So you’re sitting at a bar, having a beer in the early evening, there’s not that many people around and all of a sudden some guy sitting next to you starts telling you his life story. All about who he loves, who loves him, where he’s from and how he ended up here. It’s not incredibly uncommon for a drunk dude to start rambling at you at a bar, but it is unusual for bar chat to comprise one of the better new songs of the past 10 years. That is the case with Dawes’s "That Western Skyline."
While the lyrics are pretty self-explanatory, I’ll give you the rundown. A guy meets a girl in California, she realizes that she’s not into him or California. He follows her to Birmingham, Alabama to get her back, she refuses to look at him so he spends his days hoping to meet her eye, watching her father preach at the local church and hanging out a bar with a bartender named Lou.
Right. But what really sets the song apart from your typical story of unrequited love is the narrative structure. Instead of just telling you what happened to him, he filters it through a conversation from our protagonist to Lou, The Bartender. The songwriter Taylor Goldsmith says he did that for a couple of reasons, saying “the perspective allows the story to be a little more rich. In the first place, it’s easy to write a song and always have it dealing with ‘You and I’ ... but when you’re talking to someone about her, you feel a little more for the guy because he doesn’t get the chance to even tell his story to her.”
But Goldsmith does acknowledge that because the guy is at a bar, he might tend to give himself the upper hand and downplay his faults, saying “It’s a bit of a myth in his own head that is not accurate, not fair to himself or fair to her. And it turns into that kind of thing where you’re sitting in a bar and exaggerating. I read this really cool book Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis. He says that we think we drink to do away with ourselves, but in reality we do it to seem more grand and noble.” But all nobility is cast away through his summary of his situation alone in Birmingham, in what is probably the best line of the whole song, he comments “Oh Lou, my dreams did not come true; no, they only came apart.”
I asked Goldsmith whether this was a true story, and he said yes, sort of. He said that it had happened to him but it had happened in reverse with her coming to Los Angeles, she not liking the city and therefore him, but her staying for 3 months to try and make it work (it didn’t). However they’re still friends, and when he sees her he'll "embarrass her by saying that these songs are about her.”
There’s so much to love about this song even outside the narrative. Drummers take notice for what is described as one of the best snare drum sounds in modern music (Goldsmith says that it sounds so good because it’s louder than everything else), the haunting harmonies in the chorus sounding like a chorus of wailing souls troubled by regret, and Goldsmith getting more and more exasperated in every verse that he goes from simply telling a story (a la Gram Parsons) to pleading and crying as he realizes the situation he is in (a la Marvin Gaye). This is a spectacular song, a modern classic, an exercise in strong musicianship and a stronger narrative than I’ve seen in years. It's reminiscent of Bob Dylan and Jackson Browne, but also of writers like Hemingway and Steinbeck. I recommend as you listen, you read the lyrics.
Oh, and here's a fantastic version of Dawes performing the song live:
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