“I remember, back in 2017 when we were recording our album Passwords, jazz was finally making sense to me,” reveals Dawes vocalist/guitarist Taylor Goldsmith. “It’s not that I ever disliked it, I just felt like it was hard for me to really engage and use my musician brain to unpack it. I had to learn how not to engage with my musician brain. All of a sudden, I was getting really obsessed, and as we were driving to the studio, I was listening to a lot of Wayne Shorter. I just couldn’t stop listening to Speak No Evil. Every day, I’d get there and ask the guys new questions. Passwords doesn’t sound anything like that but getting into that album kind of opened me up.”

Though the band’s subsequent record, 2020’s Good Luck with Whatever, didn’t draw on this newfound musical interest—which had led Goldsmith to Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and an extended constellation of ‘60s and ‘70s jazz artists—the Dawes frontman acknowledges, “I think that was cooking in the background, while we made Good Luck With Whatever, which felt like exactly the record we wanted to make with a guy like Dave Cobb. We weren’t even able to tour around it because of COVID, so it was kind of cut off at its knees.”

It also was COVID that prompted Goldsmith and the other members of Dawes— Taylor’s brother Griffin (drums and vocals), Wylie Gelber (bass) and Lee Pardini (keyboards and vocals)—to explore the new studio approach that informs their latest album, Misadventures of Doomscroller. The result is a wide-ranging, improv-fueled record that consists of seven tracks, one of which is an outro.

“After I started to branch out into other things, like Miles and Herbie, one thing that I kept really responding to was that the songs were chewy. They were long and intense, but there were also only between five and seven songs on these records, which lasted 48 minutes or so. That made me think of records like Love Over Gold or Wish You Were Here. Love Over Gold is one of my favorite albums by anyone and it’s definitely my favorite Dire Straits record. ‘Telegraph Road’ is 14 minutes but, because it’s only one of five tracks, I find it to be really digestible. It’s the same with Wish You Were Here, where ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ is a lot but, once you’re done, there’s only four songs left, so you can kind of wrap your head around it.

“So that was in the back of my head as something I’d love to do because it’s something we do onstage. Songs of ours like ‘Feed the Fire’ or ‘Less Than Five Miles Away,’ we’ll take them as far as we want, and sometimes they’ll be 10 or 15 minutes. So it’s definitely been part of our DNA for a long time but, for whatever reason, we just weren’t putting it on wax. That’s just not how we were working in the studio.”

However, the pandemic led the quartet to try something new for Dawes’ eighth studio record.

“COVID showed a lot of us that our time together is fragile and it can be brief,” Goldsmith acknowledges. “So we were like, ‘Let’s just do exactly what we want and do it on our terms and we’ll deal with getting a label on board after the fact. We’ll figure all the rest out afterward.’”

With that goal in mind, the band approached Jonathan Wilson, who produced the first two Dawes albums, as well as Passwords.

“He’s such a dear, dear friend, and such a close part of this band’s identity. He was at the helm for some of our most definitive moments as a band. He seems to be such a close part of this. And on top of that, not for nothing, he had just finished a two-year tour as part of Roger Waters’ band. So he was a great coach when I was writing these demos by myself in my house—trying to figure out how to have some of these songs sustain themselves for nine or 10 minutes, thinking about the ingredients to add to a third verse that’s seven minutes away. If there’s anybody that understands how this operates, it’s someone who was just on tour with the guy from Pink Floyd, who happens to be one of our best friends.

“This was also during prime-time lockdown. We were having COVID tests every other day just to be in the studio together. We weren’t going to travel and he was in LA, so it all felt very serendipitous.”

Someone Else’s Cafe/ Doomscroller Tries to Relax

A big inspiration for this album was Black Sabbath, in particular Paranoid. When you’re listening to Paranoid and you look at the title of “War Pigs,” it’s “War Pigs/Luke’s Wall.” There’s something really fun as a fan and a listener to wonder where “Luke’s Wall” starts and where “War Pigs” ends. Or is “Luke’s Wall” in the middle section?

So with “Someone Else’s Cafe/Doomscroller Tries to Relax,” I liked the idea of some people thinking, “This is when that part of the song starts and that’s when this part of the song ends.” It was a bit of a thrill thinking about that; although, in our case, it might be a little more obvious than “War Pigs/ Luke’s Wall.” This also introduces the theme of the doomscroller that we were trying to pepper into the entire album. What’s funny about it, though, is that we wrote it last. When it came to the kind of freak-out stuff, I thought that between “Everything Is Permanent,” “Sound That No One Made” and “Ghost in the Machine,” we were going to have enough squirrelly playing. I thought it would probably be a five-song record that would open with “Sound That No One Made.” That’s what was hitting my brain before I had a sense of the arc of the lyrics, with all the songs next to each other.

We had plans to go in and record, but this song wasn’t around yet. Then, I finally was like, “I think we need like one more ambitious one.” I had heard that sort of centerpiece riff in my head, but I couldn’t quite play it the right way yet. I wrote the first half of the song in a very piecemeal way— writing separate things, then cramming them all together to see if they lined up and adjusting accordingly.

