STILL STRANGERS SOMETIMES (NEW SONG DEMO)
Another one from the upcoming record
The path this song took into existence is a bit different than usual for me. It was written for a good friend’s TV show that’s being developed (sounds douchey, I know, but a pretty commonplace occurence here in LA) about the trials and tribulations of a fictional songwriter. I’m not gonna get more specific than that out of respect for the show they’re still putting together. Suffice it to say, plot points aside, the character developed in a direction where who he was didn’t really sync up with this song anymore. So I told my friend running the project that I’d work on more tunes once we had a more solid sense of what the song should be. In the meantime, this song was just sitting there and I was pretty happy with it. Then a funny thing happened - I saw that it was much more autobiographical than I initially realized. Exaggerated for dramatic purposes (as most songs based at all on reality usually are) but true to my experience at this moment in life. So I decided it would hereby be a Dawes song.
I guess I was really opening my eyes to a certain level of separateness or inferiority that a person can’t ever shake no matter how much they love or are loved. It’s an observation that would have made sense if explained to me but I had never experienced it myself. For the avoidance of doubt - I am deeply in love with my wife and have never felt so seen by anyone and have never felt such an intimate understanding of someone else. And I feel confident she feels the same (Hi, Mandy! Hope you’re liking this week’s post so far). But there will always be something of a gap between the TG she knows and loves and the incommunicable corners of my sense of self that help me navigate my way through life. I don’t know if I’m saying that well but I bet you can relate, dear reader. The dynamic doesn’t have to be romantic. It can be just as true between siblings or a child and a parent. Just drilling down on everything implied within the cliché “you think you know someone.”
After the last few records featuring a lot of narrative songs (I’m thinking St. Aug or For No Good Reason as examples), conceptual songs that aren’t directly about me necessarily (Didn’t Fix Me or Someone Else’s Cafe), and broader songs that feature more of a general observation of life (Comes In Waves or Me Especially), it feels really nice to tap into a romantic vein. It’s there to some degree on every record, to be sure, but maybe not as relentless as it was on earlier records. So when songs like this show up now, I’m grateful to them. This song feels like the guy that wrote Time Spent In Los Angeles giving you an update about his perceptions of love and marriage as he (very quickly) approaches 40. Ok, I’m getting a little carried away…here it is for all you paid subscribers…behold…
The demo for Still Strangers Sometimes