Dawes may seem like an instant success story for the millions of supporters who have followed the California folk-rock band since its first release, “North Hills,” in 2009. However, for bassist Wylie Gelber, who dropped out of high school to join the band’s first incarnation, Simon Dawes, it was something of a last-ditch effort—one that has turned into a full-fledged career.
In August 2016, the band released its fifth studio album, “We’re All Gonna Die,” which peaked at No. 1 on the U.S. folk chart, No. 8 on the rock chart and No. 42 on the overall album chart. Since then, the quartet, which also features vocalist and guitarist Taylor Goldsmith, drummer Griffin Goldsmith and keyboardist Lee Pardini, has been performing nationwide on its headlining “An Evening with Dawes” tour in between supporting spots with acts such as Kings of Leon and John Mayer.
The Jackson Free Press spoke with Gelber over the phone before the band’s performance in Jackson on Tuesday, Oct. 24, to learn more about the current tour, as well as his past and future with Dawes.
What led to you being a founding member of Dawes?
The original members of Dawes all grew up in Los Angeles, so me, when I was about 15 or something like that, I met Taylor, and he was in a different band at the time called Simon Dawes. I ended up joining that band when I was 15, and then, we went on a few big tours back when I was still in high school. I ended up dropping out of high school to go on tour with that band. Then, a couple years later, that band ended up breaking up, and there was a guitar player in the band named Blake Mills and a drummer named Stuart Johnson, and they both started doing their own thing, so me and Taylor were both kind of living in the house that we had gotten as a band and wondering what we were going to do with our lives. I had already dropped out of school, and he had dropped out of college. We started playing music with his brother, who at the time was probably 16 or 17—that’s Griffin, obviously—so we ended up kind of starting this band out of necessity from the last band breaking up.
Had you decided on this musical direction or did that develop over time?
Yeah, it’s been developing, for sure, over time. I think there were aspects at the end of our old band where Taylor’s songwriting was turning into the kind of song that he writes today, so it was only a matter of time. There’s a song—I think it’s on our first record—called “Bedside Manner,” and that was one of the last Simon Dawes songs. There even were one or two songs that kind of crossed over and just never made it to a Simon Dawes record. But when me and Taylor started this band, it was kind of like we just needed as many songs as we could get our hands on.
… Simon Dawes was a collaborative writing process between Blake Mills and Taylor, and then, Taylor writes all the songs in Dawes, so there was definitely just a change there when the voice behind some of the songs kind of turned into one person. But it wasn’t too crazy or drastic of a difference. A lot of times, people call Simon Dawes kind of a post-punk band or all this weird sh*t, but to us, it was just a rock band. We were just doing our thing. We were super young, you know? We were just trying to figure out what music we liked, so I’m sure it was a little more frantic than our current band. It was a bunch of kids saying, “Well, we like this, and we also like this, so let’s just kind of smash things together,” but it wasn’t that crazy.
Taylor Goldsmith is the primary songwriter, but how does the songwriting process look for the other band members?
We do it the same way all the time, which is Taylor writes the song, but when he writes it, it can just be on an acoustic guitar or a piano, and it’s very folky at its core. It’s just kind of him singing, and he tries to keep a lot of his ideas in the early stages of writing pretty vague. When we get it, he obviously has ideas that he can hear in his head, and we’ll do some of them between the three of us, but for the most part, we’ll just start, in a sound check or in a rehearsal, just fumbling through stuff. On certain songs, we kind of land on it really quick. Other songs, we just have to work at it. It just depends.
A lot of times, some of the coolest ones are ones where it’s very obvious to everyone, “This is the feel or the parts to this song, and the initial idea that we all had sounds great.” Other times, it’ll be like, “Everyone likes it, but Griffin doesn’t like it,” or “Everyone likes it, but I don’t like it.” We just kind of keep picking at it and doing it like that. We try to generally leave everyone’s instrument, for the most part, in their own hands. Obviously, if there is a drum part or a bass part that someone really doesn’t like for some reason—which rarely happens—then, they’ll let that be known, and we’ll try to address it. For the most part, everyone just has faith in the musician next to him, like, “You play drums better than me, I play bass better than you, and you’re a better guitar player than me. Whatever you think sounds the best, I’m going to go with.”
What would you say is the biggest difference between “An Evening with Dawes” and one of the band’s supporting performances?
I mean, we definitely, I’m sure, are visibly having a lot more fun with these shows than we do on the other ones. It’s just nice to be able to stretch out. … When we’re doing a headlining set, it’s just kind of a relief. When you travel this much in a bus, and you’re driving around, and so much of your day is just sitting on a loading dock, waiting for something to happen, then the longer the set, the more artistic relief there is in your day.
We’re out here, at the end of the day, to play our instruments. That’s what we love to do. So the longer we get to do that, the better we’re going to do it, and the more fun we’re going to have doing it. Now, especially because we have five records out or whatever, it’s nice to be able to really play a bunch of songs that we didn’t normally get to play when we’d have an hour-and-a-half set and a couple records. We’d be limited to those songs in that set. Now, it’s like we can make a set list, and there will be songs that we haven’t played in a few months or songs that we never used to put in a headline set because where was the place for a deeper cut like that if we only have an hour?
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