Once we cut that song, I thought, “This is gonna be such a cool closer of the whole album.” But it had such a fun energy and, when one of our friends would stop by the studio, that would be the song we would play first. So we were like, “Well, this is becoming a bit of a mission statement and, if that’s the case, then it should probably open the album and we’ll figure everything else out.”

Recording it was a trip because we like to do our thing live and react to the decisions we’re all making. When that’s the case, if you have a solid first three minutes or a shitty first three minutes, it’s really hard to remember once you’re eight minutes in and you’re ending the song. So we had to keep a lot in our brains because we’d finish a take and be like, “OK, how do we all feel?” Mostly, we didn’t know whether what we just did was good or not because it was so meaty and three takes, which typically is not a big deal, would last a half-hour. Then, with all the time between songs, we were looking at hours and hours to just do a small handful of takes. So we would have to go back and listen to make sure that we really got it. There was a sense of achievement, particularly because we had set out to perform something and capture it, rather than lay a foundation and then just tweak, which is how most recordings are done today.

I think the same way that people respond to a live show is how they respond to what happens in the studio when something is set out, achieved and captured. They can hear it more than they even think they can hear it. So it was a big deal to us to make sure that it was happening on the floor. Obviously, I can only play one guitar, so if you’re hearing two guitars at once, then I’m not doing both of them at the same time. But this was definitely a quartet performance, with a lead vocal that was done live and then we added to it accordingly.

Maybe I’m wrong about this—I’m probably a little too inside—but I also think that Dawes fans will feel, “Yeah, this is the band I’ve seen play a hundred times and now I’m hearing it on the record too.” I think it’s always been there and we’re finally unleashing this part of ourselves, although anyone in the family is already very much aware of it.

Comes in Waves

I wanted there to be a bridge between these songs and what people might expect to hear from Dawes on a record. I also wanted there to be a groove or palate cleanser.

We’re a funny band right now because we have a jazz pianist who has a deep pocket and can play anything he wants. The same is true of our drummer, my brother. Then, our bass player is obsessed with soul and funk, so he plays bass a certain way. And I am trying to do my best at writing country songs. Then, together, we play this proggy, jam, alt-indie Americana thing or whatever it is. I feel like “Comes in Waves” is a cool example of that.

The way the lyric structure works to me is from all my obsessive hours of listening to Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson and the way that they will funnel into the title line. They’re so good at it. They’ll start wide and you’re wondering how they’re going to bring us home. It’s that Nashville turn, which my simple brain can never get enough of. Every time someone twists that line at the end and brings it home, I’m warmed over. I just light up from it.

So I’m always chasing that as a writer and, with “Comes in Waves,” I was trying to figure out how to keep filtering in the title in a new way. The first verse is about ocean waves, the second verse is waves of electricity, the third verse is my relationship with spirituality and the fourth verse is the political moment we were in. That’s how it all came about.

Everything Is Permanent

The way that I write tends to be fairly direct. If you listen to “Someone Else’s Cafe,” I think there’s some subtext but not much. You can figure out pretty quickly, “OK, I know what this song is about.” Maybe the music can help give another dimension to the emotion or the lyric but you still have a pretty clear sense. “Comes in Waves” might be a little trickier in a fun way, but it’s still clear. It’s on the page.

I love it, though, when writers come from this place where, even if it’s clear what the emotion is—or it’s clear what the theme is—the way that they’re putting lines on top of each other continues to compound the emotion in a way that is fairly singular to the listener.

I don’t write that way very often, so when it comes out, it’s pretty accidental. I feel like “Everything Is Permanent” showed up like that right from the first lyric: “A product of my time zone/ Mixed CDs and dial tones/ Where we would listen to the Universe think.” I said to myself: “I don’t know how that showed up, but I’m going to follow this and it isn’t going to be some linear narrative.”

So, for that reason, it was really fun to write. It had a much more chromatic Elliot Smith kind of progression when I wrote it on acoustic guitar. But, when we started playing it as a band, it sounded awful. It just didn’t work with the full band. So we had to come up with this new chord progression and a new melody, literally with headphones on behind the microphones. It was basically a new song and we kept tweaking the feel from there.

I had this riff that happens after the first chorus, where I switched into this minor mode for a bar of six and then back to major. It was this fun thing I had been playing with by myself at my house. And in the same way that so many of my favorite songs will explode—like certain Zappa songs—I wanted to let it all fall apart and dissolve with the band. I wanted it to sound like no one knows where they are, and then Lee and I would pass it back and forth.

I think that is the moment I’m most proud of as a player and a band member on the whole album. I feel like that whole solo section ended up being something that I didn’t think we were capable of achieving until it happened. So I’m really grateful for that moment and then being able to put the song back together and finish it up.

The tagline at the end, “Did you really need to cry?/ Or be seen crying?” made me feel like I was like Brandon Flowers for a second. I didn’t know where that came from, but I was really appreciative of it.

Ghost in the Machine

I wrote a version of this song for Passwords. It started out almost like a Joni Mitchell open tuning folk ballad. It’s basically about my time with Blake Mills in our first band and what that meant to me. I think back on the faith that it instilled in me and the reasons why I’m still doing it now. That obviously also includes my time with Wiley, but I still have him by my side. So it was more the idea of revisiting that stuff with Blake.

