Written by: Dave Cantrell
If you’re a ‘music enthusiast’ of a certain age – born in the mid- to late-50s, say – there’s a strong chance you at least drifted through, if not found yourself immersed in, that early to mid-70s pre-punk period when singer-songwriters of certain (often Californian) persuasions dominated the map from the burbs through the cities to the countryside like so many members of a benign but widespread cult. It was quite an active scene that, as music scenes do, produced heavy-hitters and forgettables alike, one that, unlike many such movements one could mention, left a durable impression on the culture at large and by that impact took up permanent residence on the FM landscape from the fringes inward. Fortunately, for those of us with a sustained investment in the form, there’s been a naturally occurring winnowing process over the decades that has left us not so much a glut as an enduring tradition where, overall, those most worthy tend to find their footing in the industry (for want of a better term – ecosystem?) while those somewhat less so are left to the open mics and impromptu performances from back porches and barbecues. Among those currently occupying the former camp is the Chicago-based Steve Dawson, who’s in fact been perched there for quite some while, seeing as Ghosts, the album before us today that releases June 7th on Pravda Records, is his sixth solo full-length all of which have come in the lengthy wake of his fronting the near-legendary country-tinged alt.rock band Dolly Varden that over its tenure brought its own half-dozen long-playing gems of note. It’s that background that prefaces the somewhat ‘no surprise’ thematic nature of this latest outing the gist of which can be found hiding in plain sight in that title “Ghosts” (which isn’t to mention the irony of the words ‘plain sight’ and ‘ghosts’ appearing nearly side by side in that assessment, itself pointing, if a bit obliquely, to the matters at hand).
From the damn near jaunty melancholy of “Time to Let Some Light In” that opens the record on a note of politically-touched, softly defiant fatigue where the line “freedom is another word for scared to death” rather says it all, through the pedal-steeled wistfulness of “Oh, California” with Nora O’Connor providing absolutely seamless harmonies, “Walking Cane” that takes that same wistfulness for a long stroll through Dawson’s own wondering wandering soul, the classic-in-waiting “It Was A Mistake” that with the blessing of some soulful, crying horns and a searing electric solo melds the intimate with the personal in a way so deft you simply cannot see the joins, through as well the moving, stripped-down poignancy of “When I Finally Let You Down” with its classic aching chord progression buoying a sadsack narrative with something approaching courage to last track “Weather in the Desert” that rides its own pedal steel into an emotional sunset that’s as sad as it is irredeemably human (scene-setting lyric: “You brought as many bottles as you could carry / you locked yourself in a motel room out by Joshua Tree // told yourself yoiu would not be leaving / you were gonna drink those bottles down until you stopped breathing), Ghosts is more or less a treatise addressing the many vagaries of this reality we all share, one man’s account of our often desperate, too-frequent attempts to hammer the dents and bondo those punctures caused by our too-frequent instances of driving so recklessly close to the guardrail, an account that would seem to suggest, again to no one’s great surprise, that the success-to-failure ratio is pretty much a draw at best, and that’s if we’re lucky. Beyond all that, though, let us tell you this: by our lights, even as it’s the eighth of the album’s ten songs, there’s a stunner of a centerpiece here and it’s called “A Mile South of Town.”
A ballad cast in those muted tones that can so often convey the most vivid moments of this odd and complicated existence, the song, intimate and confessional and quietly unflinching, is in essence a motorcycle ghost rider narrative of sorts wherein said narrator, past a modest, whiskey-fed bender, his post-war soldier history breathing down his neck as it always is, meets his fate on a stretch of deserted country road, a fate met equally by the animal he hits. While on paper no description could do it justice, in the moment, especially through the intimacy of one’s headphones, the song’s impact, hushed and powerful, deftly matches that at its lyrical core. And speaking of that, at least one of its stanzas – sorry, we’re not going to excerpt it here as we don’t want to ruin the moment for you – left us close to tears, fumbling for our composure. We’ll only add that, while the foregoing was indeed a standout moment for us, that type of visceral response isn’t rare on Ghosts nor for that matter in much of the work the guy’s done over the years.
Holding all this together here, of course (aside from the amazing supporting cast, listed below), beyond the arrangements and tears, the candor the beauty the sadness, is Dawson’s voice, both in the literal and literary sense, soul-evoking at every turn while never shying away from the courage it takes to be vulnerable, to let the hurt show even as you’re allowing brief shivers of hope to flicker across your face from time to time and if we don’t miss our guess that is precisely what an album of this nature is meant to do. On Ghosts, consider that goal nailed.
Steve Dawson: guitars, vocals
Gerald Dowd: drums, harmony vocals
Brian Wilkie: pedal steel
Alton Smith: Wurlitzer, piano, accordion and harmony vocals
Nora O’Connor: harmony vocals
Diane Christiansen: harmony vocals
Ingrid Graudins: harmony vocals
Chris Greene: Tenor and Baritone Saxophone
John Moore: trumpet
Tommi Zender: baritone guitar
