Check out the video premiere for the new single from Nashville-based Canadian Steve Dawson. The seven-time Juno Award winning singer-songwriter is many things: he is a record producer, label owner, guitarist and side-man and a solo artist and his ‘Music Makers and Soul Shakers’ podcast has now reached more than a hundred episodes. ‘Dimes’ features Dawson’s signature grooving guitar, complete with a lovely solo that grows out of the song. His clear, tuneful voice is buoyed by melodic musical layers, added by Kevin McKendree on the organ, Malcolm Aiken on trumpet and saxophone from Jerry Cook and Dominic Conway. To really enhance the song, there’s also backing vocals from the excellent Allison Russell. The Canadian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who will be known to AUK readers through her recent solo record and her work with Birds of Chicago and Our Native Daughters, makes an outstanding contribution to ‘Dimes’, her voice soaring in the chorus.
‘Dimes’ is accompanied by a fun, surreal animation from Wesley Thiessen. It’s the first single from Dawson’s forthcoming album ‘Gone, Long Gone’, his first album of new material since 2016’s ‘Solid States and Loose Ends’. Like many artists, Dawson found that the pandemic brought many issues and barriers to his work but the positive was that he had the time and space to be truly creative. During this productive period, he wrote enough new songs for three albums. Many of the songs from the first of these, ‘Gone, Long Gone’, including ‘Dimes’, were co-writes with Matt Patershuk; this sort of collaboration was a new challenge but the songwriters benefitted from sending ideas back and forth and pushed one another to put together a large collection of completed songs. The new album is due for release on 18th March and listeners should look out for the others at three-monthly intervals during 2022. Enjoy.
