PicoBlog

We’re on the last stretch. 3 more California shows then home. It’s been such a blast. My favorite part each night is looking out in the audience and trying to guess who is here just for Lucius or just for Dawes and watch them get introduced in real time to a bunch of music they didn’t know they would like. A lot of converts on a tour like this.

Anyway, I thought I’d take the opportunity to dig up a few more questions from our Q&A chat.

1 - How did growing up with a father that was a professional musician influence you? Was that what you two always wanted to do? (From Chris Snyder)

Our dad had to be our biggest influence in the broadest sense of the term. He literally introduced us to music. All of the music. He’s who played us the Beatles records in order. He’s who decided when we’d be ready for the Stones. And he’s who told us when some of the contemporary music we bringing home had the goods or not (Weezer? Green Day? Sure. Fuel? Collective Soul? No.) Our first arbiter of taste. And he was typically right. The bands he told us to not bother with were gone pretty quick, and the ones in which he heard something authentic are still around.

His first love was R&B and he instilled that in us as well real early on. What Dylan is to most of the songwriters I know, James Brown was for him. Along with Otis, Aretha, Al Green, The Four Tops, The Temptations, etc. It was the perfect foundational education for us to jump off from. Between listening to these records and then sitting in with our dad’s bands playing this kind of music, it forced us to learn how to think on our feet, to react to a moment, to hear the changes rather than have them written out for us. That didn’t seem like the norm for other up and comers we knew. I feel like most of my peers were learning music in the studio, able to take their time to learn a song, and arrange with unique parts. At the risk of oversimplifying , I think of it as the Beatles model. Whereas the stories of Motown and Stax churning out several records a day seemed to put an emphasis on playing live. Between this and my eventual discovery of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, that live, reactive component of playing became a huge part of who Griffin and I are as musicians. For better or worse. I frankly wish I was more of a studio rat than I am, and maybe that chapter still awaits, but I’ve always felt more myself on a stage than in a studio.

Another major factor our Dad instilled was a work ethic. He really pounded into us this idea that shows DO NOT get cancelled. You go out there and dig up whatever you can and you get it done. I imagine that’s the philosophy for most touring professionals at this point, so I’ll use a quick anecdote to help illustrate our dad’s added intensity on the subject.

I remember one of our earliest shows as Dawes was at this little tiny venue called Tangier. We had a residency there at the time, and if I’m not mistaken, it was just a trio show - me, Wylie and Griffin. So it was relatively stripped down. Opening the set was a good friend of mine, Michael. I’m gonna leave out his last name in case he doesn’t love the idea of this story getting repeated. His set was just electric guitar and vocal. Our gear was set up behind him but no one was playing it. At some point in the middle of his show he got shocked so bad from his microphone that it sent him back into Griffin’s drums behind him which he bounced off of and onto the ground holding his guitar. His guitar neck snapped and he didn’t get up initially. We realized quickly he wasn’t doing well and someone called an ambulance. Once the paramedics arrived I have this memory of them asking his name and he just said they’d have to look through his wallet to figure it out. THAT’S HOW BAD HE GOT SHOCKED! I guess the venue had some seriously faulty electricity. He came around quick and he’s doing great all these years later, for anyone concerned. Anyway, in the midst of all this my dad took me aside and said, “You’re still doing this show!” And I have no doubt his heart was in the right place - taking the opportunity to remind his son that professionals fulfill their obligations, no matter what hurdles come in their way. It’s not like he thought it was gonna be our big break or something. There was like 12 people there which included him and our mom. We didn’t end up doing our set because the venue was shutting the night down (and I’m fairly certain we wouldn’t have done it anyway), but I love that memory as an example of his respect for and dedication to the craft.

And to answer the second part of your question: yes, this is what we always wanted to do. Never really thought about anything else.

2 - As a vocalist, you've got some serious pipes.  You always do a good job staying within your large range, but are also often letting it rip on stage.  How do you approach both vocal longevity and any changes to your singing range that slowly start to work their way in with age? (From Alex Docta)

Well first of all, thanks for the compliment. It’s sweet of you to say. I have a strange relationship with my voice, or just singing in general. When I hear an amazing singer - a Chris Stapleton, Whitney Houston, or Freddie Mercury etc. - I react like anyone else does and I marvel at it. It’s definitely a thing of beauty and pleasing to listen to. But it feels distinctly separate from the quality of the song. It’s never helped sell a song or make it any better, which I know is obvious but it’s still a distinction worth making in my

opinion. I remember this David Byrne quote from Stop Making Sense - “The better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.” To a certain extent, that rings true for me and my relationship to songs. It’s almost as if “good singing” can often feel like some version of curation; some kind of added filter a singer’s essence is being put through and therefore potentially obscured. Not always, but often. When I do inventory on all my favorite singers, it turns out that very few of them are “good” singers. There’s much more personality in their performances than skill or range. Maybe it’s an overcompensation for that lack of ability. But for my tastes, it works. I feel and hear every word of a Lou Reed song despite his seemingly 3 note range and consistent pitchiness. When John Lennon shreds his vocal cords in ways that have got to be bad for his throat, I lean in a little bit more. All this to say, I’m more a fan of vocalists than “singers,” if that makes any sense.

