Happy 10th Anniversary to Dawes’ fourth studio album All Your Favorite Bands, originally released June 2, 2015.
The word that always comes to mind is “space.” All Your Favorite Bands is a perfect summer album because it is so open; there is not a single wasted note. The resulting album is a light, mellow, breezy, mythical Californian sound.
But the truth is that this level of minimalism requires great craft and vulnerability, and that is why All Your Favorite Bands is a timeless record. Most of the lyrics are actually about space—searching for it on “Things Happen,” regretting it on the title track, contemplating it on the melancholy closer “Now That It’s Too Late, Maria.” Just as lyricist Taylor Goldsmith carves space between himself and a former lover across these songs, each instrument on All Your Favorite Bands makes space for the rest of the band. Closure and distance become natural and important parts of our lives, when done intentionally. It’s not vibey good times: it’s meticulously-crafted peace. Chill doesn’t just happen; it’s hard-won.
One of the finest examples is “To Be Completely Honest,” which is replete with lyrical turns in which entire relationships can live: “the universe continues expanding / while we discuss particulars of just being friends.” The masterstroke is the titular phrase, which emerges as a preface at the beginning of each verse (“To be completely honest / It feels like you’re still in the room”) but is given depth by the verse’s end: “remembering the defect at the heart of every promise / well maybe that’s the only way / to be completely honest.” The honesty—the pure and simple thing—is no longer the subject: the thing that we’re really interested in is everything that leads up to the honesty. This moves our focus to something much more complex and emotionally rich: that the problem in the relationship was the fact that it started at all.
The other flashpoint of “To Be Completely Honest” is a single snare hit: before that final verse, there is a moment of dead silence, then the snare reverberating in that empty space. Lesser bands would have rushed those moments of silence, or dropped a synth or organ beneath it to cover up the raw vulnerability of dead air. Not this band—that openness is the point.
Listen to the Album:
These moments litter All Your Favorite Bands; album closer “Now That It’s Too Late, Maria,” is a ballad dominated by bass and drums, with the barely-audible organ and occasional guitar merely adding embellishments. There’s also “I Can’t Think About It Now,” a song with a two-minute, melodically-rich guitar solo that has no extra frills, only the essential phrasing to add to the song’s arc. Everywhere you turn on All Your Favorite Bands, economy of instrumentation creates a record that feels intimate and real: the sound that the story of heartbreak demands.
The title track looms over the entire record. It’s an extremely simple, two-verse tune that distills the entire project down to its essence: it’s over, but Goldsmith is choosing to remember the things he loved about that person—and hopes that all their favorite bands stay together. How and why he comes to that conclusion is the subject of other songs on the album, but this is the arrival point: that the space between our singer and his ex is not a space of anger, resentment, or strife. It’s just the way that things should be. The easy, natural spaces that form the contours of the album are lyrically justified by this central song.
But there isa rub: our favorite band didn’t stay together. Shortly after the release of All Your Favorite Bands, keyboardist Tay Strathairn left the group. Bassist Wylie Gelber followed in 2023, leaving brothers Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith as the only remaining members of the lineup that gave us this record. As the opening track reminds us: “Things happen. That’s all they ever do.” This record, so obsessed with distance and longing, and so intentional in its arrangement of musicians, shows us that honoring that period involves recognizing how contained—and thereby special—it was.
Listen: