Dawes just keeps on moving, revealing a new record of tuneful Rock & Roll every couple years, each a variation on the last. Yet the group’s most recent effort, 2020’s Good Luck with Whatever, is simultaneously looser and more compact.
At nine songs over 39 minutes, it’s the shortest of the L.A.-based band’s seven full-length albums. The presence of Roots/Country producer du jour Dave Cobb — who’s worked with everyone from Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson to Houndmouth and Brandi Carlile — seems to have had an impact on frontman/chief songwriter Taylor Goldsmith, whose first-person tales and earnest vocals have rarely sounded as convincing.
Album opener “Still Feel Like a Kid” finds the 36-year-old Goldsmith in a restless mood, his straightforward lyrics as accessible and weirdly intimate as ever: “I can’t stay up past midnight anymore/But I still feel like a kid/There’s always part of me that’s a little sore/But I still feel like a kid/I got dreams of coaching little league/But I still feel like a kid.”
He’s backed by rollicking honky-tonk guitar, rolling piano and a steady beat that persists clear through album closer “Me Especially,” a bluesy slow burner from the Jackson Browne self-exploration playbook.
“It’s this feeling of like, did I fuck up?” Goldsmith said in a Rolling Stone interview when asked about whether he in fact still feels like a kid. “Did I pursue this like 17-year-old hobby at the expense of adulthood? And in some ways, the answer is yes. But I think it’s in the good ways. I am prouder than ever that what I do for a living is yell my head off, and pace a stage at full speed, and play guitar solos and nerd out. I think I was nervous, like, ‘Oh, man, am I not a mature human?’ And I think, ‘No, I am.’ I show up in the ways I need to, when I need to, but when I’m on tour, when I’m writing a song, I actually am nurturing the 15-year-old in me."
Proof of COVID vaccination or a negative COVID test from the past 72 hours is required for entry.
7:30 p.m. Nov. 3. $35-$45. Taft Theatre, 317 E. Fifth St., Downtown, tafttheatre.org.
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