The members of California folk-rock band Dawes know that songs can change over the course of a tour. One will seem stale for weeks, but then something clicks, and it sounds better than it has in years. Other times, a song they all love to play will take a turn for the worse, and they’ll have to put it down.
“It’s like, ’I don’t know what was going on there, but that was just a terrible version of that song.’ You know what I mean?” said bassist Wylie Gelber. “It’s always so different, so we try to keep the sets kind of fluid. We never get too married to specific parts of the set because they’re inevitably going to feel drastically different, at least to us, every night.”
Sweeping song revisions aren’t out of the question. “The arrangement we play now on tour can be wildly different from the version on the record—chordally, melody-wise, everything can be completely changed,” he said. “Sometimes it’s like, ’Oh, here’s a song we play every night, let’s do the first three choruses just piano and vocals, and then we’ll have the whole band come in right at the end.’ Even doing that gives the song a whole new life.”
Dawes is a modern purveyor of 1970s soft rock. Across the band’s six albums, frontman Taylor Goldsmith has emerged as a premier breakup songwriter. The wistful chorus on “Somewhere Along the Way,” a standout song from 2015 album All Your Favorite Bands, is one instance of his heartstring puppeteering. He sings, “How her only plan in life was getting lost/ How she took me to the edge and made me watch.”
On tour to promote their new album Passwords, Dawes plays Cargo Concert Hall on Friday, Sept. 28. Speaking with the RN&R ahead of the show, Gelber said he started playing bass as a third-grader in Malibu, California, and met Goldsmith as a teenager at Malibu High School.
“I had been playing in bands since a very young age, so I had heard all of my friends write their first songs,” he said. “Everyone knows how good a 14-year-old’s songs can be—usually, not very good. When I first heard Taylor, his songs were so much more complex and well-arranged.”
Along with co-songwriter and guitarist Blake Mills, they formed a post-punk band called Simon Dawes, scored a record deal and put out one album, 2006’s Carnivore. They were all still in high school.
“I would take time off school to go on these giant opening tours with, like, Maroon 5 and Incubus and stuff like that,” Gelber recalled. “We’d go off on some insane arena tour and then come back, and I’d be so checked out of everything school-related that eventually my principal suggested to my parents that I should drop out of school and go on tour full time.”
So he did. Gelber said that in retrospect it should have felt crazier to drop out and shoot for rockstardom. But it was a no-brainer at the time, or at least until Mills quit the band, and Simon Dawes broke up. “For a minute there, everyone was doubting the decision I had made,” he said, laughing.
The lineup underwent a transformation—Taylor’s brother, Griffin, stepped in behind the drums—as did the sound. The group re-emerged as Dawes in 2009 with the folk-rock sensibility that became the band’s sonic signature.
Though Goldsmith is Dawes’ primary songwriter, the group often collaborates on the harmonies, with each member lending his own unique vocal timbre. And, again, nothing about the arrangements is set in stone. The music is continually changing, night-to-night, right alongside the band.
“As me and Taylor have grown up together,” Gelber said, “the songs just get better and better, you know?”