Dawes: Want To Be Your Favourite Band (Interview)

LA-based band Dawes will be performing at Auckland’s Tuning Fork this Thursday evening as part of their Americana Fest. The band released their fourth album, All Your Favorite Bands, earlier this year and have just produced a video of the title track featuring many of their fellow artist, friends and musicians including Conor Oberst and My Morning Jacket. Just a few weeks ago the band announced that long-time keyboard player Tay Strathairn had left the group, just as they were to set out to this part of the globe. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to bandleader Taylor Goldsmith about Tay’s departure and about recording with producer David Rawlings. The two spoke just as the first Democratic Presidential debate was about to take place.

Click here to listen to the interview with Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: I hope I’m not keeping you from the Democratic debate. Were you planning on watching that?

TG: Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna watch it in a little bit. We got it recording so it’s all good.

MD: Very good, yes, I’m doing the same thing. Have you been following a lot of the election?

TG: Ah, yeah, to a certain extent, more than I normally do, actually. Yeah, I have.

MD: Why more than normally?

TG: Maybe just cos I’m home and my girlfriend’s very politically-minded and she’s kinda helping me open my eyes a lot into that world.

MD: I know you’re gonna be down here in a couple of weeks, is this your first time in New Zealand?

TG: Yep, first time in New Zealand, it’s our second time in Australia.

MD: Ah, very good. You should have a good time. I should warn you, while you’re here, you may want to bone up on your rugby knowledge. The Rugby World Cup is happening and the country is obsessed with the sport.

TG: Oh, yeah, yeah, I definitely…that would actually be good. I think we are all going to try to understand it a little more so when we get there we can actually follow along.

MD: It’s a pretty good game, actually. I highly recommend it. It’s interesting because I know that you and your keyboard player…your keyboard player’s left the band recently. I was curious as to what’s going on with that and how that’s going to affect the show that we’ll see when you come down to New Zealand?

TG: Well, before Duane joined our band, for like the touring band earlier this year, we were a quartet. We were just keys, one guitar, bass and drums. And then with Duane we became five, obviously, and now with Tay leaving we are just going to go back to being a quartet. I’m going to actually play keys and guitar. I love getting to play keys. I actually played a lot of keys on the first two records. I’m looking forward to switching off and going back and forth. Obviously, these aren’t ideal circumstances and it’s been an unfortunate situation to be dealing with, but we love Tay and we know everything is moving the way it’s supposed to so there’s no ill will, there’s no bad feelings, there’s no, like, fear for the future. And I think, you know, changing it up like this is going to force us to have some really fun, different kind of sets for this trip which I think is always good for any band…mix it up and force you to operate under different circumstances.

MD: A little out of your comfort zone, perhaps, but that’s not a bad thing necessarily. Now you’ve got a new video for the title track, for All Your Favorite Bands, which has all these different folks appearing in it and I was hoping you could tell folks here a little bit about how that came about and what, if any, input you had into the video.

TG: You know, it’s the kind of idea that when it was brought up it was still impossible to envision what it would look like because so much of it had to do with what our friends chose to do. Like, we said to our friends, “Hey, just do a video where you’re singing our song how ever you want to do it”. And people all said…some people just wanted to do a straight thing where they just sang the song to the camera and then some people got a little whacky with it. It ended up making it a really fun video. But it’s really cool because even when we were talking about director credits, it’s almost like these people directed themselves. They decided how they wanted to make this video possible so it’s really like we had this very vague, small idea and then all of our friends really turned it into something that we really love watching. And the cool thing about it is that it doesn’t feel like a list of famous folks. It doesn’t feel like a namedropper kind of experience. It feels more like this is the family we’ve cultivated over the last six years. We’re very lucky to have these friends and some people you might recognize and some people you won’t and that’s our world. I feel like it really represents us in a way that we’re really happy about.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I74C2hClAsA]
MD: And somebody, if I remember correctly, was playing a chicken in the video.

TG: Yeah, yeah, that’s Paul Springs. When he told me that he was going to do that, I didn’t understand what he meant and when I saw it I thought it was hilarious.

MD: It all becomes clear!

TG: Yeah, yeah. Some of the videos deserve to be played just all the way through. Some of them are just so funny that, “Oh, this just should be the whole video”, but we wanted to incorporate everybody. Maybe we’ll release them separately at some point.

MD: And I thought the song itself…it’s very anthemic and inspiring and all that….but I also thought it reminded me of early Rod Stewart, like Country Comfort and an early 70s vibe. Is that something that you’re familiar with?

