Dawes – The Long Run (Taylor Goldsmith Interview)

If the phenomenon of “The Next Big Thing” remained in our age of Internet ephemera, Dawes would be the most likely candidate.
Acknowledged as the forerunners of “The Laurel Canyon Sound,” based on their debut album, North Hills, released in 2009, the buzz began to rise in 2011 when the former guitarist and songwriter for The Band, Robbie Robertson, tapped the quartet to act as his backing band for solo appearances.

Following on the heels of that ‘break,’ Dawes actually found themselves playing at Big Pink, the house in Woodstock New York where Bob Dylan and The Band held their famous get-togethers in 1967. Soon after, Jackson Browne gave props to the band in the pages of Rolling Stone and subsequently asked them to open a European tour for him.

In the midst of this flurry of good press, anticipation began to rise for the second album release in June, around which time Dawes also confirmed tours opening for acts as widely divergent as Alison Krause and Union Station, Bright Eyes and My Morning Jacket, this after being on the road for an extended period with Brett Dennen.

It was June 6, the day prior to the release of Nothing Is Wrong, that Doug Collette had a few moments for conversation with Taylor Goldsmith to discuss performing, recording and customizing equipment, this while the self-effacing lead singer, songwriter and guitarist for Dawes, was riding to a gig with the windows down in the vehicle to compensate for no air conditioning.
The dialogue gives more than a little insight into why this band should rise above its competition, if for no other reason than Dawes sounds like they are preparing for what their Los Angeles rock godfathers The Eagles termed “The Long Run.”

I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.  You must be very very busy these days.

Yeah, but it’s pretty exacting and totally worth it.

I’ll bet. I see you have a late night appearance for a vinyl release tonight?

Yeah, over in St. Louis where we’re headed right now.

I wanted to tell you how impressed I was with a show of yours I saw in Vermont at the end of May. I had some pretty high expectations, because I’d been listening to your new album a lot, and you actually exceeded the expectations by the time I left the venue.

Well, thanks man, that means a lot.

I had to think, though you said some very kind words about Brett Dennen,he must feel kind of intimidated at the prospect of following you guys on stage at night sometimes.

I feel like even if it’s the greatest band in the world opening for an artist, even if they’re a fraction as good as Dennen is, nothing is going to satisfy the audience unless it’s that one artist. I feel like no matter how well we play—and when we play really well we win over a lot of people (and that’s the idea!)– I think when someone goes for a Brett Dennen song, no matter how good a job we do, they’re still gonna need their Brett Dennen song.

You’re absolutely right. I was talking you guys up after you finished playing and the people sitting next to me said they were pretty impressed with you. I told them I came just to see Dawes and I was on my way out and they responded “No No Brett’s great!”
I’m looking forward to seeing you guys another time. You’re doing a lot of different dates with a lot of different artists over the next few months. You’re going to come in contact with a lot of different audiences during that time.

We actually played with My Morning Jacket yesterday at Mountain Jam (festival) and they actually watched some of our songs, so that was pretty awesome: it was honor for them to take some time to watch us. A lot of these artists (Alison Krause, Bright Eyes) are very different and there’s fear their audiences are too specific. Like, if Alison Krause fans want to hear bluegrass music and that’s all they want to hear, they might not enjoy Dawes. But we’re hoping that these are the kind of audiences and these are the kind of artists that drew new music fans that are open to a lot of different sounds and that are willing to listen to something that’s not necessarily their own headliner that they’re looking forward to seeing.

I mean, I love Bright Eyes and I feel Conor Oberst is one of the most incredible songwriters writing and I think that anybody who’s into how good he is, that they’re also the kind of person who will take some time to consider something else that someone might like.

I’d be surprised if Bright Eyes fans didn’t really get something out of listening to you. The night that I saw you in Vermont (at Higher Ground), I smiled as much at some of the lyrics you sang as the guitar solos you played. I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you write songs. I know this is kind of a trite question, but you’ve piqued my curiosity about whether you have the melody and the words come simultaneously or whether you have notebooks of words you draw on to match with melodies.Ordo you write everything fresh as it comes in a moment of inspiration?

I have, at any given time, two or three musical ideas on reserve, so to speak, so when a lyric or idea or title comes up, I can see what fits best or most easily in musical terms. Then I will follow it through that way.

That leads me into another subject I wanted to cover: how you recorded the new album Nothing Is Wrong. Did you have the material all-prepared when you went into the studio with Jonathan Wilson?

More or less. We were very lucky. I don’t know if a lot of bands do this, but we decided to play our new material as much as we could when we were doing the cycle for North Hills, our first album. We weren’t overdoing it, more like if we were doing an eight-song set, we’d do five songs from Hills and do three new ones and constantly rotate the new ones out. When we were doing headlining sets, we’d just play as much as we could. We would definitely represent our first album, and give the peopled that were familiar with the band what they came to see, but we all familiarized everyone, to a certain extent, with some of the new songs. So when we went in to record the new album, we’d been playing some of those songs for over a year, so their arrangements were very firm and very easy for us

I’d be interested to know how long it took you to complete the album. I presume you played the songs live,rather than punch a lot of it in, but did you do a lot of takes? Listening to the album it sounds like you’ve captured each one of those songs right at its peak, when you’re just realizing how good the song can be.

