Dawn Landes

I love the thrill of finding a new band that moves you so deeply you rush to find their entire catalogue and listen to it incessantly, wondering how life was complete without this wonderful music. If I’m lucky, this happens maybe one or twice a year. This year I was fortunate enough to fall in love with Kentucky-bred, Brooklyn-based Dawn Landes.

It all started back in March when a friend sent me the video for a quirky, blue-grass cover of Peter, Bjorn and John’s “Young Folks.” It featured a female singer switching between guitar and accordion conducting a backing band of “old folks”, who happened to be the WST (We Sorta Tried) Bluegrass Band from Austin, Texas. Charmed by her voice and the irony of this low-budget production, I visited her myspace page to hear more. What I discovered was an extremely talented multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, and recording engineer whose music is a lovely blend of folky ballads, country-tinged rock, and electronic loops.

Why I love her….
Dawn Landes actually started out as an assistant and freelance engineer at various recording studios in New York City, where she’s worked with such respected artists as Phillip Glass, Ryan Adams, Joseph Arthur, the Earlies, and Josh Ritter (to whom she’s now married). And it was in these studios that she began recording and producing her own songs.

You’re probably starting to see a trend with my profiles – I’m a sucker for literate songwriters. And Dawn Landes is no exception. Her influences are both traditional and literary with her first song being a musical adaptation of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

As a Francophile, I was fascinated to learn that France has played a big part in Dawn’s musical career. She landed her first record deal with the little French label, Ocean Records, and her first CD, Dawn’s Music, was released in France in 2005. Since then she has divided her time between Paris and Brooklyn and has even started writing some songs in French. None of these songs have been released yet, but hopefully they’ll make it on one of her upcoming albums. To tide us over, there’s always Dawn’s cover of Francoise Hardy’s “Tous Les Garcons et Les Filles” that she frequently plays live. It was added to her set as a way to introduce guest drummer, Olivier de Chateaubourg, who apparently is a French count....

On a different note, Dawn Landes doesn’t have an official second album. Her apartment was burgled, and the robbers stole her laptop containing the completed second album. Instead of re-recording the lost album, she wrote the song “Bodyguard” about the robbery. And this song became the first track on Dawn’s critically-acclaimed third CD, Fireproof. For the record, Fireproof was recorded live to tape, a much more cumbersome medium for potential robbers.

And now for some trivia – Dawn’s cover of Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down” was used for a Human Rights Campaign video supporting the repeal of Proposition 8. This cover is a hidden track on Fireproof if you’re looking for a copy.

Listen Up!
First up is the lovely “Twilight” from Fireproof.



And here is the utterly adorable “Straight Lines.”



Check her out!
Dawn Landes’ new album, Sweetheart Rodeo, will be released on September 7th in Europe and January 19th in the US. Lucky for us, a new album means more tour dates. Dawn will be hitting Europe this September with my all-time favorite band, Okkervil River, and Elvis Perkins. Then a US tour will follow this October.

Discography: Sweetheart Rodeo (2010) * Fireproof (2007) * Dawn’s Music (2005)