'Without You': No Wishful-Thinking Love Song
'Without You': No Wishful-Thinking Love Song
Dylan Taylor's 'Weed and Whiskey' confessional defiantly, desperately hangs onto the kind of soul-stirring music we once rock 'n rolled to before profit-margin algorithms left nothing to poetic chance
“Showed up buzzed to my best friend’s wedding. Somehow the story turned into me shit-faced in my hooker shoes. Oh I can’t lie, I blacked out that night. But it’s the thought that counts and I was there, booze in my boot ready to share. Oh I’m doin fine without you…”
About a year ago, Atlanta-born, Nashville-based indie singer-songwriter-troubadour Dylan Taylor started getting ready to drop single after single, in hopes of putting together the pieces of her next album. She’s been fighting the algorithm to get each and every heartfelt, original, confessional tune out to an overwhelmed, exhausted, maybe (pretty please) receptive, adoring public — dying to hear something new and different, and comfortably retro-chill.
To hear her breathe conviction into the often unbearable.
So far, she’s dropped seven or eight singles (did I miss one?), seemingly on the fly: “Rather Watch Me Burn,” “Man Down Mayday,” “Smoke Clears,” “All American Anxiety,” “Heartbreaker,” “Suicide Mission,” “Damn My Heart,” and her most recent love-lost ballad, “Without You.”
The ballad “wasn’t supposed to be a real track,” Taylor wrote in a recent Instagram post.
“This song was recorded during a vocal shoot-out I did with crow and [recording engineer/mixer] Joe Costa at Skinny Elephant Recording when we were trying to pick microphones for the EP…. But crow really liked it so he got Joe Pisapia to fancy it up with some pedal steel and now it’s its own thing. Hope you like it!”
The ballad balances nicely between the bow of that pedal steel, strung up in a wind-in-the-willows lilt, tracing age and eternity, and Taylor’s see-sawing tabernacle, inching like a lost hiker trying to reach the top of some personal mountain.
Taylor, btw, is an insider’s secret. A stand-out, a loose thread…the voices in your head clouding your broken but not beaten heart, tripping over shitty memories and second chances.
The dirty, bloody, outstretched hand, trying to touch some hem of almighty redemption… Who else can relate?
All your favorite country-rock-pop singers molded into one.
But with shocking, blurty depth, gauzy Renaissance-meets-Steam-Punk vision, and a head-shaking, hip-moving Top-40 way of phrasing everyday mixed emotions like Sweet Tarts fizzing in Mike’s Hard Lemonade…
“Without You” is quite the musical feat, neither firmly country, nor pop, but loosely looping and straddling somewhere in between.
It isn’t until she drops the deceptively sweet and innocent chorus-mantra (“I’m fine without you”), burying the lead, revealing the ways she copes (“…they’ll kick me out if I come back, but I don’t mind, got bigger fish to fry, like the ounce in my panty drawer or the fifth behind my bedroom door…”), making a lie of it all.
The ruminative tune will have you feeling sad and hopeful at the same time, while laughing out loud at boldly phrased lyricism that juxtaposes melodrama with shocking, tongue-in-cheek sitcom comedy — slip-sliding around in Taylor’s naturally curling, Tower-of-Babel dialect that ducks and weaves and hits, soft and bittersweet, like a gut-punch aftermath:
“Showed up buzzed to my best friend’s wedding. Somehow the story turned into me shit-faced in my hooker shoes…”
U2’s “One,” but without the maudlin, downward spiral so dense and foggy you can barely breathe. Don’t worry, it’s not that bad; Taylor breathes for you, for us all.
She’d probably be cool with any reaction, just so you get her drift. And if you have a soul and a spirit and a lick of sense — you will.
This is no sweet-16 wishful thinking, this is real life, real adult contemporary music.
Get away from the maddening digital crowd. Follow her and find out what’s really going on.
Until the next one…
She couldn’t do it without you
Credits:
For her singles, Taylor’s joined by top-of-the-line musicians who can hang just as much as rip and roar, including longtime guitarist Dennis Drummond, bassist Jon von Boehm, slide guitarist Joe Pisapia (k.d. lang), and drummer Max Zemanovic (Miranda Lambert).
“This [‘Without You’ music] video is the product of a workshop that was put on by Pixel Connection and Tamron Lenses in Nashville! The workshop attendees split up into teams and each team got to direct and shoot their own scene. Then Charlie from Tamron edited it while they all watched and let them help and ask questions [DT, YouTube].”