(Laughs) Well thanks! We definitely took a whole month to record the album.We tracked the whole album in about seven to ten days, then we started overdubbing which pretty much consisted of everything we couldn’t do as just the four of us, like adding a second guitar. And sometimes adding a first guitar, because sometimes on a song like “So Well,” our producer Jonathan (Wilson) wanted as much control as we could get over that acoustic guitar tone. So rather than keep the one that we had going on with the bass and drums, we would just re-cut it playing along. A lot of things we cut live, like the rhythm guitar and lead vocal on “Coming Back to A Man” was cut live with Griffin (Goldsmith, Dawes drummer) and Wylie (Gelber, Dawes bassist), same for “Time Spent in Los Angeles,” that was all live, a lot of “Fire Away” was live. Then when it came to organ and background vocals, the second guitar—that’s what we do with overdubbing. We had a lot more songs than we did with North Hills, or maybe not a lot, but fifteen or sixteen tracks. We spent a lot of time getting the sounds we really wanted. Because with North Hills, we only recorded for about two weeks, so for this album we took twice as long. But I guess for an album these days is still a pretty short time to make an album.

Well, considering how long some people can take to record an album, that is a pretty brief time span. You recorded both of these albums with Jonathan Wilson: does it make it simpler for him that, as a musician himself, he can give you the ideas he’s thinking about? Or did he not have all that much input into what goes down on the tape?

He is definitely the guy in control who, in my opinion, makes it sound so good. The tones, the amp choices, the guitar choices, the mixing, getting the drums sounding the way they do—he’s really really good at all that.

And he’s really good at knowing if something is achieving what the band wants it to. I feel it’s very common for a producer to want to put their own stamp on something, but with Jonathan he’sable to understand bands on their terms. He’s equally a Grateful Dead fan and a Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers fan, so while those are very much opposite types of bands, he loves both them because they’re achieving what they want to achieve. It’s not like he says “you ought to write this lyric like this” or “you should play this kind of guitar,” it’s more like “Does it sound like what you want it to be?” If he wants to change or correct something, it’s always for the sake of our vision, staying in line with what we want. I couldn’t imagine a better relationship with a producer.

That kind of insight into your material is what I was thinking about when I asked that question. And being both a Grateful Dead and Tom Petty fan myself, I understand where he’s coming from and where he’s going.I was reading about his studio earlier this afternoon before we got on the phone: it sounds like a really sweet place to record.

It’s amazing—really amazing. Even some of the big big producer guys have been renting out his place because it’s so cool. When it comes to recording with two inch tape, while some people might think it’s only for pretension or nostalgia’s sake, it really creates a great environment to make a record, You’re not staring at a computer screen, you’re listening with your ears and that in itself is already a big deal. Then it’s also noteasy to edit so, we would be forced to achieve a good performance and really do a good job. If you tell a drummer or guitarist bass player or anybody, “you need to get this whole take right!” you’re going to get a much deeper performance out of them than if you told that person “Do the best you can and if it’s not totally great, we’ll edit it.”

Wyiie the bass player and I go back about seven years, maybe eight: we were in a band together before Dawes. Then Griffin, my brother, was always involved in our musical efforts before Dawes: he was always so good at drums, we knew eventually that’s who he’d play with; our original drummer was in his forties—he was a great guy—but it just made the most sense we would play with Griffin. Then we met Tay (Straithorn, Dawes keyboardist) when we started the band about four years ago. We know each other pretty well musically.

You really radiated a lot of stage presence as the concert went on too and at the end of it, you all really got caught up in the music: there was more theater to the show, natural theatre to be sure, than I would’ve expected. It made me wonder if you discuss at all how you present yourselves on stage or if you’re just not conscious of it at all and just let whatever happens happen?

Well,after seeing the pictures of the ridiculous guitar faces I make, I would definitely change it if I could would. I look like such a weirdo. I definitely try to stay conscious of that: sometimes I just try to play guitar and definitely not make weird cringy faces, but sometimes I can’t help it. We definitely don’t discuss that sort of thing. We don’t  change our clothes before we go onstage. We feel like that takes care of itself because we feel our music…some artists resonate with people because they are larger than life because they do seem to fantastic to be true—Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeroes or David Bowie—they have quality of “Wow I can’t imagine that really existing.” It’s so attractive. But with us,and lots of music that we love, it relies more on the fact we’re not trying to make it anything we’re not. What we are is a bunch of normal guys who want to play music, so we don’t try to ham it up or come off any differently than we are.

That’s what I find one of the great attractions of listening to Dawes: you sound very natural. The influences are sometimes pretty obvious, but it doesn’t sound like you’re just copping from somebody else to get an idea, it just sounds like you’ve absorbed a lot of influences and are just starting to process them in a pretty stylish way.

I was at the show a little early and talking to one of the guys who works at the club and I asked him if he’d heard the soundcheck; he remarked on your custom equipment you have. I saw an interview with Wylie where he talked about working on your equipment—do you make a habit of doing that?

No, but we definitely are gear heads and we can definitely geek out on that. We hear about Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers or The Who and they have these stacks of amps and so much cool gear: that is cool to us.

We definitely take it a step further than most bands and bring an eighty-eight piano and a Hammond organ with a Leslie speaker. We really felt like that’s how it needed to be for what we wanted to achieve. Wylie built our cords and he build my pedal board and booster and my strap was made by my good buddy Johnny Corndog. It’s always fun to have specific stuff to you that no one else can get their hands on, not because you don’t want anyone else to own it, but just because it helps to define yourself as a musician. I use this amp that’s a boutique amp made by this small company that was bummed because Vox stopped hand-wiring their amps. So they modeled their amps on the Vox AC30, but they’re not Vox. And it sounds great but it doesn’t cost me five thousand dollars because I have to pay for an amp from 1965.  I get to buy something new and something that isn’t really common. It’s my own kind of amp.

I’d have to say, remembering how good you sounded that night– and sometimes the opening act doesn’t get much of a chance for a sound check or doesn’t care whether they sound that good– I’d have to say the clarity of sound you guys maintained throughout the set really represented the music well. Whatever interest you take in your equipment, it’s really paying off for the audience.

Thank you