Dawes • November 30, 2021• The Commonwealth Room
Reviewed by Justin Hicken
“We were backstage looking at all the posters of bands who played here before, and we saw our poster from 2018, and we just want to say it’s so good to be back in Salt Lake City.”
Taylor Goldsmith, frontman of Dawes, shared this with the lucky patrons at The Commonwealth Room in Salt Lake on a Tuesday night on the last day of November.
Dawes isn’t shy about hitting the road. They tour frequently, and Taylor and his talented wife, Mandy Moore, regularly treated their followers to “Instagram Lives” of songs during the pandemic. Dawes also did some full-band, live-stream shows before being one of the first bands back out on the road earlier this year. They were one of the first bands to play live shows to audiences as they hit the road again in Santa Cruz, California last May.
So while three years may not seem like such a long time in between shows for a city, to Dawes it feels like an eternity.
The previous occasions where I was lucky enough to catch their show, it was always “An Evening With Dawes”. This is something not many bands can pull off. I would say especially challenging for a band with just over a decade of records, but Dawes always pulled it off beautifully. In essence, it’s a no-opener 2 1/2 – 3 hour format with an intermission in the middle. Jackson Browne, who is a close friend of the band, is well known for these types of shows, and I wonder if the band followed his example playing this format for many shows.
This tour was a little different for Dawes goers. The talented Erin Rae played a small set before Dawes came out to rock the crowd with the night’s set opener ‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’.
I was personally a little bummed the show wasn’t a sell out. My guess is that it was pretty close to capacity, but I didn’t get the numbers. Maybe it was due to being a Monday night right after a long-holiday weekend, but you’ve gotta show up for a band like Dawes if you want them to keep coming back.
The set as usual, was unique and unpredictable, with a good mix of songs from each of their records. One highlight of the set was a Taylor solo cover of ‘Christmas in LA’ (The Killers). This was such a rare cover for Taylor that his sound guy had to come out and hold up the lyrics on a phone for him, but they nailed it.
Despite their desire to get out and play as many shows as possible, Taylor shared a sad story about how they were heartbroken that the band had to cancel some shows due to some positive COVID tests within the band. Taylor explained that to add insult to injury, they got a few nasty social media messages. (In fact, if you go to their IG story for that announcement the comments are disabled.) While most of the messages were supportive, not all of them were.
“It feels like this next song would be appropriate for those people”, Taylor suggested as Dawes proceeded to dive into ‘Crack the Case’ – a song about love, forgiveness, and trying to understand one another.
The set felt like it ended too soon. After closing with ‘A Little Bit of Everything’, the band came back out and played what seemed like a 12-minute jam session of ‘Peach in the Valley’.
My only gripe with the show, was that despite the awesome jam session during the encore, the show ended about 10:50pm, and it ended without one of Dawes’ show staples ‘All Your Favorite Bands’. I just can’t imagine a Dawes show without this song. Normally the whole crowd is singing along and we just didn’t have it this show.
A few thoughts as to why this may have been. Dawes has recently begun recording all their live shows to be released on nugs.net. This may encourage even more variety than we are used to. In fact, I had stumbled upon an Instagram post about how the Friday and Saturday Dawes shows at The Fonda Theater in LA featured “No repeats”. I figured that had to be just talk, until I compared the setlists and found it to be fact. So indeed, one of those shows also didn’t get ‘All your Favorite Bands’ either.
Notwithstanding my small gripe. The show was incredible and I hope Dawes continues to visit Utah in the future.