New York – All Your Favorite Bands, the forthcoming new album from Dawes, the Los Angeles-based quartet, is slated for release on June 2. David Rawlings, of Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, TN, sat in the producer’s chair for this fourth installment – a benchmark that simultaneously represents a sophomore release from the band, off Dawes’s own label, HUB Records.

The new record is comprised of nine new original tracks composed by lead singer Taylor Goldsmith, with the exception of the title track, which was co-written with alt-country artist Jonny Fritz. All Your Favorite Bands emphasizes the outstanding musicianship of Taylor Goldsmith (lead vocals, guitar), Griffin Goldsmith (drums, background vocals), Wylie Gelber (bass) and Tay Strathairn (keyboards, background vocals) that Dawes’ fans the world over have connected with and celebrated through the years. The album also features vocal contributions from Gillian Welch and The McCrary Sisters, vocals and guitar prowess from Rawlings, Richard Bennett playing acoustic guitar and Paul Franklin playing pedal steel.

Fans can pre-order All Your Favorite Bands through iTunes, Google Play or Amazon.

Deluxe packages are also available at Pledge Music.

The video for the album’s leading single, “Things Happen,” has just debuted on NPR’s First Watch. See it below!

All Your Favorite Bands follows the highly praised tertiary record, Stories Don’t End (2013).

Taylor Goldsmith explains why the album is called All Your Favorite Bands:

“The main line of the title track is ‘And may all your favorite bands stay together.’  I know that my favorite bands are a really deep part of who I am.  They help define me, they help represent me, they trigger certain emotional memories, and they stand for the ideals and lifestyle that I will always hope to achieve.  And I don’t mean rock and roll fantasies, but rather concepts like freedom and enlightenment. I would love for someone wishing me well to put it in the terms of ‘may all your favorite bands stay together.’  That would be a real friend.  That person would know what truly matters. To me, the statement of ‘All Your Favorite Bands’ immediately gets down to a highly personal and singular part of anybody in a way that few other concepts can.  So that’s why we named our record after that song.”

Previous projects saw Dawes assembling material in the studio and then fleshing it out more fully while traveling. This new record however, saw the group choosing to take the opposing approach. Prior to starting tracking at Woodland Sound, Dawes did two weeks-worth of small club shows around California with Rawlings along for all of it. Much to the delight of fans at those shows, the band tried out new material while Rawlings preserved future thoughts and ideas. Afterward the five would collectively discuss the set post-show,breaking the music down, deconstructing it and build the songs up again and after much reworking, Subsequently, Dawes became intimately comfortable with, and accustomed to, how they wanted to the new songs to sound. The end result led to Rawlings’s production of the band’s skillful playing fostering an exposed and un-agitated listening experience.

“Despite taking these songs on the road a little before heading into the studio, the only things we’ve ever been concerned with are honoring the songs and the inspired moments that come from truly playing together and reacting to each other. Not only expressing ourselves by how we play individually, but also expressing each other by how we play together. After spending so much time playing music on stages and having to react in the moment, creating comfort zones in the studio where we’re supposed to take our time, play separately, and play songs as many times as we wanted feels foreign and uncomfortable. In short, having to think about the bigger picture rather than our individual performances is what makes us a band.  With this new record, all the lead vocals, guitar solos, simultaneous piano and organ and of course bass and drums were all done at the same time. And listening back, we really felt like we were listening to the way we thought we sounded. And that’s all we could ever want.”

Keep up with Dawes through their official website and these social media outlets:

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