful. They are real people singing real harmonies in real time, and audiences are starving for that.

Daring Greatly’s identity isn’t locked into genre or aesthetic. It’s pretty emotional. The songs become Daring Greatly songs when every member pours themselves into them and when the collective chemistry transforms individual ideas into something larger than any one person could create alone. That spirit might be the band’s greatest strength. If you look throughout history at some of the most generally agreed-upon most successful bands of all time, that spirit of connectedness, brotherhood, and longevity is a common thread. The Beatles, CSNY, The Who, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones. Harmonies and tight musicianship are not novel skills. Behind the scenes, trust in your bandmates is what matters the most and when that falters, the band fails across the board.

In 2026, trusting other people enough to create something collectively might actually be the most rebellious thing a rock band can do. And Daring Greatly keeps doing it anyway.

When all is said and done, years from now when they are looking back on their career, they want their legacy to be one of realness and unity. Liam speaks on how that’s true for him.

“Live music can be a healthy escape from reality. Tune out the rest of the shit, and enjoy what’s happening right in front of you. A live concert can take you up and down and that’s a ride in itself.” And what a lucid ride it is.

Daring Greatly are kicking off their next international tour at our very own Belly Up Tavern on June 18th. Check out their website for tour dates and more details! www.daring-greatly.com