Rich(ard) Dawson
As Rich(ard) Dawson sat in his allotment shed writing lyrics for his latest record, he looked out over still green slopes of the Tyne valley with his only company being the wasps which would occasionally land in his brandy-glass cup of tea or the horses who would pop by to stare into his window, to stare into his soul. It’s an intimate scene that is almost reminiscent of the kind he sketches out across End of the Middle. “I wanted this album to be small-scale and very domestic,” he explains. “To be stripped back, reconnect with the basics and let everything speak for itself – to be really stark and naked by just putting the words and melodies out there.”
While Dawson is no stranger to big musical ideas, be it opening his 2022 album The Ruby Cord with a world-building 41-minute track or writing epic songs from the perspective of a seed in collaboration with the Finnish experimental rock band Circle, here Dawson dials everything down. An instruction to drummer Andrew Cheetham was to play everything so softly that he was barely touching the drums. “It’s the same with the guitar and singing,” Dawson says. “Everything is held back and soft. I wanted it to sound feeble, sickly, or maybe like a newborn foal struggling to get to its feet”.