Meet Dan Meyer, one of our new Chorus Leads! Dan was born in Michigan and spent his first 9 years of school in Houghton Lake, MI, where he started playing trombone in 5th grade. His mother was a Sweet Adeline back then and he was in her chapter’s show when he was in 6th grade. He moved to Overland Park, KS when he was in 9th grade where he participated in marching & concert band at Shawnee Mission West. Upon graduating from Wichita State University in 1976 with a BS in Computer Science, he moved back to Kansas City, working for Burroughs Corp.
After a few years there, the company moved him to Southern California where he lived in Arcadia, Ventura and Tujunga. It was while he was in Tujunga that he started singing barbershop as a baritone with the San Gabriel Valley chapter, invited to a rehearsal by a guy that worked for him. He ended up directing them for 6 months after their director resigned. Because he joined barbershop to sing, he left there and went to the Los Angeles chapter in the San Fernando Valley, singing baritone, and while there he met Len Wermes, now a NWS tenor. While a member of the LA Chapter, he sang with a couple of different quartets and did some assistant directing.
In 1991, Unisys Corp (formerly Burroughs) relocated his family to Downingtown, PA (a suburb of Philadelphia) where he quickly joined the Bryn Mawr Mainliners, just after they had competed at International in Louisville, KY. He was with the Mainliners when they competed at the International conventions in New Orleans, Salt Lake City and Indianapolis. Besides singing baritone with the Mainliners, he was also an assistant director and attended Directors College for the first time in 1995. Around 1997 he started singing baritone in a quartet called Moonlighting. Moonlighting was together for 6 years, each year placing in the top 10 in the Mid-Atlantic District.
He left the Mainliners in 1999, and in 2000 became a founding member of a new, mixed-voice a cappella chorus, “A Cappella Pops”, as a first bass (baritone) and eventually became the assistant director and music team chair. It was during those first months of A Cappella Pops rehearsals that he met Eileen Kelly, a first soprano, and they were married in 2007. In 2007, his voice teacher suggested he switch to tenor, which started him on the road to singing (barbershop) lead. In July of 2008, he became the musical director of the Wilmington, DE chorus, the Chorus of the Brandywine. While there, he attended Directors College twice.
In May of 2014, after 35 years at Burroughs/Unisys Corp, Dan accepted a position in the IT Department at the University of Washington, starting in mid-July. Eileen and he are renting a house in Edmonds and she has joined the Sno-King Community Chorale. Two weeks after they arrived, Dan visited a NWS summer session and “ran into” Len. Having a friend here made deciding to join easy.
Between them Dan & Eileen have four children (two each) and two grandchildren. Dan’s son Chris is an engineer in Sunnyvale, CA and Eileen’s daughter Meg lives in Charlotte, NC with her husband Rob and daughter Caitlyn. Dan’s daughter Elyse, a Boeing engineer, lives in West Seattle with her husband Ray (the bassist of “Don’t Move”) and daughter Marti. Eileen’s son Joe lives in West Chester, PA. Dan and his wife enjoy camping and traveling. When they moved to Seattle, they spent two weeks driving across the country with their 20’ travel trailer. They also enjoy wine and beer tasting. Each fall Dan goes deer hunting in Manistee, MI, where he and his four sisters own 80 acres of woods. Dan also enjoys woodworking when he has his power tools properly setup. And we’re glad that his “musical tools” are set up with us here at Northwest Sound!