Track Premiere: Davis John Patton “The Oceans”

Photo: Austin Goode

Davis John Patton has a new EP entitled ‘Songs from Davis‘ (a follow up to his 2020 release ‘From the Garden’)  –  from which ‘The Oceans‘ is taken.  It see’s the Iowan singer-songwriter get back to his musical roots prompted by the Global Pandemic.   A trip to his folks’ place galvanized his writing process: “My parents were selling the house I grew up in.  It had been 20 years, so there was a lot of emotion. One literal artefact of inspiration triggered my creativity. I was scrolling through old photos and looking at prints from the pharmacy back in the day. There was this artsy picture of me jumping in a pile of leaves from the year 2000. My first thought was, ‘That’d be a cool album cover’. All of the ideas I’d been writing about existence suddenly made sense.

Davis John Patton didn’t put ‘Songs from Davis‘ together alone. An old friend from high school choir Patrick Cunningham co-produced the EP with Davis, while Chris Bethea mixed it. “I was going back to the indie folk roots I started with,” Davis explained. “That was my direction. Patrick brought the largeness to the songs and added a lot of scale. My default is always a simple and stripped-back arrangement. His default is always ‘play around as much as you can’. We tried to find the middle ground and balance out the EP with soft and big moments.

Of ‘The Oceans‘ Davis told us that he’d been thinking about the big questions – life, death, what happens before the latter and that’s reflected in the song: “The lyrics stick out with these scary images of a roaring ocean and thundering storm. It’s such a dark, weighty question. You’re faced with the realization you’re not the strongest person here or the greatest authority in the whole universe.

 

About Jonathan Aird 2838 Articles
Sure, I could climb high in a tree, or go to Skye on my holiday. I could be happy. All I really want is the excitement of first hearing The Byrds, the amazement of decades of Dylan's music, or the thrill of seeing a band like The Long Ryders live. That's not much to ask, is it?
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