Should we think about flames because Dawn Landes eggs us on to or should we think about the ways that we could retard those flames, to make nice with them because she more insistently eggs us on to do that? These are questions that don’t answer themselves and yet there’s nothing that can so confidently claim to be supremely fire proofed. Brick homes and businesses find their own ways to burn down to the ground and eyeglasses and contact lenses melt to the retinas in extreme heat. … [Story Continues Below]

First song
Tous Les Garçons et Les Filles (Dawn Landes) [2.12MB] [1453 downloads]


– unreleased cover of a French pop song from the 60’s
I learned this song a few years ago when I was touring in France — staying in a caravan on the lawn of an old estate somewhere in the southeast part of France. Originally sung by the stunning Francoise Hardy. When the lyrics, “All of the boys and girls of my age are walking down the street hand-in-hand, and me I have no one” are sung by even a French super-model, they sting. Another great line from this song, “My days, like my nights, they’re all the same. No joy. Plenty of boredom. Nobody whispering
I love you in my ear.” We recorded this in February in the middle of a tour with Jason Isbell and Will Hoge, and I had brought a young Frenchman (a count!), Olivier de Chateaubourg with me to play drums. It was his first time in the States. He had a blast, and we sang this song every night on that tour so I could tell the ladies in the audience all about his French-ness. He took it from there.

Second song
Kids In A Play (Dawn Landes) [3.09MB] [1357 downloads]


– original version appears on Fireproof
Morgan really pulled out all his shine-stops on this song… anybody who wants to play the bass AND the glockenspiel at the same time has my respect! If you listen real close you can hear both Morgan and Olivier very shyly singing along on the La Las at the end. I found that the more you drink, the more La Las you can muster* I only wish we wouldn’t have been so rushed to get to our gig that night, I would’ve added loads of kooky keyboard parts from the Daytrotter vault of amazing instruments.

Third song
Goodnight Lover (Dawn Landes) [2.28MB] [1415 downloads]


– original version appears on Fireproof
This is a pretty different arrangement than the original track on the album. Initially, I wrote the song on an old clunky Funmachine Organ, with a quirky backbeat and sloppy out-of-tune chords. Sadly the organ is way too big to take on the road, but my guitar playing here is definitely out-of-tune! Morgan really added some beautiful stuff on here with his French horn. It’s such a mournful sound I think, a pretty sigh.

A good coating of black burn covers everything that those fires touch, yanking all life from the carriers until they are shadows of the orangeness and what they previously were. Landes, the Southern girl born in bourbon country, who now makes a home in New York City, alternates between the ferocity of hot streaks of fire and the passive, sleeping dog version of the stuff on her latest full-length record. It’s an album that approaches subjects that get a lot of common face time and others that don’t so much. She sometimes sounds like an idiosyncratic Natalie Merchant, playing around in the wildness with some of the jangly and crazier sounds that Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs were playing with back when they were working on Wowee Zowee and Slanted and Enchanted. It’s not a standard comparison, to be sure, and Landes takes us into those odd places where in one instance we’re thinking about those “million tigers sleeping on their sides” in “Goodnight Lover” and we’re not able to stop ourselves from imagining that those tigers aren’t going to sleep forever and when we’re cocksuredly placing our relaxed heads into their mouths ajar, there’s still a 50-percent chance that those tigers are going to catch a fire of their own and snap down on us. They’re bound to wake up restless and we’ll be the sitting ducks they were hoping for, and immediately they’ll be figuring out ways to best BBQ us up for dinner. People are restless and never fireproof. It’s not how we’re made. Landes didn’t intend for her songs to make me think about tigers committing a sloppy kill and then getting culinary with their work, but it bears remembering that there is a remarkably sharp converse to no fire. Without a fire there is complete cold and with one, it’s as hot as it gets. Toning down a fire is hard to do and teaching it to be picky in what it decides to eat through is just as difficult. Landes is soft in her approach, ever the song bird, and it’s still very plain to hear that there’s something out there lurking around the corners – outside the light and the comfort – waiting to get at you, to light you up, to stimulate you in ways that happen rarely. It could be that you need to get out of there or you need to readjust to a new situation – those teeth, that torch, the one you loved suddenly being the one you no longer love or the one who no longer loves you. Often in her songs, Landes comes across as that observer of the pretty flame that just goes on and on diligently until it’s too tired to stand anymore or it’s killed off mid-sentence. She makes these feelings of an old woman walking through a corridor of her home late at night with an oil lantern in one hand like a tea cup and the other hand cupping the side of the light. It cuts through the dark and the only sounds that are heard are the shuffling of fabric of the flowing night gown. This is where we’re thinking here about her gorgeous French cover, dedicated to her count of a drummer. Then she’s the person squirting a crinkly container of lighter fluid onto a contained fire to make it rabid, talking about being the strange kids acting in a play, hoping they don’t let it get boring, not on their watch. Then she’s leaning over the night stand and blowing out the whimpering candle and we think about her three sides from the beginning again – none of them fireproof.

Dawn Landes Official Site