PicoBlog

I wrote Time Spent in Los Angeles (TSLA for the rest of this post) when I was in Nashville writing for the Middle Brother album. It was 2010. John had invited me to make some kind of duo album with him and I showed up with a few songs already written - Wilderness and Blood and Guts, to be specific - and I looked forward to writing a few more before we started recording. We were only in town for two weeks. One week to write the album and one week to record it. So we had a lot of work to do.

John and I kept opposite schedules. I wrote in the morning and very slowly. He wrote in the evening and very fast. So fast that I couldn’t keep up. I remember watching him write Me, Me, Me right in front of me and I barely had my head wrapped around the chord progression before he was fully done. I don’t think I contributed one line to that one. My memory is of him having stood the entire time. One song that was uniquely collaborative in the writing of it was Middle Brother (the song). Jonny Fritz and John and I hashed it out around the dining room table. It’s a funny song and they’re both inherently funnier than I am so I was responsible for some of the simpler statements like “I’m gonna learn to fly an airplane” (see? Not a funny line). But other than that song, insofar as writing is concerned, who you hear singing a song is more or less who wrote it.

The songs I wrote alone in those mornings were Thanks For Nothing, Million Dollar Bill, and TSLA. Which was a big deal for me because in those days I was lucky to get about a song a month, so 3 in a week felt miraculous. I’d write til mid afternoon, John would come around and write something great within minutes and then we’d go out to a bar or find something to eat. We spent a lot of our time that first week with Jonny Fritz and Kevin Hayes, two future best friends I was just getting to know at the time.

It wasn’t until we started recording that Matt Vasquez arrived. We didn’t pivot into thinking we’d be better as a trio until after we had already arrived in town. So by the time we convinced Matt to join the party and getting his travel figured out, our week of writing was over. But he showed up with his tunes ready to go. That’s the day Griff arrived as well (That’s him playing drums on the whole album).

Once we were in recording mode there weren’t really any nights out after that. We were in the studio all day and all night. We worked hard and fast and I feel like that’s reflected in the record. Arrangements are sparse but we got a lot of mileage out of each performance. Vocals were typically live with the tracking, which isn’t too surprising with this bunch, I guess. We’d all swap electric guitars, acoustic guitars, keyboards and basses depending on what the song needed. All of our personalities as lead guitarists are pretty well-represented throughout the tunes. Arrangements and recording is where the bulk of the collaboration happened. No one said ‘no’ to anyone else. We all followed each other’s lead. We jumped at the chance at being as supportive to one another as we possibly could. Sometimes collaborative records like this can make the artists involved sound a little more watered down than they do on their own. I’m biased, but this felt like the opposite. It really brought the best out of us. We each framed the next guy’s strengths enough to where the finished product was greater than the sum of its parts. That’s my opinion of it, at least.

When we were getting toward the end of mixing, our (Dawes’s) agent came out to listen to what we were doing. He really loved what he was hearing but once he heard TSLA, I remember him getting a little more serious. Once we were done listening and he and I got a moment alone he said, “you can’t put that on this record. It’s a hit! And if it’s a Middle Brother song it’s not gonna get the same shot as it would if it was a Dawes song.” We all knew we were only going to tour the Middle Brother album one time and that would probably be it, so I understood his reasoning. As a Dawes song, it was more likely to be a mainstay in setlists for a lot longer. He wasn’t dismissing how special Middle Brother could be (and already was to us), he was just trying to be mindful of the long game.

And I think he was right! Even though it wasn’t a “hit” in the general sense, TSLA, as a Dawes song, kicked off our second record, got its own music video, and was our first song that did pretty well at radio. Maybe it would’ve had a similar life had it stayed on the Mid Bro album, but we’ll never know at this point. All we do know is the MB record came out just fine and TSLA felt like an essential moment in the growth of our own band. I was terrified to ask John and Matt if I could pull it from Middle Brother, but when I did they couldn’t have been more understanding.

But the version we recorded felt great and no one’s ever heard it before now! So, for all you paid subscribers, here it is beneath the paywall! The first version of Time Spent in Los Angeles ever recorded. You’ll be able to recognize Matt and John in the BGVs and John is playing all the lead guitar. It’s a nice little document of the discovery of a song, even though it wasn’t meant to stop here.

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