TG: Yeah, I mean we love Rod Stewart. You know, we love all sorts of music. I mean, it’s always hard to know where certain influences are coming from, from what songs, and sometimes they’re so random, you know. Like I’ve been listening to a lot of Arctic Monkeys for one song and it ended up sounding nothing like them because none of our music’s ever sounded like them. Or listening to a lot of Willie Nelson for this one song and it turned into one of our fast, loud rockers. And I think that’s how it goes for a lot of songwriters where you get this idea in your head that’s inspired from something and it’s not always a piece of music but when you go back to how you got there it’s just…it’s so hard to understand that sort of thread, you know. And frankly, with All Your Favorite Bands, I’m not sure where it started. I know that it was the last song to be finished for the record but that lyric, “may all your favourite bands stay together”, was something I had before I wrote any of the other songs. I actually didn’t think I ever was going to finish it. I just kinda had it and I finished the chorus and I showed it to my brother and he was like, “you should actually finish this song”. So that’s when we kinda kicked it into gear and made sure it got done. It’s so old now, that germination of the idea is so old now that I don’t remember where it came from exactly.

MD: Its sounds like a great toast as well.

TG: Yeah, yeah, and that’s kind of how we wanted it to feel. We wanted it to be something that you could wish for someone in a lot of different circumstances. People ask me, “Is this a break up song?” It definitely is not. I like the idea that it could be applied to that situation but, you know, I also like the idea that it could be applied to someone graduating high school, or something like that.

MD: Did you have a favourite band who broke your heart when they split up?

TG: I’m actually pretty lucky; a lot of my favourite bands are still together. This artist isn’t a band but he also didn’t break up…but something that I think about that’s sort of related is I remember when Elliott Smith passed. I was at the right age where it really hit me on a deep level and I think that’s when I started to realize, kinda what the song was even about, where these musicians, these bands, these artists…it goes so far beyond, “Oh, now I’m not going to hear music from them anymore”. That’s all well and good but that’s such a small part of it. I think such a bigger part of it is that you create relationships with these artists, you know. They’ve spoken for you in a way that you couldn’t speak for yourself. And not only that, but you identify with them at a time when you didn’t necessarily feel like you had an identity. To be able to grow up and say, “I’m a Metallica fan”, that has so much to do with how you view yourself. That goes so far beyond, “That’s the music I like”. It’s really what represents you. And so for these artists, whether they break up or they pass on, it’s a part of you that goes with it. So that Elliott experience is the closest I ever had to that. That is even before just the…how unfortunate it was for such a talented person to pass on at such a young age.

MD: Yeah, yeah, I hear ya. I know what you mean. You said something interesting; you said you learned more about the song. Does that happen quite a bit with your songs as you live with them and perform them over and over again, you learn more about what the song is actually about?

TG: Umm, I guess so, I guess I always go back and forth between thinking, “This is fine, this is good, or this is bad”. And with All Your Favorite Bands it’s like even with that title there’s a part of me that’s like, “Oh, this is a little overt”, you know. But that ended up being what I liked about it. So yeah, sometimes it does take playing it for someone else, typically in the band, for them to be, “No, no, this is worth following through”, for me to really do so. Sometimes I just let it go.

MD: The album itself was recorded in Nashville, is that right?

TG: Yeah, it was at the studio owned by Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch. There wasn’t really any reason to do it in Nashville. It’s just that that’s the studio that our producer owns so we thought we should do it at his spot because he’s familiar with it, he knows how to manipulate it and get the best out of it.

MD: I was going to say, it doesn’t really have a Nashville feel, it has still more of an LA vibe to it. I’m curious why you decided to work with Dave Rawlings?

TG: Well we’ve known Dave for a long time and we’re a big fan of his work as a producer, as a musician, as a guitarist and songwriter. So, knowing him for a long time and admiring everything he’s produced we definitely had this feeling of, you know, it’d be really cool to…when we were thinking of who to do it with, in a conversation with him, he was like, “You know, I’d do it”. And the more we talked about it, he even admitted, “This is not a world that I’ve ever dabbled in.” He’s produced bands, but stuff like Old Crow Medicine Show. It’s much closer to what people know Dave for doing, that more traditional, acoustic instrument thing. And so for him to do a rock band that wanted to make a rock record…like he even said to me, “I feel like I’m confident in about 60% of the picture here, of how to do this”. And he said, “But I feel like that’s when I do my best work, when it’s not something that I know exactly how to do this”. So I think we both went into it kind of excited to roll the dice together and just figure it out along the way. And that’s kind of how it worked. And he’s such an incredible musician and a songwriter that we were able to have that language, you know, to be able to talk about guitar voicings and also talk about particulars of lyrics and like song structure that we both really understood, rather than coming from different worlds and just not knowing how to communicate. We really fell into that communication and respect and trust immediately.

MD: Speaking of guitar voicings and that, to me, when I was listening to a lot of it, it had a kind of jazzy feel, but in the way that say, the Allman Brothers inserted jazz into their Southern rock sound. Then I found out that you were touring with Duane Betts, so it kind of all made sense. Is that an important part of what you guys do?

