Steve Dawson photo by Matthew Gilson
Steve Dawson Captures Emotion For Ghosts
On June 7th, 2024, Chicago-based singer/songwriter Steve Dawson released his latest album Ghosts via Pravda Records. Known for his role leading the Americana/Country band Dolly Varden, Dawson is very multi-genre in his approach to solo work, but also shows a predilection for storytelling based around emotional arcs. While the orchestration within his songs is often meticulously geared toward emotion, for this album, Dawson also focused on a live element, bringing in friends and collaborators to perform based on demos over a relatively short period of time. That, he feels, actually contributed to capturing the emotion he was looking for on Ghosts.
Some of the songs on Ghosts hail from a few years back when a surplus of songs meant his careful sequencing of album tracks paved the way for his next collection, whereas some are more recent and exist amid a greater awareness of death and loss. While some of that has been personal to Dawson, it’s also part of a tone of reflection on the album that audience may find very familiar to their own lives. I spoke with Steve Dawson about Ghosts, his greater awareness of loss these days, how he keeps his songwriting moving, and more.
Americana Highways: It seems like it’s been the norm for a number of years for you to have multiple projects, including releasing your solo work. Is that true?
Steve Dawson: Yes, that’s true. I think for the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, Dolly Varden was my only project. All the songs that I wrote and sang were for that band. Around 2004, Dolly Varden took a hiatus for various logistical reasons. Then I made my first solo record, called Sweet is the Anchor. That came out in 2005. That was the start of me playing with other musicians who I respected and admired in the Chicago community. And some of those same people are people who I’m still playing with now. Between 2005 and 2014, I was going back and forth between making solo records and making Dolly Varden records. It seems like now, I’m mostly focusing on my own records. It’s become harder for Dolly Varden to get together.
AH: It’s interesting how that event back when Dolly Varden was on hiatus actually got you thinking towards releasing your own music which has then been your companion through the years since then.
SD: That’s true.
AH: That’s very relatable for a lot of musicians right now because the pandemic did that. Some people had never done solo work before, but they made discoveries because of trying it.
SD: It’s interesting how peoples’ creativity adjusted to that odd situation. I think we’re still getting the aftermath of that in terms of the records and songs that people are releasing. I have heard some people say, “This is a pandemic song and I don’t want to sing it.” [Laughs] It talks about being isolated and they feel that people are over that.
AH: Obviously, there was an era where a lot of pandemic music was coming out, and then the gradual release of music that might have been created during that time, but what I’m seeing now a lot is, “These are the life events that happened to me during that period which I didn’t yet get a chance to talk about.” That’s turning up in songwriting. Is that true for you?
SD: The one thing is that my brother-in-law died of Covid in May of 2020, and the anniversary of that just passed. We’ll never be over that. He was just a lovely, lovely human. One of the songs on this record is directly related to that, “Sooner Than Expected.” That song will be on my mind forever, probably.
AH: I’m so sorry to hear that. It’s true that as long as human beings have been around, losing people too soon has always bothered us and remains with us. It’s like a story that remained unfinished.
SD: If someone has cancer and there’s a prolonged deterioration, I think there’s some level of getting used to the idea that this person is not going to be around anymore. It’s the suddenness and unexpectedness of it, too. I just figured my brother-in-law would always be around. There was no time to adjust. Recently, there’s also been a spate of people my age dying suddenly. Steve Albini just died. My friend Ingrid, who sings on the album, had a heart attack, and she was just gone, lights out. Maybe that just happens as you get older, but it seems extreme.
AH: It is scary. The frequency of heart attacks has really gone up among my friends and colleagues, too. Because of all this in your life, do you think that you’re now living in more of an awareness of death? It becomes more than theoretical that it could happen at any time.
SD: I do. I’ve always been maybe a little more obsessed with mortality than the average person in general. [Laughs] But I definitely feel the constraints of time and that time is limited.
AH: Is that ever a driving factor in making things for you?
SD: I wouldn’t say that it’s a driving factor for actually creating. Though, now, maybe for the next things, I don’t have time to wait around. In the past, I’ve thought, “I’ll make the next thing when I feel motivated and interested.” I can get a little lazy or patient with time. Whereas I’m now forcing myself to write more often since I don’t have unlimited time. I’m pushing myself a little more to be more productive, to take chances, try to travel, and just do things.” I don’t have unlimited time to wait around.
AH: For me, I don’t know that thinking about death makes me more creative, but it might push me to do the chore-like aspects of finishing things and releasing them to the world.
SD: Exactly. It’s so much. Most creative people are not the kind of people who enjoy self-promotion. It’s more like a necessary task in the modern situation. We’re doing social media and booking shows. A lot of promotion goes into creative works and it’s exhausting, but necessary.
AH: Were you aware of an over-arching idea behind this collection, or was it something that you had to give some thought to as the songs were coming about?
