Preview Feature: Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen Kick Off Northeast Tour With Columbus House Concert

Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen from Dolly Varden come to Hogan House October 3

Since the mid-1990s, first with storied indie-rock band Stump the Host, and then with sometimes-underrated Americana band Dolly Varden, Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen, have set a high bar for emotional directness without sacrificing wit, and intricate arrangement without sacrificing clarity, building one of the great song catalogs in American music and becoming go-tos for the fertile Chicago scene.  

I still remember the first time I saw them, in the blistering heat outside a brewpub in St Louis around the annual Twangfest gathering in 2006, and it shocked me into better awareness – melting away the hangover, pulling me by the lapels out of the overwhelming desire to talk to my friends I might only see once a year, to sit my ass down and listen.  

I’ve been enthralled ever since – with great record after great record under both the Dolly Varden name and Steve Dawson’s - so when the last minute opportunity came to talk with Dawson via Zoom, even though I’m on vacation in Memphis for the annual Gonerfest pilgrimage, I had to take it. Even more so because Dawson’s 2024 album Ghosts is a high-water mark even with a career like his: one of the most beautiful looks into memory, loss, and grief I’ve ever heard, wrapped in a warm groove played by a cast of astonishing musicians. 

The occasion of our conversation was a house show at Hogan House – one of Columbus’s indispensable and often overlooked cultural treasures, run by two of our most selfless advocates for music, PJ and Abbie Hogan. I’ve seen some of the best shows in years in the intimate confines of the Hogans’ basement – by Robbie Fulks, Jon Langford, Wussy, Marah, and others. I’m as excited about this show – which kicks off their Northeast tour - as any one of those. Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen play Hogan House – near the Easton area – on Thursday, October 3, with doors at 7 pm and the show at 8. Tickets for the show are available at  Columbus, OH - October 3 – Undertow Shows with more information including the exact location upon purchase. BYOB, but I’m told the Hogans will provide dinner. 

The below has been edited for clarity and length. 

Richard Sanford: Tell me about how the partnership with Diane started. 

Steve Dawson: I moved into this House that I still live in, as a tenant in in the late 80s. Diane owned the house - still owns the house, we co-own it now. I moved in with a friend of mine from Boston [after leaving the Berklee School of Music]. He scouted the house and rented the 1st floor apartment. He is a musician, and I was recording some of his songs [on] a little 4 track machine. He asked Diane to sing some harmony.  

I knew her, obviously, because she was around the house, but she was kind of ignoring me. After that I was like, “Oh, you're a singer. That's interesting.” And then I think another guy was over here, this old folk singer guy that was friends with my friend Nick; he was sitting around singing old folk and country songs, and Diane came in and started singing harmonies. And I guess she used to do that with her dad. Her dad was a Woody Guthrie fan. Like, doing the dishes at night, they would sing folk songs, and she would just sort of gravitate towards singing the harmonies. Her ability to sing harmony is pretty amazing and she knows all those old songs.  

I know [those songs] from when I was in high school living in Idaho; it was the only thing on the radio, and I grew to really love it. I went down a deep rabbit hole of George Jones and Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, when I was 19 and 20. So, I knew a lot of those songs. I loved singing them [and] I was just like, “Oh, do you know this one?” And she did:  
“Let's sing 'Window Up Above.’ Let’s sing ‘The Race is On.’” And she knew all the words. And she sounded great. 

RS: I was really moved by Ghosts. And one of the things that struck me was the earlier album [At The Bottom of a Canyon in the Branches of a Tree] that featured you playing almost everything and this, with an a-list cast of musicians, have so much sonic similarity. Do you have arrangements in mind when you get to the studio? 

SD: It was left up almost entirely to the musicians. I made acoustic demos of the songs so that the forms -  you know, where the verses were, et cetera was all [there] but what everybody played: the bass parts, drum parts, pedal steel, all that, they made them up on the spot. 

With the previous record I had a lot more time to try things out because there was no deadline. It was open-ended; I was going out to the studio whenever I had time and [thought] “Maybe I’ll see what I can do with an organ on this song, and listen back, “Should I leave that off?” There was a lot of trying different things and seeing what would happen, which I loved doing but was very time consuming. 

RS: In the press materials, you mention it’s not lost on you that Ghosts starts with a song about moving on from the past then the rest of the songs directly reckon with the past or loss. Is that a contrast or is that a mission statement – the way to get past something is to reckon with it? 

SD: Yeah, you’ve got to go through it. You can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, at least in my experience. 

RS: Are some of these specific tributes? Is paying tribute important to your art? 

SD: Kind of. That song “Sooner Than Expected” is sort of about my brother-in-law who died of COVID, and I feel he warranted – he was definitely due multiple tributes. But I don’t name-check him or anything. Things that pop up in songs are important, but I don’t know that I’m thinking “Well, this song is going to be about this person I feel is due tribute.” It more [often] just shows up, if that makes sense. 