TG: I have a real deep admiration for guys who can play jazz. I wouldn’t know the first thing how to do that but it was a record where we wanted to…we really wanted to keep arrangements and part writing at a minimum so that we can really respond to each other and react to each other on the floor. That’s kind of how the record went, you know. Like certain songs like To Be Completely Honest or Now That It’s Too Late Maria, it was like, “Ok, this is an instrumental section, let’s see what we end up doing”. There was no real clear idea as to what we would play each time and so there’s moments like that where it feels really free and really loose. I appreciate hearing you say that it had a jazzy feel because, yeah, there’s moments like that where it seems like the whole band is just in a zone and responding to each other. That’s when we’re at our best. I mean, I think that goes for any band. That’s a place where we haven’t gotten to that much on our previous records so we were excited that that was kind where we existed the whole time with this one.

MD: It’s interesting, you mentioned those two songs, To Be Completely Honest and Now That It’s Too Late Maria, because on my notes here they are combined together and I noted here that they kind of reminded me of Jackson Browne and Late For The Sky and all that stuff. It’s Too Late Maria is almost ten minutes long and it really gives the band a chance to stretch out and do their thing. It’s an amazing song as well, maybe you can tell me a little bit about that particular tune.

TG; Sure. Well that one was a real happy accident. We had this really fast, kind of shuffle version of it and it was probably about five minutes or something, I don’t know, but something like that I think. And then when we came in on the first day, when everything got miked up and it was time for us to pick up our instruments, Griffin just started playing that beat and I just started playing those chords and everyone fell in and I started singing Now That It’s Too Late, Maria. Then Dave poked his head in and kinda gave us a signal that it was sounding really cool and that we should keep going. We really thought, “Well, this isn’t the version, we’re going to do the actual version later”, so none of us really took it that seriously. We just kind of played it and sang it without thinking that anything was going to be kept. So I think that’s why we were so loose with it. That’s why there’s stuff that I’m doing on guitar that’s, it’s just really, I don’t know what you’d call it…its irreverent but just not concerned. And I think we all played that way. And when we were done, Dave was like, “I think you’re really going to like that”. And then we went back and listened and we really did. We were like, “Wow, think is actually one of our favourite things on the record and David said, “How long do you think it was”? And we said, “I don’t know, six minutes or something?” And he’s like, “No, it’s almost ten!” So we really had no idea that it was unfolding the way it was. So it kind of existed before we were able to acknowledge that it was going to be part of the record.

Listen to Now That It’s Too Late, Maria here:

MD: Does it change much live? Do you go in different places or did you stay true to what you put on the record?

TG: If anything it’s just longer.

MD: Excellent. I look forward to hearing that. To me, and I may be wrong, it sounds to me like there’s kind of an air of cynicism and darkness that runs throughout a lot of the lyrics in a lot of the songs, kind of like late-period Eagles…The Long Run…and Steely Dan. Is that something that is on your mind or that you were intent on infusing into the music?

TG: I think for me…I don’t really think too much about it but I do think that I find that the songs that I end up wanting to sing every night have some sort of cathartic value to them…for me as a singer, I don’t know if does for anybody listening to it. But I think for me to remind myself…you know, like a song like Things Happen which to me is just about how we can get so caught up in the pettiness of our day to day and these things that truly don’t matter…and like, “somebody said something to me but he didn’t say it in the right way:, or whatever it is, and I feel like that song is really about how to let go of that sort of thing. I would think that’s a fine thing for anybody to be reminded of. With singing Now That It’s Too Late, Maria and having it end, “Now that it’s too late Maria, there’s no one here to blame”, that’s something that I feel wraps up a romantic experience in a way that I feel helps me make sense of it all. But if it ended with that dark kind of, “Now that it’s too late Maria, you know, stay the fuck away from me”, then it would kind of like stay in that dark, unfortunate place and I probably wouldn’t ever sing it because it would just be gross. So I think a lot of our songs, while they might exist for a second in that dark thing that you’re talking about, or in that cynicism that you were talking about, I think overall they end up with some sort of suggestion at the end of it, you know, of, “How do I shift my perspective into not looking as bad as it is, or as it seems to?”

MD: Just finally, I notice that you have this playlist section on your website where fans are encouraged to contribute to build this Spotify playlist. I was wondering why you decided to do something like that and if there’s anything there that’s been a surprise to you…if you learned anything about your fans?

TG: Umm, if anything I was surprised at how consistent it was. You know we did it because like the title of the song, All Your Favorite Bands…it was kind of an idea from our manager, like, “What if we put together a list where people can make a list of all their favourite bands?” We’re like, “Ok, that sounds cool”. So looking at it and seeing all these artists who are friends and I feel like we’re coming from the same place musically, I was really psyched about it but I was also very surprised. I was like, “Wow, I thought there’d be more outliers. There’s a couple…like I saw Kanye in there, I love Kanye, so I was really happy to see it in there but I realized that he’s one of the most popular musicians, so of course he’s going to be in there. I didn’t see that much stuff that I was surprised by.

MD: No Metallica, or anything like that?

TG: Unfortunately not. I hope it gets there though.

 

 

Save