Undaunted: How Lesley Daunt and Howard Goldberg Turned Grief Into Their Most Powerful Music Yet
- Joanie Cox Henry and Fernando Santomaggio
- 16 minutes ago
- 6 min read
By Joanie Cox Henry and Fernando Santomaggio
Some musical partnerships are built in rehearsal rooms. Others emerge from carefully planned collaborations. The story behind UNDAUNTED began with a subject many avoid, which is loss.
UNDAUNTED: A Trilogy of Loss, Hope, and Love, an ambitious three-record project exploring heartbreak, healing, resilience, and redemption. The trilogy will chronicle an emotional journey through loss, acceptance, connection, and hope, drawing from the duo's real-life experiences and their shared passion for emotionally driven rock music. Funds raised will support professional recording, mixing, mastering, manufacturing, and promotion of the releases, helping bring the project's deeply personal vision to audiences around the world.
For Lesley Daunt and Howard Goldberg, two veterans of South Florida's fiercely independent music scene, the project grew out of decades of friendship, shared history, and an uncanny ability to find each other whenever life delivered its hardest blows.
"We're trauma bonded," Daunt says with a laugh via Zoom from her Georgia home.
She means it both jokingly and seriously.
They just launched a Kickstarter campaign this month to turn their vision into a reality.
The pair first crossed paths in the early 1990s, long before UNDAUNTED existed. Back then, they were simply musicians orbiting the same creative community, playing in each other's bands, supporting mutual friends, and becoming part of the same extended family of artists.
"We always intermingled together," recalls Daunt who is also a brilliant visual artist creating art pieces inspired by everyone from Taylor Swift to Frank Zappa. "We played together, played separately, and somehow always found our way back into each other's lives."
Over the years, that connection deepened through personal tragedies, the loss of friends, and the kind of life experiences that either fracture relationships or strengthen them.
"Our relationship runs really deep," Goldberg says. "We've been there for each other through deaths, heartbreak, and all kinds of craziness. Lesley has been a rock for me."
That history became the meaningful foundation for UNDAUNTED.
A Return to Music During the Darkest Chapter
Several years ago, Daunt found herself back in South Florida under heartbreaking circumstances.
After the death of her sister, she returned to help raise her niece while also caring for her mother. What was supposed to be a temporary stay stretched into years. She found herself separated from her home in Georgia, her dogs, her routines, and much of the life she had built.
"I needed something," she says simply.
That something turned out to be music.
For the first time in years, Daunt dusted off an electric guitar she had barely touched in more than a decade. She began experimenting with recording software, layering sounds, exploring synthesizers, MIDI textures, and guitar tones.
There was no grand ambition. No record deal dreams. No strategic plan.
"I was just trying to entertain myself," she says with a relentless tone of honesty in her voice. "I needed a little joy."
What began as experimentation quickly became obsession. New sounds sparked new ideas. New ideas became songs. Then came a Wednesday night with Goldberg.
"We had a standing Wednesday date," Daunt recalls. "I played him some songs and said, 'Do you want to play with me?' He said, 'Sure.'"
Five minutes later, the first pieces of UNDAUNTED existed.
Music as Survival
For Goldberg, the timing could not have been more significant.
As Daunt was processing one chapter of grief, Goldberg was facing painful upheaval in his own life. When he heard the demos, something clicked immediately.
"The lyrics just hit me," he says. "Everything hit me."
The project became more than collaboration. It became catharsis.
"I saw it as an outlet," Goldberg explains. "A way to get rid of the stuff going on inside me."
The effect surprised him.
After years without writing lyrics, the floodgates suddenly opened.
Since then, the duo has accumulated enough material for multiple albums, creating songs that feel intensely personal while remaining open enough for listeners to project their own stories onto them.
That universality is one of UNDAUNTED's greatest strengths.
