Passwords

Passwords, the sixth Dawes album, came out on 22 June 2018 on the band’s own HUB Records and brought back Jonathan Wilson, who had produced their first two records at his home studio in Laurel Canyon. Taylor Goldsmith wrote most of it after the 2016 election, while getting engaged to the actor and singer Mandy Moore, and has said the album is about how the two inform each other. He also chose where each mood would sit: the two bleakest songs, “Living in the Future” and “Stay Down”, open the record on purpose, he told American Songwriter and Paste, so that nobody would leave it feeling that way.

The sessions were rushed. According to Relix, Goldsmith called Wilson from a tour stop in October 2017, and Wilson, about to release Rare Birds and join Roger Waters’s touring band, had two weeks free in November and a few days in January. The band worked at his Fivestar Studios in Echo Park, learning Goldsmith’s acoustic sketches as they recorded and cutting the takes live. “We kind of rushed into recording this record,” Wylie Gelber told Tahoe Onstage. Goldsmith sang and played guitars, his brother Griffin Goldsmith played drums, Gelber bass and Lee Pardini keyboards, with Wilson adding guitar, drum machine and synths. Gelber and Pardini both left in 2023, and Dawes is now the two brothers.

“Living in the Future”, the lead single, is the album’s one real rocker, built, as Variety noted, on a heavy guitar riff in an unusual meter. “Stay Down”, written with Jason Boesel, best known as Rilo Kiley’s drummer, and Blake Mills, Goldsmith’s old partner in Simon Dawes and the producer of We’re All Gonna Die, is about retreating from the world, an attitude Goldsmith told American Songwriter he doesn’t share but found strangely cathartic to sing. “Crack the Case” was written first and showed him what the album would be: a song about talking in order to be heard, not just to air an opinion. Relix traces it to an interviewer who asked him about Donald Trump. Trevor Menear, then the band’s touring guitarist, plays slide on it.

From there the songs stretch out: the next four all run past five and a half minutes. Wilson added arpeggiated sequences to “Feed the Fire”, a song about the hunger for fame as the thing that will consume its singer. “Telescope”, the longest track at 6:34, is what Pitchfork heard as a return to the band’s older storytelling, about a conspiracy-minded man in a trailer outside Albany. Lucius’s Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig sing backing vocals on “Mistakes We Should Have Made”. “I Can’t Love” and “Never Gonna Say Goodbye” are love songs for Moore; Goldsmith told Relix he wrote the second in a hotel room on tour, meaning it only for her. “Time Flies Either Way” arrived, Relix reports, as a sparse acoustic ballad. Goldsmith had been listening to little but Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil, so Wilson suggested trying it as jazz; Pardini took over on piano and played his solo live in one take, and Josh Johnson added alto saxophone.

The reviews split over the mellower sound. AllMusic welcomed the album’s echoes of the 1980s adult pop of Bruce Hornsby, Fleetwood Mac and Steve Winwood. Variety’s Chris Willman also reached for Hornsby and called it the band’s mellowest record and its first openly romantic one, and Mojo gave it four stars. Pitchfork, at 5.6, admired what the album wanted to say more than how it said it, found the arrangements stale, noted that only four of the ten songs run under five minutes and heard Creed and Nickelback in the opener’s chorus. Paste, at 5.5, heard little beyond imitation of early-1970s Laurel Canyon soft rock. AnyDecentMusic averages the reviews at 6.2.

The opening three songs are the best of Passwords: the only riff on it built to hit hard, a song about the pull of retreat that its writer says he doesn’t believe in, and the track that Pitchfork and Variety, at opposite ends of the reviews, both called the best. After that the energy drains away fast. With the dark material behind it, the album settles into long, mellow songs, and the contentment Goldsmith was writing from gives them little to push against. A record made this quickly, on what Goldsmith called a “that works, let’s move on” basis, needed sharper songs to carry it. The first three tracks last just over 14 minutes. The remaining 37 are where it loses its grip.