I played the song for Blake at the time and he said, “That’s really sweet, man.” We tried to come up with some sort of a rockier version of it but it just sounded stupid. So that just didn’t make the record.

Then, with the next one, I felt like I had enough songs so I didn’t want to revisit it.

But this time, I came up with this quick G minor thing, where we started grooving with a feel that we never had before. It’s very much like a blues progression or at least a blues progression insofar as Steely Dan has blues songs, where they’re never gonna let it just be the three chords. That’s kind of how this song is too, and it felt like a fun runway to cut loose in a way that we never have before.

I don’t think that we have ever done a song that is that fast before. Jonathan Wilson got on a second drum kit and he did the live take with us. So you’re hearing him and Griffin switch little solo bits at the end there when we have that heavier riff. Then, we overdubbed some percussion and that was really it because there’s no background vocals and we did the solos live. So that song was done fast.

Other than our EastWest Studios live performance of the whole album, we’ve never played that song. I feel like it’s going to be one of our show highlights and maybe even an opener at some point. It just feels like new territory for us.

Joke in There Somewhere

I was exhausted by talking about COVID and hearing about COVID almost from day one. So when I started hearing all of the lockdown music, I was like, “This is the last thing I want to hear about right now.” But at the same time, it was definitely what we were all experiencing. So I wanted to write a song that was definitely about it, but never talked about it and therefore could possibly be about anything.

I wanted it to be more about how this sort of passively agreed upon social arrangement is so much more fragile than we’re willing to acknowledge. It feels like the whole lockdown was us sort of pushing against it to see what kind of give it has, then realizing, “Oh, a lot of this is just because we decided to live this way. We’ve just decided to behave ourselves and, when people decide to start raiding Target for toilet paper, they’re going to do it and nothing’s going to stop them. And that’s pretty weird.”

So this song was about the mundanity of it, sort of a day in the life, and then trying to say, “Yeah, this is funny. This is strange. There’s something going on underneath that we’re not even willing to look at or admit.”

Even though doomscroller is not in the title, it speaks to the whole doomscroller theme. “Someone Else’s Café” is a song about a tyrant and how that scratch never gets itched and how there’s a little bit of that feeling in all of us. “Doomscroller Sunrise” at the end is seeing that we all play these small parts in something that’s moving forward with or without us, and that it is no one person’s fault.

I feel like COVID was a time in our lives when I was waking up and checking charts, polls and news sites to terrify myself about things that I had no agency over. I’ve done that at different times in my life. I’m not a paranoid person but the stuff that starts coming down the pike, you’d be crazy not to start wondering for your safety a little bit.

I think that this concept of the doomscroller is something that we all can relate to. The doomscroller is sort of a devil on your shoulder telling you to keep clicking and researching something that only scares you more and that you really don’t have any control over. The idea that it’s some little devil was funny to me and felt true to the experience.

So that’s where that came from with “Everything Is Permanent” being kind of internet-focused, “Someone Else’s Cafe” being a little more political and “Joke in There Somewhere” being about our public sphere. It felt like all these songs were talking to each other.

Joke in There Somewhere (Outro)

I think that releasing music on vinyl versus cassettes, CDs or streaming not only changes the way that we listen to music, but also the way that music is created. It’s something that can be played with and brought into the medium. It already has in some ways. If you look at side B of Dark Side of the Moon, you’re like, “I don’t know where one song ends and one begins.” That’s part of the fun.

Now, obviously, this isn’t Dark Side of the Moon. I’m talking about one outro and that’s a whole side, so it’s very different. But it’s the idea of “What does it do for this outro when we give it its own track? What does it do to ‘Joke in There Somewhere’ when we end it without the outro?” I don’t know why or how, but I feel like it does change the way that they hit, the way that someone hears it. All of a sudden, we have an instrumental track, whereas it started as just one long performance.

Sound That No One Made (Doomscroller Sunrise)

This one felt like such a fun way to go out. Even though I started out thinking it could be a good opener, once we recorded it, we were like, “Oh no, this will be the coolest closer.” That always happens to me—I have an idea and then the record reveals itself and does what it wants.

Lyrically, as human beings, we all want to look for patterns and sources. We all want to look for reasons and be able to identify who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. This song is trying to speak to the fact that we’re doing that to make ourselves feel better. I believe the reality is that we’re all contributing to rolling this ball forward in whatever way, shape or form.

I’m not a defeatist. I think that we should all try to make the world a better place. But I also think that pointing at someone and saying, “Here’s the person responsible,” feels more like a convenience. That way we’re not taking as much accountability as a collective consciousness as we should or as we can.

This one probably has the most squirreliness. It has the most riffs and the most sections. I was surprised that when we did the YouTube thing for the mega fans [performing the entire album], this was a big favorite right away. I was surprised because I thought it’s a little slower, a little chewier. It has a whole bunch of noise at the beginning.

I think it’s going to be a highlight in terms of all the different sections we get to play and the way that it all comes down to a low bass riff. It is full of stuff we’ve never done before, and that’s always part of the goal.