SD: The latter. I had some songs left over from the previous record and I wrote some new songs. As I looked at that grouping of 15 or 16 songs, I pulled out the songs that I felt worked together. That was more of a gut thing. I started investigating the common themes, but that was after I had recorded all of them. One of the songs was an upbeat, snarky, pop-rock song, and I felt it sounded really cool but it didn’t fit the other songs at all.
I was just talking with someone else about the album format as a really great way to put together a group of songs. I just really love albums and I always have. I love to conceptualize and listen from the first song to the last, and have it be an emotional journey with ups and downs. The ending is a resolution of sorts. I just love that. For me, ever since I was a teenager, all I’ve wanted to do is to make records. The whole idea of releasing singles, to me, doesn’t make sense. My brain does not work that way. I think about sequencing songs so they have a story-aspect and flow into each other. That’s a big part of the process for me.
AH: I love that and am glad to hear that. I think this album is coming out on vinyl, too. Is your thinking also about the two sides of the LP?
SD: Totally, like what’s the first song on Side A, and what’s the first song on Side B. That’s a big one. Then there’s the last song on Side A, that’s a tough one. I definitely look at old classic records and see how other people conceptualize starting and ending the sides. My previous record, I really wanted to make a double LP. I had all the songs, but it would have been very expensive. So some of the songs, four or five, which are on this record are newly recorded, but were slated for that last record.
AH: When you’re writing new songs, and making demos, is your wife, Diane Christiansen, your first audience for hearing them? You all make quite a team.
SD: Actually, we have a group of six people who have been getting together for almost five years. During the pandemic, we were doing it on Zoom. It’s a songwriting group. The only requirement is that you bring in something that you’re working on. It’s not so much a critique group as a deadline and a peer group of people we love and respect. A lot of the songs have been part of that, and Diane has been writing songs, too, that she plans to someday record. She would be hearing a lot of my songs for the first time within the context of that group of people.
AH: I’ve heard a lot of examples of the ways in which a group like that has helped people keep their writing moving forward, even during very difficult times.
SD: It’s good just to have a deadline, and accountability. I think, for me, that when Dolly Varden was playing and rehearsing regularly, at least once a week, I’d bring in new songs. I was writing them and presenting them to the band all the time. Then, that ended, and I kept writing songs, but at some point, around 2014, I kind of stopped writing. So with my friend Jenny Bienemann, a folk singer/songwriter, we dreamt up this group of writers.
AH: One thing we haven’t hit on is that for this album, things were less solitary than on your previous one. You specifically wanted to have other people involved in writing and recording after a fair amount of planning.
SD: Yes, absolutely. I had the songs, and I’d made acoustic demos, and I picked the musicians purposefully among people I’d always wanted to record with. They were people who I’d been playing live with for quite a while. That was a drummer named Gerald Dowd, a pedal steel player named Brian Wilkie, a bass player named John Abbey, who’s also a recording engineer, who has a studio named Kingsize, where I had recorded before. I adore him. Then there was Alton Smith who I’d played live with for years, but I’d never recorded with him. We did three sessions with the core band, where we did four songs each day, spread out over two weeks.
I’d sent them the demos, so they had a basic idea of the songs, but really, we just played. We all sat there in the big room in the studio, sitting in a circle, with everything miced up live. It was all bleeding into everything else, but John made it all sound good. We’d play, then talk about arrangements, then play again. But the third take, we usually had it. Sometimes there was a fourth take. I don’t think there was any more than that. The song “A Mile South of Town” was actually the first take. I said, “I think we got it.”
AH: Wow, that’s a very intense song, so that’s surprising to hear. But sometimes with really emotional songs, dealing with an emotional story, the first take does get it, and you don’t want to mess with what it captured.
SD: Exactly. It makes sense because you’re reacting in real-time. There’s no second thought. That’s kind of a goal in creativity, in general, not to second-guess and just act on instinct. If you can get that without someone making a major mistake, that’s the goal. That’s why we never blew past four takes of anything. We would just try to get the best early takes as possible.
AH: It’s funny that if someone looks at your collaborators on this project, they can also get a glimpse of all the side-projects that you’ve been on in totally different genres. You’ve really shown an interest in various sounds over the years.
SD: I feel that, in some ways, that’s a detriment. I love so much music and I want to try so many different things that I think it’s hard to pin down what I actually do. But it’s what I’m driven to do.
AH: The flipside of that is that it’s clearly created all these great relationships that you have, which you called on for this album.
SD: That’s true! I’ve worked with some staggeringly brilliant musicians, which I feel very fortunate to have been able to do.
Thanks so much for having this conversation with us, Steve Dawson! More information and details can be found here on his website: https://stevedawsonmusic.com/
Check out our review of the album here: REVIEW: Steve Dawson “Ghosts”
