The Ultimate Setlist: Dawes

What is The Ultimate Setlist? Here's the introduction.

Coming up with your own personal perfect setlist requires an intimate knowledge of the artists body of work, and of their habits on stage. I wanted to make one for Elton John, but I don't think I'm there yet. I could definitely come up with 20-30 songs by him that I know and love, but so much of it is just going to be the 20-30 songs by Elton John that everybody loves. I need to become more acquainted with more of his music to find the oddities and oft-overlooked songs that stand out in my own head in order to write down a unique setlist. Sure, I know his greatest hits, and every song on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Honky Chateau, Madman Across the Water, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and Empty Sky, but there's just so many others that I don't. That's only around 90 of the pushing 400 songs in the Elton John catalog.


It's easier to come up with a list for a band with three albums. I first saw Dawes before they released their first album, North Hills, and I've been following them ever since. I've seen them somewhere between 10 and 15 times, and I know all three of their albums (plus two songs on an EP) very well. They're a great band from California that play a mix of country, folk, and rock and roll. So, here's my ultimate setlist, full of the 23 Dawes songs that I would just have to hear.

1. Most People
2. Time Spent in Los Angeles
3. That Western Skyline
4. Hey Lover
5. Love is All I Am
6. When You Call My Name
7. Someone Will
8. God Rest My Soul
9. If I Wanted Someone
10. All My Failures
11. Coming Back to a Man
12. How Far We've Come
13. Bear Witness
14. So Well
15. The Way You Laugh
16. If You Let Me Be Your Anchor
17. Peace In the Valley
18. My Girl to Me
19. Fire Away
20. When My Time Comes
--encore--
21. Strangers Getting Stranger
22. Million Dollar Bill
23. A Little Bit of Everything

Nine songs from Nothing is Wrong, eight from North Hills, four from Stories Don't End, and two from the EP Suitcase.

This certainly seems like a pretty good way of figuring out which albums are my favorite by each artist. I've always said that I liked Stories Don't End, and that it wasn't a let-down following the excellent first two albums in the Dawes catalog, but apparently I don't need to hear as many of those songs as I do from the other albums.

"Most People" is one of my very favorites, and it's always good to start the show with a strong crowd-pleaser. The only songs by Dawes that I've never heard live are the two Suitcase EP songs, which I'd love to hear. I love the verse in "Strangers Getting Stranger" that goes:

"We got doctors that know everything about us
We can level cities by the end of the day
The world is turning back into dust or maybe it's just
We're becoming all the god's that we've praised."

Also, "It's not that I want back all my innocence, just the joy of losing it again," is wonderful in that very Dawes-y way.

It's a big buildup at the end of the set with "Peace in the Valley" being very intense, "My Girl to Me" being very awesome, and "Fire Away" and "When My Time Comes" being loud and riveting, but it's a quiet encore. "Million Dollar Bill" and "A Little Bit of Everything" are more likely to be categorized as ballads than anything else, but are two of their very best songs. Maybe it'll leave us thinking.