Jake Dunn Photo credit: Matt Rucinski
Jake Dunn’s EP, Kinda Like A Dream, is the echo chamber of isolation. Forged in the unnatural silence of the COVID years recorded, mixed, and mastered within the solitary cell of Amish Electric Chair Studios, the EP is a vivid X-ray of a private vision. Dunn, self-performing every instrument, achieves an almost paradoxical feat: turning retreat into expansion.
The outlaw dust of Southeast Ohio remains the bedrock, but here it’s refracted through something cosmic. The sound feels untethered, as if the Appalachian folk of the region learned to breathe at a higher altitude. It transcends, goes beyond Cosmic American Music, it’s a satellite view of the American sound.
The EP’s genius lies in its structural honesty. Dunn’s stated intent, “I had a very clear idea of what I wanted from each song,” proves absolutely true… The mostly emotional lyrics and harmonies (often featuring his wife’s voice as a subtle, crucial gravity) are framed by instrumentation so spacious it borders on being weightless. The resulting sound is as intimate as it could be utterly vast. By stripping away the collaborative dynamic, Dunn has built a self-contained space where his influences, from folk to rock, coalesce under an entirely new pressure. Kinda Like A Dream asks you to step into the quiet headspace of its making.
The EP is a product of isolation, yet the final production is layered, rich, and soaring. How did you avoid the potential pitfalls of self-production and maintain such a sense of atmospheric space when you were the only creative voice controlling everything?
JAKE DUNN: I had written these songs maybe 5 or more years ago, long before they were recorded, and that didn’t even happen until around 2022. So, I have had a lot of time to listen to these songs and put in the thought and consideration and feelings that I wanted. Not just from the lyrics and the melodies, but in the atmosphere, and those overall emotions of the song. I have become very close to these songs, and now they sort of feel like friends almost, simply because of how much time I have spent with them.
Your music deliberately bridges outlaw country confidence with reflective vulnerability. When writing during a period of such widespread anxiety and stillness, which of these two traditions…the outlaw or the introspection of the poet…did you find yourself leaning on more heavily?
JAKE DUNN: The introspective part of my personality had certainly taken over when these songs were written. I have really felt a sense of direction by looking inward and just taking a pause from all the noise and chaos around us all. Spending some time with myself has really done me a lot of good. It isn’t always the best thing for me, though, and sometimes getting too lost in my own head can become very dangerous for me. But, when I have the time to reflect on what I’m thinking and feeling about the world around me, it helps me to understand myself a lot, which helps me to create.
Considering the isolation, was the “Cosmic” aspect of this EP a deliberate spiritual reach outward, or an accidental byproduct of your own inner scape?
JAKE DUNN: I’ve always been a fan of music that is a little “out there” you could say. Artists and bands that push the boundaries of the genre they fall into have always inspired me. When I was growing up one of the first bands that I really got into was Pink Floyd and they have remained one of my absolute favorites. Then I came across Graham Parsons and The Flying burrito Brothers. The whole idea of cosmic American music really connected with me and impacted a lot of the music I was writing and listening to at the time. I want to keep pushing that idea forward and beyond the music that I’ve already created and the sounds that I’ve already explored. I enjoy music that is hard to label and not being confined to the box of a single genre makes me feel free to create and say what I really need to.
You mentioned the emptiness of places made the world feel “surreal.” Can you discuss one specific song on Kinda Like A Dream and how you used a guitar tone, a chord progression, or an echo effect to capture the feel of that surreality?
JAKE DUNN: There is certainly a lot of echo, reverb and different effects going on with all the instrumentation throughout the songs. I really wanted to embrace those types of effects and create a type of atmospheric feeling, almost like a liminal space, that did more than just perk your ears because of the melody. I wanted to create a soundscape that you could get lost in because it felt dreamlike. Specifically, in the bridge of the song “Kinda Like a Dream”, there’s a build up before the guitar solo, and that whole section is very spacey and layered with lots of echo. To me, it almost sums up the entire feeling of, not only that song, but the whole EP as well. Of course, there was a different emphasis on each tone and effect for every song on the EP, depending on what I felt was right for the meaning and ideas behind them. I wanted each song to have its own life and existence in its own different way, melodically and sonically.
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