AFTER BEING DIAGNOSED WITH CANCER, MARIN MUSICIAN RECORDS 1ST SOLO ALBUM

By Paul Liberatore

Marin Independent Journal

October 15, 2026

In his long career as a co-founder of the Modern Mandolin Quartet, Dana Rath played on seven albums, including a triple Grammy nominee. But he had never had a solo album until a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis threatened his life and inspired him to go into a studio to record his original music.

After two years of intense treatments, the 70-year-old mandolin virtuoso reports that his prostate cancer is now undetectable. And he has just released that debut solo record, “My Toes Know the Way,” one of the most heartfelt collections of acoustic instrumental music I’ve heard in ages.

“When I found out about it, the cancer was already Stage 4 and had come on very suddenly in an aggressive form,” said Rath over coffee one recent morning in a San Rafael cafe. “It definitely inspired me to get started on the album. I wasn’t thinking I was going to die anytime soon, but on the other hand, there was that possibility. What if I didn’t react well to treatment? So you do what you’re going to do.”

For 32 years, Rath traveled the world with the Modern Mandolin Quartet, an acclaimed chamber music ensemble he co-founded in 1985 with celebrity string player Mike Marshall. The group reached its peak in 2013 when it was nominated for three Grammys, including best chamber music/small ensemble performance for its album “Americana.” Seven years later, with its members scattered around the globe, the Modern Mandolin Quartet couldn’t survive the pandemic.

“It was a pretty good run,” he said. “You’ve got to let things go at a certain point.”

No longer a touring musician, Rath, who lives in Corte Madera with his wife, interior designer Maxine Lampert, has since focused his time and energy on his woodworking business, making and designing custom cabinetry and furniture in his shop in San Rafael.

He still plays mandolin and guitar casually with various local groups. You can catch him at 5:30 p.m. Friday at the Depot in Mill Valley with the band Musical Feast. And music, especially his own, has never been far from his thoughts.

“I had stopped playing with the quartet, and I had all this music in my head that I’d only played a few times with other people,” he said. “So it was time to begin a recording project of all my own compositions. I waited until I was almost 70 to do it, but I want to say it’s never too late.”

At the same time that he was undergoing radiation treatments and hormone therapy for the cancer, which had metastasized to his lymph nodes, he began recording in a studio in Ross with his friend Tim Weed, a multi-instrumentalist who co-produced and engineered the album and plays banjo and guitar on several of its 11 captivating tracks.

“When you’re contemplating mortality while you’re also recording songs that come from your soul, it changes your approach to them,” Weed said. “I think that somehow it took him to a more emotional place a lot of the time. There were thoughts I know he had that this could be his swan song, that this could be the last work he’d put out in the world. I think when you have that thought in your mind, you dig a little deeper, and you dig into depths where you haven’t been before.”

For Rath, the music became a kind of medicine and the studio a refuge, a healing place for his mind as his body went through the rigors of cancer treatment.

“After a while you kind of want to escape all that and do what you have to do,” he said. “It helped me stop obsessing about whether it was going to have a good outcome or not.”

Over the eight months it took to finish the record, Rath and Weed brought some of the finest acoustic musicians in the Bay Area into the studio, among them bassist Sascha Jacobsen and accordion player Sam Reider, both Latin Grammy nominees; former Turtle Island Quartet violinist Evan Price and bassist Jim Kerwin of the David Grisman Quintet.

They lent their virtuosity to melodic compositions that are steeped in the various styles and flavors of music that Rath has been influenced by throughout his life.

“As a mandolin player, I wanted to play as many things as possible on the album — Americana, Brazilian, country, classical,” he said. “It all swims around in your head and comes out as a soup.”

In his album notes, he includes blurbs on his inspiration for each song. One of the lifestyle changes he made since his diagnosis is to exercise more, including running on Marin trails. That inspired “Raven’s Haven,” a magical spot on one of his jogs where 50 or more ravens would gather at dusk.

“I threw myself more into exercise,” he said. “That’s about the best thing you can do for your head.”

He wrote the title track to commemorate a memorable hike back to his B&B after staying too long at an international mandolin festival in an ancient town in eastern Germany, the kind of fairy-tale village with a spooky castle on a hill.

“I got enraptured in the festival and missed my bus getting back to the place where I was staying,” he said. “I had to walk down a road through a dark Bavarian forest. I could barely see, and pretty soon there was nothing. I started hanging my foot over the edge of a ditch so I wouldn’t fall into it. It took a long time until I got enough moonlight to see my way home.”

Intentionally or not, that story serves as a kind of metaphor. Out of the darkness of a cancer diagnosis comes this beautiful song and this radiant album.