Supersweet

Interview

Dawn Landes

A Brooklynite via Kentucky who's temporarily relocated to Paris to tour her debut album Fireproof, Dawn Landes has a few things she can teach you. First it's French (of course), then football, film scoring and how you should eat only white cheese if you want crazy dreams! 

Dawn Landes is a happy person, we’ve learned. She’s an excitable human being. She’s looking forward to a lot of things and can talk passionately about stuff in her life for-ever. Currently, she is working on a recording studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn - in the very building she’s once squatted. She’d casually say with a smile that “it’s part of the thing you gotta do.” Now that her widely released album Fireproof is a sweet success, she’s got even more reasons to be jolly about.

“I don’t know, maybe someday someone will write an academic paper on the relationship between Dawn Landes and Charles Bukowski,” she bursts into laughter as her eyes glow, “I would love that!” Dawn mentions reading him at the time of writing her hit single ‘Bodyguard’.

“Charles Bukowski was a drunk and an amazing poet. I really love his books and I especially love the look of his books because they were published by Black Sparrow Press. It’s basically a couple in San Francisco who hand-printed everything and they’re just gorgeous looking and that’s what I was first attracted to. I’ve read all his letters and I’ve seen the movie about him which he wrote the screenplay and I love the documentary about him which is amazing. He’s just a really interesting guy. I just love his play with words. It’s pretty unusual I guess.”

Inspired by the great minds, her latest inspiration includes Barry Hannah’s Airships. Dawn Landes’ work is often quirky but sugarcoated in dream-like weaves. Speaking of dreams, she says many of them are way off that they wouldn’t make sense to the outsiders. “Someone told me once that the most boring thing in the world is listening to someone else’s dream because you can’t possibly understand them but I think it’s such an insight into somebody, it’s pretty great, I love it,” she shrieks, “I love reading about other people’s dreams, I have this friend and we always e-mail each other our dreams.” Her latest dream adventure was an anxiety one, where she was onstage doing a show but no sound came out, “No one can hear me, my voice doesn’t come out and I can’t make a note sound. That terrifies me!”

Do you eat a lot of cheese then?

“No. But I’ve learned that certain types of cheese help you. I think the whiter cheese, someone told me that.”

Do any of them foretell what’s to come?

“Yeah! The ‘Bodyguard’ song, that came true. I did have a dream about being robbed and then I did get robbed. So watch out,” she warns, “I try to not talk about my dreams too much because they might happen!”

Dawn also had her big break from covering Peter, Bjorn & John’s ‘Young Folks’ by getting the old folks, The WST Bluegrass Band, to help out. And there’s ‘I Don’t Need No Man’ cover by Woody Guthrie amongst others.  “It was such an interesting concept for me, like a guy singing this song from a woman’s perspective, it’s pretty weird and that doesn’t happen very often.”

Maybe it’s all the switching/swapping themes that subconsciously hold a special place in Dawn’s heart. She admits to having a thing for complicating her bandmates’ lives. “I often find musicians who don’t normally play an instrument and ask them to play another one. Or like I got me the guitar player and I’m like, ‘Why don’t you play drums?’ Or got me a bass player and tell them to play guitar. You know, they’re musicians so they feel the music any way. So it’s not fighting for them and they’re going to play very differently because they’re not confident in their instruments. I love it, I mean it’s kind of scary and maybe stupid, but I think it’s fun.”

This is why the music of Dawn Landes is more than just music in its own rights. It’s the added charms full of personality that is layered within the work itself, hard to detect but many will find themselves forming a ‘bond’ with her music after a few listens. And that’s what makes Dawn’s music a little different than her peers’. We discover about her that besides having a day job as a sound engineer and time off as a budding musician, she reads excessively, plays football (with boys) and also done a couple of film scores!

“The first one was called Blackbird and I met the director Adam Rapp and he did a little budget song and it is a very dark movie, never really got like a big release or anything,” she sips the beer and contemplates, “It’s so hard to make movies, it’s so expensive, you just have to throw the dice and see if anything happens. And then the movie I did last year was called Familiar Strangers, that’s more like a TV family drama sort of thing. It’s quirky but not too much.”

Wait, there’s more to it! It wouldn’t be very Dawn Landes to just stop there, “I have a lot of friends who are making films and I would like to make a film some day too, but it’s tough. How do you even tell a story? It’s all about who’s in it and what’s happening in their career…”

Let’s hope she won’t move on into any other fields any time soon. She’s exactly what’s been missing in music these days – something that isn’t trying so hard or pretending to be groundbreaking but heartfelt and fun with a twist. She’s often carelessly called ‘anti-folk’, does anyone really know what ‘anti-folk’ means?

“Hmm… That’s a very good question,” she frowns and grins. “I think it’s like the phenomenon of rebelling against your parents. It’s a generation of folk musicians rebelling against the tradition of folk music; but at the same time totally embracing it. I think it’s got to be something like when something happens to me like I’ll be doing something and suddenly I’ll be like, ‘Oh my god, my mom does that!’  It’s that kind of thing, like you try to avoid it but really you can’t avoid it. That’s what you’re doing but the rebelling is good, it creates a little friction and sometimes some new frictions create new sound.”

Doesn’t it bother you though to be pigeonholed that way?

“I don’t know, call it whatever seriously, as long as no one says the same thing every time. If every time I sing a song and they say, ‘You sound like Alanis Morrisette’. Pal! I must be doing something wrong!” she laughs. “Not that I don’t like her music but if everyone calls me that every time I think I’d just have to get a new direction maybe. But whenever they call you different things, people are just trying to connect; they’re just trying to relate to something.”

What did we tell you? Isn’t she one very happy individual?

Dawn wears a cream knitted dress by Miriam Ocariz, available at Labour of Love, 193 Upper Street, London N1 1RQ