The Secret Life of LP9 part 4
Surprise! gets finished
Sometimes I wonder if Dawes was a little bit easier to pigeonhole, a little more aligned with one specific genre, a little easier to describe - would we be a much bigger band? All of my gratitude and awareness of all that we have accomplished notwithstanding, it’s a fairly raw admission to even share the question with you, I guess. But it’s not one that bothers me. I’m very contented with our (or any artist’s) evolving identity and beyond that, none of what happens is up to me anyway. I’m bringing it up because I’m curious and I’m fascinated by what resonates on a massive scale and why. I don’t know why The War On Drugs or Phoebe Bridgers feel generational (and not for the same reasons), they just do. Something that inspires so many other artist’s in their wake to sound a little more like them, and all of the sudden you have a “sound” for the next 5-10 years that you hear everywhere. It’s incredible.
And along with these generational moments, as we all know, the folksy aesthetic has been alive and well over last decade or so. That’s great news for us not only because it’s a major component to our own songs, but it’s also often music that we love. And yet, as a writer, I feel like I can never submit to it completely. There are certain rules to fitting into the Folk/Americana box that have never felt natural to us, for better or worse. When I finish the first draft of a song like “Surprise!” (which you can listen to in the last post in this series about LP 9) and it has all the folksy trappings and feels easy enough to record accordingly, there’s something inside both Griffin and I that holds us back. Maybe it’s just plain old self-sabotage, but I don’t think so. Maybe it’s the creative voice in our hive mind saying it needs to be a little bit more representative of us as individuals. I’m not saying anyone making true Folk music these days isn’t abiding by the same principle. I’m sure they are. We all have our own little quirks that help us get over our own interpretation of the finish line. This is one of ours.
So I took the words and the cadence and I set about making some music that helped it set itself apart from my other songs. Something where if you hear the first 10 seconds you might think “oh, it’s that song.” I’m not saying I achieved that, but that is the aim. So I came up with a riff that the song could keep returning to; something that grounds it and also matches the mood of the lyric. And then I came up with chords that (hopefully) create a richer path for the tension and release within the melody and progression. I also added more space between each line. The previous version had all the lines bumping up next to each other so it was a bit of a relentless stream of information. If you missed something, it kept right on without waiting for you. This newer version let you chew on them for a second before they moved on to the next one.
The song might have less classic hat tip moments to folk songs, but it’s still very much of a folk song. Now it just feels more distinctly Dawes. Whatever that means. It just reached this moment of recognition - “It’s done now. I can stop.”
For the paid subscribers, here’s the final demo of this one. The version recorded after this was the final album cut, which I can’t wait for you to hear. Griffin and Trevor really outdid themselves. Griff even said at one point that it’s his “favorite thing we’ve ever made.”
Thanks for being curious enough about this song to get this far. Next time we talk about the new album it’ll be featuring a different new song. Not sure how yet but I’ll figure something out!