"Mark Donato is a smart (but not eggheady!) songwriter from upstate whose new album, I Haven't Wasted All This Time Alone (Rag and Bone Shop), is alternately sweet, witty and wry."
♥ Time Out New York

"For Donato, never-again relationships, never-to-be loves, imminent death, and the unrepenting music industry are what great songs are made from. Especially when they are presented with a dash of Caribbean pop ("Moods of Extreme Desire") and country-tonk charm ("Caretaker")."
♥ Chronogram

"Infirmary Ball" is a classic in waiting."
♥ Daily Freeman (Kingston)

"A singer-songwriter musically exploring the liquid labyrinth of life's existential jar of half-sour pickles...fraught with around-the-corner perspectives and rhythmic wit... And isn't that what alternatives are all about? "
♥ Woodstock Times

"An unflinching yet sympathetic look at love, work, and memory, this wry singer-songwriter's appealing latest batch of songs, The Old Joy, is like an arm around your shoulder during hard times...delightfully droll country rock."
♥ Richard Gehr, The Village Voice

"This is folk music in that you sense this singer/songwriter calls his parents 'my folks.' But it resembles rock and roll in its scope, pop music in its feel, and literature in its character development…he sounds like someone genuine and gentle enough to be misplaced in our mad scramble for the latest world-weary glamour boys…Perhaps we don't deserve a CD this good. Let's hope I'm wrong. "
♥ Hanh Tu Phuong, CUPS

"On the surface, (Donato's) debut engages because its odd, ever-morphing textures, just like Harry Smith's anthology's, remind us that folk music was once remarkably strange...Beneath the surface, couplets like "I dreamed my father told me I caused his heart attack / He said my life was empty and he deserved to have his back" remind us that his songs don't just sound interesting."

"…vocals that oft times evoke the phrasing of Holy Modal Rounder Steve Weber or the cracked sweetness of the Grateful Dead (Weir or Garcia I'm not sure), and there's the oddball lyrics that evoke the fractured short stories of Barthelme (Frederick or Donald I'm not sure)…"
♥ J. Salamon, The Village Voice

"Donato's debut is like listening to a set drawn from the most droll Bob Dylan, the humblest Elvis Costello, and the youngest Randy Newman."

"…deserving music makers in full possession of Dylan's proverbial head-full-of-ideas-that're-driving-them-insane like Mark Donato and Life in a Blender and Death Cab for Cutie and Very Pleasant Neighbor who couldn't even get their discs into shops…"
♥ Camden Joy, author of Boy Island, The Last Rock Star Book and Lost Joy

"One of the best songwriters around."
♥ John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, in reference to M.D.