In 2012, Dawes released their second album, “Nothing Is Wrong”. The opening track began with a four-beat count-in from an electric guitar, which was followed by a riff with the unusual chord progression of I-iii-vii-IV, played solo on the same guitar. The band – bass, organ and drums – joined in for the second run at the riff, before the first verse commences.
“These days my friends don’t seem to know me”, sings Taylor Goldsmith, who also wrote the song, “without a suitcase in my hand”. He’s a man on the road who, even when he’s standing still, he sings, “I seem to disappear”. Goldsmith delivers the line in an understated manner to match its mood, which reflected my own in the year I first heard it. I had returned home after five years up in Edinburgh, ready to get stuck into the world of work, but otherwise spending a lot of time in front of a machine at home, waiting for the odd item to proofread about online dating sites.
I was soon stuck on this song and its hypnotic riff, with Taylor’s brother Griffin pounding a 4/4 groove underneath it. Then Taylor introduces another person who has “that special kind of sadness…that tragic set of charms”. She seems to be a kindred spirit, one he had met “so far away from home”. Goldsmith, who is himself from LA, worked on the song after spending time in Nashville, but he knows that such things only arise from spending time in his home city; I’ve been there, and know about the difficulties of pursuing an artistic career in Hollywood or as a musician, so can empathise with the person Goldsmith sings he wants to “wrap…in my arms”.
He continues to plough his melancholy furrow in the second verse, fielding questions about where he comes from, which serve to “see what that says about a man”. In a typical LA style, where geography is defined by the freeways one takes to navigate the city, Goldsmith is more interested in replying to his questioner with “bad directions that never lead them there at all”. He sounds dejected and obtuse, with a mention of the moon and something “swimming in my drink”.
In the first verse, he uses the word “maybe” three times, and in the following verse, he links two phrases with the repeated use of “something”. Both underline the uncertainty of the lyric, with little that is clear and obvious. Goldsmith, looking back to the opening image of a suitcase, sighs how he thought he would be attractive “for the places I have been”, since he is a well-travelled young man with a broad hinterland. He also conjures up the image of dirt “deep beneath my nails”, which rhymes with how he is “battening the hatches and pulling in the sails”; a metaphor from the land tied with one from the ocean.
Finally, in the last part of the song’s last verse, our narrator seizes the moment: “But now I know what I’ve been missing, and I’m going home to make it mine”. Perhaps this line reverberated with me because I had gone home myself, although I had nobody to wrap in my arms at the time. Taylor’s lady is the actress Mandy Moore, and the pair have had three children.
The most memorable part of the song comes in the chorus, appropriately following the word “sadness”. A hitherto unheard diminished fifth chord sounds, which absolutely captures the spirit of “Time Spent in Los Angeles”. Another new minor chord, on the sixth note of the scale, coincides with the mention of the city, before a simple V-IV-I descending progression to finish the chorus. I have heard the band play the song twice: once in 2013, when they played a gig at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford, and in 2019 when I was in Washington, DC, and serendipitously timed my visit with their show. I sang along to a chorus I still carry with me, although it has been given a new meaning by recent events.
In 2025, Taylor lost his home studio, and Griffin lost his home, weeks before he became a father, in the LA fires. The pair, who are now the only original members of the band, performed the song in a highly charged performance on Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show, which is filmed in the city. Footage of fire crews and victims was beamed onto the screen behind them, as the pair played a tune which is about far more than a narrator wanting to be loved.
Instead, like the girl who is the focus of the chorus, Los Angeles itself is something that deserves to be embraced, held tightly despite the “sadness” it brings people.
