Dakota Commons: "The City is Floating"
When Dakota Commons first picked up the guitar, he’d spent his life until then studying classical cello and listening almost exclusively to orchestral music. His ear was attuned to layers of melody, complementing each other with the precision of Bach and Handel. So what did he now make of Death Cab for Cutie? Tallest Man on Earth? Fleet Foxes? Well, it all kind of made sense, actually. He heard the careful arrangements, the instruments all bantering like intellectuals in an Oxford drawing room. But now there were lyrics, too: poetry and ideas conveyed directly to him in words. Dakota could relate to the folk and blues tradition of singing about love and heartache, but what happened to the folk songs from the ‘60s that talked about politics and immediate issues? Dakota would approach his own lyrics with a much broader scope than what he was hearing in contemporary music.
Indeed, one track on his upcoming debut EP, The City Is Floating, is entitled Climate Change and feels like a slow-burning descent to the cataclysms that await us. Another, Price of Everything, confronts the listener with the economic inequalities of the first world (this one was written on ukulele while Dakota was visiting super-affluent Monaco during yacht week). The title track is accompanied by a sharp music video that features Dakota adrift in a culture of detachment, slowly coming unmoored and floating away from who he is along with the rest of us. It's a scathing send-up of the American class system and the human-level effects of gentrification.
Yet, unlike town criers such as early Bob Dylan, who screams from a soapbox over three basic chords on an untuned guitar, Dakota never abandons musical perfection for the sake of what he has to say. The lyrics are dreamily picturesque, and the music itself could, like his classical influences, stand on its own: Dakota’s voice is ethereal and unique, his finger-picked guitar is pristine and disarming, and the harmony of it all comes together to make The City Is Floating a one-of-a-kind debut, and introduces Dakota Commons as a town crier who, despite the softness of his speech, demands to be heard by the indie folk audiences of our time.
Have a listen and keep up with Dakota Commans on social media:
