The Game (Oh Brother Master recording)
One week early
First of all - sorry it’s been about 2 weeks since my last post. My wife gave birth to our daughter Lou (Louise) Everett Goldsmith and I’ve been trying to soak in the family time.
But yes! We have one week until the release of Oh Brother and we wanted to find a special way to celebrate with our Substack family. So I decided (kind of last minute) to share one more album cut with all of you. It’s called The Game. In 7 days everyone is gonna be able to hear it but you get it now…
The deepest of Dawes fans are probably already familiar with it as a folksy tune we’ve played a lot in the acoustic segments of our shows.
For the recording we wanted to find a way to take its simple progression and structure, keep the song as the focus, but make sure the arrangement went beyond the typical approach. If we had given it a train beat, then it would just be the train beat song. We wanted it to be more than that. Once Griff found that groove featuring that brush swipe and the cymbal swell and I started playing that guitar part, everything else fell into place. Then it was just a matter of building the tension throughout all 4 verses and a bridge. For me, it might be the song that best embodies the sonic personality of this record.
As Kris Kristofferson might’ve put it: “I started writing this song about Ani Difranco, ended up writing about Phoebe Bridgers and Brittany Howard, Madison Cunningham and Brandi Carlile, Lucius and Mandy Moore…Joni Mitchell had a lot to do with it.” (If you don’t know what I’m referring to, go check out his song The Pilgrim)
Hope you enjoy.