Presently, Louisville, KY native Dawn Landes may be best known for her cover of "Young Folks," for which she enlisted a group of "old folks"--the WST Bluegrass Band from Austin.
But that's all going to change with the release of her second album and first formal US release, Fireproof.
Fireproof's first, and perhaps most infectious track, "Bodyguard" was written following the burglary of Dawn’s Brooklyn apartment. She didn’t have much, just a Casio keyboard, a laptop computer and a hard drive….with her complete second album ready for production. Album two, and years of Dawn Landes' creative work, were gone forever.
“I never looked back or tried to recreate those songs, never played them, nothing. I just started over from scratch. I wrote ‘Bodyguard’ in the kitchen while waiting for the police to show up,” reminisces Dawn.
The aptly named album was recorded live to 2” tape in a single day in an old fire station in Red Hook, Brooklyn (along with drummer Ray Rizzo, bassist Jonny Flaugher and engineer Adam Lasus.) It's an astonishing mixture of the urban and the rural. Fireproof is like a little kitchen garden planted between high-rise buildings; in it’s own way, a remarkable act of resistance.
"I think albums are always marked by the places where they were conceived or written. New York was bound to color many of the sounds I recorded for Fireproof," explains Dawn. But at the heart of these songs, there's still that girl playing the guitar in a cornfield in the Midwest. The only difference is that the corn has been replaced by high-rise buildings."
