Christmas in LA
And a Brief Digression About Simon Dawes
Sorry for taking an extra second between posts. We spent all week preparing for our Dawes and friends Christmas in LA show at the Bellwether and things have just started to calm down. I’ve never tried to set up any kind of holiday show so I didn’t know how it would go, but it ended up being such a joy. Our guests included Sam Nelson from XAmbassadors, Mike Viola, my wife Mandy, Matt Koma from Winnetka Bowling League, Madison Cunningham, Jim James and Bo Koster from My Morning Jacket and Blake Mills along with our old band mates (which included Wylie) in Simon Dawes, so we had ourselves a mini reunion of sorts.
The last show we ever played as Simon Dawes was in 2007 and we didn’t quite realize it was the last show at the time. We were really young and completely unequipped with any tools that could help us weather a bad patch of our complicated relationships so instead we just quit abruptly. At the time I was 22 and terrified. I figured that was my one chance at making music work so I might as well pack it up. But even while nursing that fear in my head I never seemed to slow down. It wasn’t a conscious decision so I don’t want to take credit for it. I just seemed to continue to put one foot in front of the other. If I had to guess I’d say it was mostly due to a lack of knowing how to do anything else. I think I even played my first acoustic show in LA within days of the final Simon Dawes tour ending. That show featured early versions of tunes like If You Let Me Be Your Anchor, Peace In The Valley, Blood and Guts and All My Failures.
Griffin and Wylie jumped onboard this new project immediately so I knew I didn’t want to name it after myself but I couldn’t think of much else. Finally, out of fear of losing any (more like zero) momentum generated by our time as Simon Dawes, I decided to hold onto the back half of the name. Simon was Blake’s first name until his parents decided he was more of a Blake and Dawes was my grandfather’s first name and my first middle name before I had to change it (long boring story) so it felt like MY half. And hilarity ensued.
(A digression within a digression - Dawes has actually served as a pretty awful band name if we’re being honest. Beyond all the mishearings and misspellings, everyone in the UK always thought we were saying “doors,” everyone in Scandinavia would pronounce is Dahves, and in Spain it was Dah-Wes. No one has had a firm grip on it, including ourselves.)
Anyway - jumping back to December 9th. It was surreal playing those songs again with Blake, Wylie and our drummer Stuart Johnson. I immediately felt 17 again with all the requisite intoxication, trepidation, spit and vinegar that the band was originally imbued with for us. I don’t know how it felt for everyone else watching us revisit this material but it was a real time machine for us and I’m so grateful that opportunity was afforded to us.
All the other guests were incredible. No exceptions. They all brought their own flavor to the party and it seems like our ever-open-hearted Dawes family in the audience was invested from beginning to end. We posted a small clip of some of the festivities on IG but wanted to give you the full song here beyond the paywall. Thank you to whoever was able to make it to the show and make it such a fun night for us. I meant what I said - I’d love for it to become a yearly tradition for all of us.