All Your Favorite Bands

With an early studio take from AYFB sessions

I don’t remember writing the chorus to this song. I only remember it existing without verses in my collection of demos. I figured it wasn’t good enough to finish and didn’t plan to work on it anymore as I was putting together material for our fourth record.

During this time we booked a tour of small venues California - towns like Santa Barbara, Visalia, San Luis Obispo, Pioneertown - and the plan was to only play new material. Dave Rawlings, who was already onboard to produce the record, joined us for the run. We figured that arranging these songs in front of a crowd, tweaking whatever felt needed from night to night, was the best way to discover how these songs worked best. We might’ve played one or two older tunes, but otherwise it was all half-baked unreleased material from what would become All Your Favorite Bands.

We traveled in SUVs, considering that this was a small tour that didn’t warrant (or pay for) booking a bus. One afternoon on a drive between towns, Dave was driving and I was riding shotgun playing him any crumbs of demos I still had lying around. When we got to this 30 second demo of a chorus for this idea called All Your Favorite Bands, I almost didn’t even play it for him. It felt silly and I didn’t have any ideas for how to finish the rest of the song. But he heard something in there immediately. Before I had a chance to dismiss it he said, “You have to finish this. This is going to be the most important song on the album.” Dave has always had an otherworldly sense of how a song is going to scan with listeners. I do not have that. The songs I’m always proudest of tend to be the chewiest and least accessible and the ones I think are potentially throwaways perform the best. Dave can do both at once. He recognizes strong writing and playing (because he’s one of the best writers and players out there) but never loses sight of how it will land with an audience. It’s pretty freaky to witness. That X Factor that we all talk about striving for - he’s attuned to it at all times.

Anyway, I had my marching orders despite feeling surprised and a little confused at his response. A few weeks later we were on another van run and I reached out to my old friend Jonny Fritz. I explained the situation - I had this chorus to a song I needed to write but I didn’t know how and needed his help. It was clear the song didn’t need much, but I needed a way to break it open. I sent him the demo and he wrote what became the second verse and I wrote what became the first verse. This was all via text in the back of a van. Voice memos and no guitars. I showed what I had to Dave and he said we did it. Nothing else was needed.

During the recording process, we did some of the more fully formed songs first. We put this one off only because we had no idea how we were gonna play it, or even how we were going to make a full track out of it. It was just two verses and two choruses clocking in at around 2 minutes. It still wasn’t quite finished, at least arrangement-wise. The other songs had the benefit of that California run to help us work out the kinks. This one was still chock full of them. By the time we got it, we set aside a full day to really figure it out. We tried all sorts of approaches for the arrangement. We tried it as a full band groover and we tried it as an acoustic ballad. Nothing was quite doing the trick. It felt like it was beating us. Finally we needed to call it a day but we were going to start fresh the next day along with a few of Dave’s Nashville friends in tow - Richard Bennett on acoustic guitar and Paul Franklin on pedal steel (Go listen to On The Night, the live album by Dire Straits and check out the mind melting pedal steel playing. That’s Paul). I was a big fan of both of these guys and it was an honor having them on the session. As they were getting settled it came time to show them the song we were about to record. Remember, this was after a full day of slugging it out and not getting anywhere. Anyway, to show them the bones of the song, Tay, our keyboardist at the time, sat down at the piano and just started playing. I was holding my tele which was turned up real loud and started playing and singing along with what Tay was doing. Dave, again, heard it before everyone else - “This is it! Just like this!” Even though we were just tossing it off, ostensibly just playing it for some guys to show them how it goes, it immediately felt like a definitive version. Even though it was a simple solution, the piano and electric guitar combo had a kind of Tonight’s The Night quality to it. All the sudden the song wasn’t too precious but also not too boisterous - a balance we couldn’t figure out how to strike up until that moment. The only other piece we needed to figure out was what to do after the second chorus. Someone suggested soloing over the chorus chords instead of the verse and that’s all we needed. Then a 3rd chorus with a tag and we were done. Along with Richard and Paul, we had Dave pick up an electric guitar and play with us as well. That’s him taking the second half of the guitar solo.

Since then it’s become the tune we end every show with and arguably our most covered song. It never burned up the radio charts or behaved as any sort of standard “hit,” but within this Dawes universe that’s exactly what it’s been for us and I’m deeply grateful for it.

Here’s a cover I was actually sent today by the Dartmouth Brovertones

And below the paid substackers will hear an early take from our first day of trying to figure this one out. Tay was on organ, I was playing wurli, and Dave was on electric guitar. You can hear that we were still deep in discovery mode. We were cooking but still weren’t quite there. Listening back to this early take now I feel like we sounded better than I remembered at the time, but still firmly believe we ended up with the best version. Hope you enjoy. Talk back soon.