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Just days before the release of their sophomore album Nothing is Wrong, the members of Dawes loped onto the Vic Theatre stage in Chicago. The band may have been booked for an opening set with Brett Dennen, but it didn’t look like an opening set crowd. The quartet clearly earned local goodwill at last summer’s Lollapalooza festival.
Appearing disheveled from the road but assured, Taylor Goldsmith led his band through a clutch of mostly new songs that were equally rough-hewn and refined. Though fresh songs including the opener “If I Wanted Someone” shared the roots rock and Americana grit that fueled Dawes’ debut North Hills, they were perhaps a bit more focused and musically compact than predecessors like the melancholy “That Western Skyline.” The latter song nonetheless brimmed with hooks and brotherly harmony with younger sibling Griffin Goldsmith on drums.
Highlights of the new material included “A Little Bit of Everything,” a series of vignettes about coping with the worst and embracing the best of life. It featured Griffin’s martial beat coupled with Tay Strathairn’s elegant church-hall piano. Flailing like a mop-topped Muppet behind the drum kit, Griffin took lead vocal for the stirring “How Far We’ve Come.” “The only point of looking back is to see how far we’ve come,” he sang as the song reached its crescendo.
Before digging into the CCR stomp of “Coming Back to a Man,” the elder Goldsmith announced a surprise for the Chicago crowd. Though Nothing is Wrong wasn’t due for release until the following week, the band had just received their stock and had cracked the cases. “I think we’ve got just enough for every single one of you,” he said with a wink.
Many in the crowd were clearly waiting for the tumbling triplet intro to “When My Time Comes,” and welcomed it with the night’s biggest cheers. The rafter-raising version gave credence for frequent comparisons to The Band, an obvious love of Dawes’. The song also provided proof of the band’s welling notoriety through an unexpected source. Even though the friend who accompanied me claimed to have never heard of Dawes, she lit up with recognition at the song’s first notes, and sang the chorus with as much gusto as everyone else in the room.
“Fire Away” rambled like a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers classic, while playing to Taylor Goldsmith’s lyrical strengths with stories of another lost love. “So if you finally wrote that heartbreak song the experts never could … ” began Goldsmith, leading into a big chorus that glided over Strathairn’s gospel organ. Whether or not he considers himself an expert in the field of heartbreak or the songs that define it, he’s well on the way to claiming the title.
