damian & the displayers

What began as entertaining a neighborhood audience with a cardboard guitar while lip-synching Beatles songs in his early pre-teens grew into an obsession with learning to play the actual guitar in his twenties. Immediately beginning to write songs while figuring out block chords, damian israel shiner leaped into the Boston singer-songwriter scene in the mid-nineties, playing originals and covers by The Cure, U2, and other influences, while expanding his circle from there. He spent eight years writing and performing regionally with shiner.jones, a folk-rock act popularized by Emerson College’s broad-reaching radio station WERS (88.9FM), then splintered off to form a collaboration of musicians who would sit in with him on either coast of the U.S. called “the displayers” in 2006.
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shiner has written, performed, and toured with Grammy-winning artists, and is currently fronting his own Boston-local version of the displayers. His music can be found on iTunes, Spotify, and myriad places around the web, and he is expecting to release a new album sometime in early 2024. His vocal stylings are his hallmark, as he hears in harmony; he is an artist not to be missed.
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Prolific composer and performer for decades, the pandemic put a halt to shiner’s live, in-person shows, but he is working on a new recording project and actively gigging again, including a recent performance at the historic Whisky a Go Go in LA!

“Hi guys, thanks for sharing your music! The leading riff of this track [“don’t”] is brilliant, simple but addictive, and there's a certain humility to the vocal lead that reminds me of some of the indie rock legends of the early noughties. Your style is great, the songwriting really interesting, the performance impassioned and no doubt immense at a live show.” — Stereo Stickman, 2024