RS: There’s a combination of lightness and gravity in your writing – is that a tone you consciously shoot for? 

SD: That’s probably due to a lot of the music that influenced me that I love. Richard Thompson does that thing – especially when Linda Thompson is singing – with those songs that are just heartbreakingly sad and so beautiful. Or even when I was a teenager listening to Jackson Browne; he kind of does that too, maybe not to as fine a point as Richard Thompson. I think it’s partly personality and partly trying to get to the place that has so moved me in songs.  

RS: Mentioning Jackson Browne, when At the Bottom of the Canyon came out, I was playing that first track, “This is All There Is,” and my partner Anne commented, “This is very Laurel Canyon,” while I felt like I was hearing the Hi Rhythm Section. There are several songs on Ghosts that also seem to blend those two things – were those two sound worlds important to you? 

SD: You’re kind of dead-on. Those Willie Mitchell Hi records are some of my all-time favorites. I love everything about them, from the drum sounds to the horns to the singing, the songs, the strings; every single aspect of those records. In fact, Gerald Dowd [drummer on Ghosts] asked me what I’m thinking when I play drums. [I answered] I’m a pretty shitty drummer, but a goal is always “What would the drummer on an Al Green record do?” 

The other side of it is the records I grew up listening to are very much those Southern California ‘70s records, so that’s inescapable. [The influence] is sort of baked in. I’ve tried to run from it but I’m embracing it more in the last 10 years; and I think maybe it’s back more in favor again. For a long time, those records were considered super lame, but it seems like people like [Carole King’s] Tapestry and those early Jackson Browne records again. 

RS: Talk to me a little about Gerald Dowd. I first saw him play with Robbie Fulks and as a drummer and singer, he’s a force of nature. 

SD: I’ve played with Gerald off and on for over 20 years – he's the guy in Chicago you go to if he’s available to play drums on something. Until this record, I’d never recorded with him, but we’ve played lots of shows and there was a little period in Dolly Varden where he was the substitute drummer for six months or something, which was fun. 

To my surprise and joy, he asked me to produce his last solo record, Father’s Day, which was amazing. I got to know him a lot better and got to be sort of in on his songwriting process, get inside his songs a little more. He’s a great songwriter and great singer; a lot of people around here talk about how unfair it is that he’s the best drummer in town, also a formidable singer-songwriter, and also super funny and nice. When I thought “I want to make a record that’s live in the studio,” he was the first person I thought of. 

RS: Tell me about the rest of the players. 

SD: [I had prior relationships with] everyone except Brian Wilkie, the pedal steel player. I’ve played with him a little bit here and there and seen him around town but hadn’t played music with him very often. Alton Smith, the keyboard player and harmony singer, again, I’ve played shows with him pretty regularly for 20 years. He and I have very similar sorts of influences, so things come out really easy in terms of [my] saying “Play like you’re on a Hi record, or play like you’re on a Willie Nelson record,” he’s got it. 

John Abbey, the bass player, runs a recording studio called Kingsize Soundlabs where we recorded this record. I love working with John – he's a great person, a great, creative bass player, and he and Gerald play together a lot [so] they have sort of a telepathy going.  

Nora O’Connor, I’ve known forever as a singer around town, but we’ve never made music together; occasionally we’re on the same gig or I’d go see her sing. She actually approached me about helping record some of the stuff for her last record, My Heart, at my studio Kernel Sound Emporium. She’s one of those people that could harmonize to anything, and she hears in multiple layers: so, when I was thinking of someone to sing harmony on that “Oh, California,” song, I immediately thought of her, and she nailed it. She added some sneaky third parts in there so it’s not just two-part harmony. She’s adding bonus harmonies I didn’t even hear. 

Chris Green [who did horn charts and the saxophone solo on “It Was a Mistake”] is a newer acquaintance of mine. A common friend of ours, John Meade, put together a band called The Soul Avengers, that started out as an Al Green band for one show called Love and Happiness, then we did soul music of the ‘60s and ‘70s a couple of times. That’s how I knew Chris and when I approached him, he was like, “Let’s do it.” He’s great – he just got signed to [storied Chicago indie label] Pravda Records as their first jazz signing. 

RS: Give me a taste of what the shows will be like. What can people expect?  

SD: It’ll switch a little bit, but Diane and I have been singing since the early ‘90s, you know, so we tend to both like singing specific songs [together]. There’s a handful that we will always do – some of the Dolly Varden songs, some of my songs; we’ll cover the whole history. We’ll do more than a few from the new record, and we usually throw in a cover or two, like the Merle Haggard or Buck Owens songs that are how we met singing. 

Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen play Hogan House on 10/03/2024 with doors at 7:00 pm. For tickets, visit Columbus, OH - October 3 – Undertow Shows 

Terrific 2003 Dolly Varden show from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/dvarden2003-02-28.flac16