Premiere: Dandelion Lakewood’s ‘Dropping Leaves, Setting Sun’ is the sound of winter’s sharp sunlight

Danedelion Lakewood. // photo courtesy the artist

Kansas City-born musician Dandelion Lakewood’s new single, “Dropping Leaves, Setting Sun,” begins slightly ominously: “Dropping leaves/ Setting sun/ Fading years/ Rusted gun,” and with the next verse, it gets explicitly ominous, as the lyrics move into further imagery of decay with “Crumbling stone/ Falling trees/ Bleached white skull/ Rotting teeth.” The music is the sound of winter’s sharp sunlight on a landscape bereft of all life or growth, so it’s brutalist, but beautiful in its own way, with noise and folk intertwining.

The single drops tomorrow and includes a B-side entitled “Longest Night,” which is a noisescape to soundtrack a winter walk on the solstice. While you take a listen to “Dropping Leaves, Setting Sun” below, you can also read Lakewood’s story of how the song came to be.

“I wrote this song at the end of 2018 while staying at a friend’s village in rural Bulgaria. The vibe was all about endings, things falling apart, and decay; and how these broken bits are the substrate for births, growth, and renewal.

I didn’t get around to recording until staying with my sister and her family back in Kansas City after I returned from my 8 years of vagabonding abroad as a street musician. I was cooped up in a semi-finished basement room and had just begun to assemble a small home studio.

I had the old Stratocaster that I bought with money from working at a summer camp in 8th grade, and I captured the tune with a kind of heavy shoegaze chorus, lots of distortion, and thick heaviness. It might be my 8th grade love of Nine Inch Nails albums like The Downward Spiral, but I just wanted to capture some sense of the richness of decay. The noise outro definitely takes a cue from the ending of “Hurt”.

The B-side is an ambient exploration where I processed my acoustic guitar with a lot of granular synthesis techniques. A lot of my friends know me as this acoustic troubadour, bounding around forests, farms, and beyond. But I’ve been interested in electronic music from an early age, and I get a lot of joy from artists like Tim Hecker, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Harold Budd, to name a few. I started using Ableton Live at version 3 and got really obsessed with computer music tools like Max/MSP and Pure Data in the early 2000s. I’m still working out how to combine my songwriting and my instrumental ambient work. This single is the start of integrating those elements.

I’m playing with a band now (Bowl of Dust & Co.), but we’re still fairly fresh and haven’t begun the recording process yet. These solo creations that I’ve been collecting (for 10 years!) are impatient to finally be born into an album so I can move on with new projects.”