That Special Kind of Sadness: Dawes' "Nothing Is Wrong"

3:50 pm - Sat, Jun 18, 2011: 25 notes

That Special Kind of Sadness: Dawes’ “Nothing Is Wrong”

Mature is an easy adjective to throw at “Nothing Is Wrong,” the sophomore record from Dawes. Easy because, after a few years of incessant touring, Dawes has come much closer this time around to capturing their thrilling sense of purpose as a live band, playing with the type of resolute, confident drive that makes it very easy to forget that this band is frighteningly young. Calling Dawes mature is also another way of also talking about their commercial appeal as torch-carriers of the 70’s SoCal sound (these guys are a throwback to when music was real man, is a common youtube comment), a status that’s only been cemented and highlighted as of late with vets like Robbie Robertson and Jackson Browne hiring these kids as their backing band. But calling “Nothing Is Wrong” mature is also just an easy way of trying to talk about something else, something that John Prine gets at when explaining what he had in mind when writing “Angel From Montgomery”:

“And I Said to Eddie ‘What do you want to write about,’ and he said, ‘I really like that song that song you wrote about old people, let’s write another song about old people.’ I said, ‘I can’t Eddie, I said everything I wanted to in Hello In There, I can’t do it.’ So then I thought for a while and said, ‘How bout a song about a middle aged-woman who feels older than she is.’”

“But it’s not that I want back all my innocence, just the joy of losing it again,” Taylor Goldsmith sings in “Strangers Getting Strangers.” Dawes must not want to explain to itself too well, because the song, perversely, ended up getting cut from the record, and can now only be found on a promo-only collection of outtakes. But that line, that word: Joy, explains it all. For Goldsmith, the woman in “Angel From Montgomery” feels both desperation and joy at her own desperation. And while young men dealing with heartbreak is still the primary subject matter here, this time around Goldsmith uses his playful narcissism in dealing with failed love as less of the point of it all but more as a starting point, a springboard for the type of self-deception and fear of adulthood that lies at the heart of this deceptively self-assured record.

Why posture maturity? For Dawes and Goldsmith, the characters are half the age of the Prine’s protagonist in “Angel From Montgomery,” but they may truly feel just as old. Their way of dealing with this terror is pretending that it’s their choice to feel old, that heartbreak and rough times have provided them with the tools to grow up and mature, that actually, this is all kind of a good thing. And so a group of songs about pretending and wanting to feel older than you really are, about feigning joy and maturity amongst all the sadness of young adulthood and all the desperation of your first real heartbreak, is one way to describe “Nothing Is Wrong.”

This joy, this celebration of the loss of innocence and the necessity of maturity, might just be the only way of dealing with something much more painful. “That special kind of sadness,” is what Goldsmith calls it in the opening track and lead single “Time Spent In Los Angeles.” Is “that special kind of sadness” really just a condensation of Goldsmith’s unique brand of self-involved, celebratory melancholy that works to block out true heartbreak or despair. If so, then the saddest song on this record must be “Coming Back To A Man.” It’s a bouncy shuffle that hides itself well as a lesson of perseverance and taking the high-road after love-gone-wrong, with its defiant refrain: “cause you broke the quick, giving heart of a kid, and you’re now coming back to a man.”

This woman has done me wrong, and in the end I’m better for it, boasts the narrator. But “Coming Back To A Man,” perhaps better than any song on the record, exposes the narrator’s own painful naivety. Goldsmith knows that whoever’s singing this song is being dishonest with himself: “I might think of you more often than I’m willing to admit,” is the obvious confession, coming at the end of a song that reads a lot like Dylan’s “Most Of The Time,” a tale of someone convincing themselves that things are alright because that’s the only way to handle the obvious fact that they’re not. “Coming Back To A Man,” like the record as a whole, is about pretending that love has taught you what you needed to learn to grow up when all it’s taught is hard it is to do so.

In “Nothing Is Wrong,” heartbreak is nothing more than a warning. Adulthood is impending and it is time to grow up, is what a failed young romance shouts back at the young man who, knowing no better, agrees that this must be true, that the lessons of lost love will only make him tougher, more mature. It’s pretending you feel bad for the imaginary girl with her “special kind of sadness” when the only one person you really feel bad for is yourself.

It’s the joke of celebrating “How Far We’ve Come” when thinking instead of how far you still need to go is too much to bear. Or maybe it’s breaking down after eight songs of posturing and just admitting, in “Million Dollar Bill,” that all you need is to lie in your bed with the lights off and act like a teenager, fantasize for a moment that you can make everything better. Because Goldsmith is all-too aware of what his characters are doing, he knows that pretending that nothing is wrong is a tough of an act to maintain, but he also also knows that to believe in this living is just a hard way to go, so he understands why they’re trying.

(Source: thepretender)