The Art of Leaving Space
One of the project's standout tracks, "Out of Reach," explores longing, distance, and the ache of wanting something unattainable. Maybe it's something or someone you couldn't have or perhaps something or someone you shouldn't have. At first glance, it sounds like a love song. Look closer, and it becomes something larger. Goldberg describes it as a story everyone recognizes.
"There's somebody you're attracted to, somebody you can't have," he says. "It's an old story. Everybody's lived some version of it."
Yet neither songwriter is eager to over-explain their work. In fact, they actively resist it.
"I don't always like hearing what a song is about," Daunt says. "Sometimes I've already connected it to something in my own life, and then somebody explains it and I think, 'Damn, I liked my version better.'"
Goldberg agrees.
"If somebody connects with a song in their own way, I don't want to spoil it by saying, 'Well, it's really about this,'" he says.
It is a philosophy that gives UNDAUNTED's music its emotional weight. The songs are specific enough to feel honest, yet spacious enough to belong to anyone who hears them.
"Shattered Echoes" is another powerful song Daunt and Goldberg just released.
This tune is a haunting portrait of a heart wandering through the ruins of a lost love, where every shadow, empty room, and passing stranger echoes the memory of someone who is not coming back. It captures the pain of longing after heartbreak, as the narrator reaches for a vanished connection and finds only silence, fractured reflections, and the ghostly reverberation of what once was. Or maybe it's a figment of unrequited love that only ever existed in the listener's mind. Again, this dynamic duo prefers leaving the hard stuff for their audience to sort through and decide.
Building a World From Layers
Perhaps the most surprising revelation is how much of UNDAUNTED's sound originates with Daunt herself.
Listening to the finished recordings, it is easy to assume a full band or a roster of studio musicians helped create the lush arrangements.
Not so.
Many of the tracks began as simple guitar parts, MIDI instruments, synthesized bass lines, and carefully stacked layers.
"If you isolated every track, you'd probably laugh," Daunt says. "A lot of it is incredibly simple."
But simplicity, she argues, is beside the point.
The magic lives in how those pieces interact.
Synth textures fill the gaps. Guitar lines weave together. Small musical gestures accumulate into something far larger than the sum of their parts.
The result is music that sounds expansive without sacrificing intimacy.
Remembering Scott Putesky, Another South Florida Icon
The conversation takes a more emotional turn when the subject shifts to the late Scott Putesky, the founding Marilyn Manson guitarist better known to many fans as Daisy Berkowitz.
For Daunt, the mention immediately opens a floodgate of memories.
"He was one of my best friends," she says.
Her voice softens.
What follows is not a discussion about fame or controversy. Instead, it becomes a portrait of a man remembered for generosity.
"People don't realize how much he helped other people," Daunt says. "He supported so many musicians."
Goldberg nods in agreement as Daunt reflects on Putesky's intelligence, kindness, and willingness to champion artists around him.
The Black Velvet Heart
Throughout the conversation, Daunt repeatedly jokes about having a "black heart" and a "black soul." After speaking with Daunt and experiencing her uplifting vibes, it’s difficult believing their description of her. During this interview we decided she has more of a black velvet heart.
It feels fitting because beneath UNDAUNTED's dark themes lies something unexpectedly hopeful.The project was born from grief, isolation, heartbreak, and uncertainty. Yet what emerges from the speakers is connection. Connection to old friends. Connection to creativity. Connection to survival. Most importantly, connection to anyone who has ever found themselves trying to navigate life's darkest moments while still searching for beauty.
For Daunt and Goldberg, that search continues.
And judging by the growing mountain of material waiting in the wings, they're nowhere near finished telling the story.
If you want to help Daunt and Goldberg get to their next chapter in their trilogy of song, you can choose your own adventure and donate to their Kickstarter campaign here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1757183230/undaunted-a-trilogy-of-loss-hope-and-love. There are multiple tiers to backing the project.
UNDAUNTED is available on Spotify, SOUNDCLOUD and other platforms. Visit https://www.undauntedmusic.com/ for more. You can follow UNDAUNTED on Facebook here.
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