How far we’ve come

Dawes, who I wrote about seeing last Friday at Taste of Minnesota, has been featured by music website Daytrotter. The four live tunes are unsurprisingly excellent, but the stream-of-consciousness essay about the band, its music, and life by Sean Moeller that accompanies the music is worth the visit alone:

“Since we first met the four men in Dawes a year and a half ago, we’ve spent a lot of time with them. We’ve spent days with them in barns, freezing all of our asses off, drinking lots of whiskey, hot apple cider and hot chocolate. We’ve seen them hop out into the yard and chase around barnyard animals, squawking and fussing to get out of the way. We’ve seen them get very little sleep and spend every waking hour singing and playing, just spilling with what they have running through them. We’ve spent a 4th of July with them, standing beneath a menacing purple-black sky full of storm clouds, rain and a couple hundred dollars worth of illegal fireworks. There have been babies in our families named after them. We’ve talked to them for hours until our throats were raw with the task and the effort, turned husky but still happy to have done it. We’ve come to love them as brothers and yet, through all of it, what still remains untouched is their ability to make us gasp with the purity of what they do and who they are as a group of musicians. Even a close friendship doesn’t dull one’s sense of awe when it comes to their debut album “North Hills,” a live show that’s absolutely a religious experience and new songs that are just as good and scarily meaningful. They never cease to make us stop and account for our own deficiencies – not in a destructive way, but in a way that forces us to be closer to ourselves and those that we tell ourselves we loved and are told that we’re loved by…”

Keep reading: Dawes: Daytrotter Session recorded Jul 8, 2010.