Which brings me back to my complicated relationship with my own voice. I always felt like it lacked the swagger of a Zevon, or the desperation of an Otis. But one thing I feel confident in is that it’s what comes out naturally. It’s not affected, at least as far as I can tell. It’s me. And I appreciate what I can do with it for the sake of putting on a show. You know…those Free Fallin’ notes you either have or you don’t 😉 (not that we ever do Free Fallin’, but you get my point). But I admittedly take that part of it for granted. Which bleeds into not taking care of it as well as I could or should. I read in Born To Run that The Boss has never warmed up in his life. And if he’s still out there at 75 hitting those Backstreets notes in the middle of 4 hour shows, then we must all be unique snowflakes with different sets of needs. I currently do not have a regimen for warming up or for general maintenance. I’m certain there are several paths and programs out there that could only be helpful, but I’m also confident that, at least for me, the bulk of my vocal trouble comes from my brain rather than my instrument, and if I can keep a good head and not stress about losing my voice, the likelihood of me getting visited by any problems is much much lower.

In conclusion:

After rereading the bulk of this answer, I feel like it’s worth clarifying - I’m not saying it’s uncool to be good at singing. There are a lot of amazing singers that I LOVE - Joni, Freddie, Brittany Howard, Bono among so many others - but it’s not because they’re voices are amazing. I just believe them so deeply…along with all the truth tellers with voices that are less than beautiful. Hopefully that makes a little bit of sense.

3 - I’m drawn to Most People--love the lyric, love the guitar part, the vocal melody....all of it. Now hearing the early demo from the reissue...would love to hear the story of the song. Where the inspiration came from and how it evolved production-wise. (From Wilsbach)

When I started Most People, I was very deep in my Joni discovery period. Like everyone else, I was born with her hits imprinted on my brain, so I’m talking more about discovering Hejira, Hissing of Summer Lawns and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter for the first time. A massive moment for me. So all of those eruptions of harmonics on guitar and bass from Joni and Jaco throughout Hejira made me want to figure out a way to do that in a Dawes song. That combined with the groove of Coyote was how I heard the riff in my head. I’m happy to say that it didn’t sound like a Joni rip AT ALL once we found a groove for it as a band. But initially I was trying to be as Joni as I possibly could. I heard her subdivisions, I heard congas, and I definitely didn’t hear what it ended up becoming. And that is one of the most exciting part about being collaborative. Every time Griffin takes something I had into a direction I didn’t hear it going, it always gets better. It becomes more than anything I could have anticipated, not less. It’s never a compromise. So now I try to have as few designs for a song as possible so I can always be surprised.

Lyrically, I had been sitting on this idea for a chorus with no idea how to frame it; no idea how to write the verses. It felt like a pretty straight forward country song type chorus. But I knew we would play it in a way that would take it out of the country world real quick. It felt like words I might hear on Phases and Stages. When I played the song for the person I wrote it about (who was just a friend - I liked that the song didn’t have to have romantic implications, depending on the interpretation), she said it was a little too wordy. I appreciated her honesty, but I’m glad I didn’t take it to heart. I’m quite proud of where the verse lyrics to this song landed. I think I’ve talked about this before, but when I wrote this whole album I was on a fairly strict diet of only reading Joan Didion. And her influence and worldview feel more pronounced on these verses of Most People than maybe anywhere else on the record.

The outro got added because we knew at this point in our career that the songs with the outros were often the most fun to play live and we kinda only had two of them at that point - Fire Away and Peace In The Valley. This one felt like it could handle another section so that’s when we started playing around with the idea. What we ended up with is slightly different from the demo because the demo was just a place holder. I knew a section like that needed to be figured out as a band. I remember we came up with what ended up making the record at soundcheck in Burlington, VT at the venue Higher Ground. So thanks for that, HG!

For the paying subscribers - I’m gonna add the Most People demo that can be heard on the recent vinyl rerelease, for all of you folks that haven’t gotten to hear it yet. Just so you know what you’re missing. 😉

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