Steve Dawson

Featuring special guests Alton Smith, Nora OConnor, Gerald Dowd, Brian Wilkie, John Abbey, Chris Greene, Diane Christiansen, and Tommi Zender. _____Hope, a poet wrote, is a thing with feathers, perched in the soul and singing a tune without words. In the hard-won and hopeful songs of Steve Dawson, the words are very much present supple, wise, spilling out hard truths and the tunes are crystalline often they offer the clearest glimpse of hope after all.On Steve Dawsons new album, simply titled Ghosts, his sixth as a solo artist, the Chicago-based musician and songwriter, well-known for the impassioned alternative country of the band Dolly Varden, crafts ten songs that find reasons to believe in music, in human connections, in desert vistas even as the ghosts move all around him, all around us. But those ghosts, those presences of the past, are part of why we hope. Loss by loss, year by year, Dawson reflects on the aching acoustic song Sooner Than Expected. Still he tries to keep up, tries to keep pace with time. He knows hope doesnt come easy and knows the ghosts cant be wished away.Im very aware the opening song says, The past is gone, and then the rest of the album digs through the past, Dawson says. It was a conscious decision that reflects how it works for me (and others, I assume) where you decide to move on but ghosts from the past keep showing up.