Sometimes a song or a band has to grow on you. The first listen (or three) somehow fails to appeal, but then you hear that layering that you didn’t notice at first, or you’re taken by a lyric you hadn’t previously noted, or the sound just starts to captivate. I often like songs much better once I’ve memorized the lyrics and I can sing along.
I have the opposite reaction with Dawes. The first time I heard many of their songs, I was so enchanted by the sweet and clever lyrics, but after hearing the song multiple times, I started to feel like I really didn’t like it as much as I’d originally thought.
The song “Most People” exemplifies this feeling. Like watching a Saturday Night Live skit, that starts out enjoyable and then proceeds to bludgeon itself to death, going way, way past the point it ever had a right to. This song draws me in and then sort of makes me want to run screaming. I first listened to this song and was charmed by the lyrics, including “And it all makes up an image that resists interpretation/which is lately how she’s come to see herself/How she does not believe in accidents/does not disagree out loud/And falls in love with every many she cannot help.” I even liked the chorus, at least at first. But it just keeps going on and on, that plaintive MOST PEOPLE this and MOST PEOPLE that. By the second refrain I’m waiting for it to be over. By the third I’m actively ready to shut it off. Even worse, it becomes an ear worm, that excruciating song fragment you can’t get out of your head.
I do think they’re a talented band, and I love that Laurel Canyon sound as much as the next person. The harmonies are beautiful and the lyrics are interesting and literary. Sure, they still sound much like a Jackson Browne cover band (he’s a big fan of theirs and asked them to join him on tour, and even sang backup on their second album), but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I get a bit tired of the angst about how awful LA is (if you hate it so much, why don’t you leave? Oh wait, they did. They’re in North Carolina now. Maybe now they can stop dissing LA and its inhabitants. Los Angeles is NOT an empty-hearted town).
I’m just tired of getting excited about one of their songs the first time I hear it on the radio, and then later deciding it wasn’t all that. I sat in my car and couldn’t get out, even though I was at my destination, the first time I heard “A Little Bit of Everything.” The lyrics were so interesting that I had to hear it to the end. When I got home, I listened to it online a few times, and decided it was clever, but ultimately not as intriguing as I’d first thought.
The title track of Stories Don’t End has the refrain “Stories don’t end/They go on and on/Just someone stops listening.” I guess sometimes, that someone is me.
