Steve Dawson - Ghosts (2024)

Chicago-based singer-songwriter Steve Dawson has announced the release of his latest album ‘Ghosts’ on Pravda Records on 14th June 2024. The album’s ten songs were largely written between 2017 and 2023, and combine “intimate confessions and tightly constructed narratives where there are no clear answers to violent changes. It is a world of ghosts who move all around him, all around us. These ghosts are often personal, but they intersect enigmatically with a broken world.” “Is this really happening?” Dawson asks on ‘Walking Cane’. “Have we learned nothing? Here we go again.”

Dawson’s last album ‘At The Bottom Of A Canyon, On The Branches Of A Tree’ (2021) which was reviewed on AUK, was pretty much a one-man effort. Dawson expands: “It was recorded and mixed mostly during the pandemic – I played all the instruments and sang all the parts (except for Diane [Christensen, Dawson’s partner] on one and my friend Alton [Smith] playing keys on one song). So, for this album I wanted to NOT do that. I wanted to play with a ‘dream band’ made of some of the amazing Chicago musicians I’ve worked with.”

The dream band included Smith and Christensen along with drummer Gerald Dowd, bassist John Abbey, Chris Greene on saxophone, trumpeter John Moore and veteran Chicago musician Brian Wilkie on pedal steel. Additional vocal harmonies were provided by Chicago stalwart Nora O’Connor and Ingrid Graudins (who appears on the album’s final song, ‘Weather in the Desert’; Graudins died unexpectedly shortly after that recording.

Dawson aimed for a live in-the-studio sound, elaborating: “Many of my favourite albums were recorded live in the studio,” Dawson says. “I was reading about Neil Young making Zuma and Tonight’s The Night, all the 1970s Dylan records, the Band’s second record. The arrangements on this new album were created on the spot, and rather than a collection of overdubs, the album is a performance.”