September 9, 2024 • 12 mins
Wellington muso Elliott Dawson has released a new song called Quarter Life, written about that time he turned 25 and wondered how his life was going to pan out now that uni was over. He called up to chat about it and how many of his friends are flying away overseas on their OEs.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Radio holdar kis Off the Record podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
With Let's have a Chat with Elliott Dawson Calder.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Nice to meet mate. Has the Capital City been today.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Strangely sunny given what has been going on recently, which
I personally am loving.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah. We spoke with Tessa from Mystery Waitress the other
night and she said it been to her of a day,
so things have come right. And as they say about Wellington,
you just can't beat it on a good day.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
No, you can't, you can't.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
You also actually can't beat that new Mystery Waitress album
I've been listening to about a lot recently.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Yeah, really good.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
As your sound similar to theirs.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I think it's probably drawn from the same New Zealand
guitar sounding family, but mine is a lot more dramatic
and a lot heavier, particularly with the news stuff. Yeah,
definitely definitely wouldn't mind being put in the same bracket
as them.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
So what kind of stuff have you been influenced by
over the years?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Stuff that I loved when I was a kid was
like punk punk, pop, punk rock, kind of like michemilical romance.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
And in my limited maturity, depending on your perspective.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Have also come to have quite an appreciation of that
post rock, particularly stuff coming out of the UK, that
country neuro Fontane's DC kind of people of the World
mixed with a bit of jazz.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
There's a pretty good jazz school in Wellington. Guys from
Trinity Roots went through there back in the day. Did
you go there or did you study something else?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
No, I didn't. I didn't study music at Union.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I studied law but sixty but most of my band
members went to the jazz school here in Ponicke. And
so the music that I write and the musicians that
I'm playing with definitely come from from that area of
the world.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
And so together you've come up with this song quarter Life.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
The vibe is existential dread.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
I had a bit of a moment as a lot
of when I turned twenty five where I was like,
oh God, and I'd finished kind of the pipeline of
like high school and then you do your degree and
then finished that, and was feeling very vulnerable in front
of the shape of the next forty years, being like, okay, great,
what do I do now?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
You sort of get to that point after UNI we
basically round about that time, you sort of think, Okay,
I'm an adult now. Yeah, hang on.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, that fully developed frontal cortex and the consequent fulsome
understanding of your own mortality hit me like a brick
through the window.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
It's interesting looking back on it now because I'm twenty
seven now. So I wrote a song about two years ago.
I'd like to think that I've got things a little
bit more sordid now, and it's nice to look back
on that song, particularly now that it's out, and be like, Okay,
I was going through it, but we're all good now
with a different kind of perspective.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Do you think it was a good idea to hold
on to it for a couple of years.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Oh that's such a good question.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
I think probably yes, because if I had put it
out immediately.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
You still would have been dealing with it, wouldn't you.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, Yeah, you know, we might have been having this
conversation and I could have been completely all over the place.
I'm glad to have survived that, for sure, And I guess.
I guess also I think particularly for people who are
my age, like my friends, and that it's more relatable
to them now looking back than it would.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Have been at the time.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Oh yeah, hindsight is yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Yeah, it's good joining me on the on the tracker.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Musicians that I play with regularly Olivia Campion on drums
who also drums, and Mystery Waitress Harry Skolls on bass
and Rubin topsand on keys.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Well, what a lineup. Let's hear it all put together.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Hi, this is Alliot Dawson.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
You're listening to Quarterlife, my new single on Radulo Hoback.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Hear colon love.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
I'm killing the sun Sma Brena fother this old the
wood is when the wind is how Settle.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
In for the.
Speaker 5 (04:31):
No long.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Cordon love. I'm killing the tongue.
Speaker 6 (04:42):
I thought you said it would be pretty. You're catching
case you hand it straight. Settle in for the lon, don't.
Speaker 5 (05:08):
I want to know. I want to know why you
think no chance? I want to know. I want to
know think I have no chance?
Speaker 6 (05:36):
Caught a lot some losing my strong running down for
the sixth time?
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Was it seven?
Speaker 6 (05:44):
So the sinner Sagan begging breathe.
Speaker 5 (05:47):
From the family. I want to know. I want to
know why.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
It's radio heard. That's brand new from Elliott Dawson. It's
called quarter Life and we're lucky enough to have Elliott
on a zoom with us now all the way from
Wellington Cure Elliott, thanks for bringing us that tune.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Thank you, Thank you for having me and playing it.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Is that part of a wider project? Is there an
EP or an album in the works?
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yes? Yeah, there is a full length album which is done.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
It will come out next year and there'll be another
single before the end of the year, in November or
their Adults.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Those are the plans.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah, yeah, it's good to have a plan. You said
that you write that song a couple of years ago.
The other songs have you been holding on to those longer?
Have they come about this last summer?
Speaker 3 (07:28):
We know we got it's a bit of a mix. Really.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
I put up my first album in twenty twenty two,
which is called hang Low, and there's a few songs
that were written kind of around the time just before
that album came out, and then the rest of them
were all twenty twenty three. It's a nice good spread
of that two years post finishing UNI.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Now that you've finished UNI and you sort of wrote
a song about that turning point about becoming an adult,
do you still catch up with the old UNI mates?
And still party like you're twenty two.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Not quite, But the reason for that is all of
my friends have left Wellington and are doing their are
we living overseas thing?
Speaker 2 (08:09):
If we cast our minds back twenty years ago, bartab
Be Weird did the whole fly My Priddues thing, which
is about exactly that, people leaving Wellington to go and
conquer the world.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
And oh really, I didn't know that that's what it
was about.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
That's cool, and you're going through that same thing with
all your mates.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yes, hopefully I can be as successful, although my music
is potentially a little bit more abrasive than Barnaby's.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Right, So you're not part of the next Flimo Priddies
project in Wellington next month?
Speaker 3 (08:37):
No, No, unfortunately not. But yeah, you're putting a good
word barnab me. I'm always I'm always available if you're
listening to this.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
There we go, Barney. His name is Elliott Dawson. Ellie
you mentioned that, I mean Flymer Priddy is massive. Bands
like twenty people in it. You've got half a dozen
people that play live in your band and you've pinched
them from other bands. In some cases, do you get
opportunities to pull everybody together and do shows.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
I played a show when the single came out at
San Fran here in Wellington a couple of weeks ago,
which went really good.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Although you are very correct.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
To assume that it is quite hard sometimes generally in
the live setting there's only five of us, although there's
more people that play on the recording than we would
normally have in a live setting, so it's not so unmanageable.
But I am un in favor of having a lot
of people on stage because it sounds better.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
And it looks cool.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
And how did that show go at San fran.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, yeah, really well, it was a bit nerve wracking
because it had been about a year or so since
I had played a show, but it was good. It
was really nice to play some of the songs from
the album that we haven't really done live that often.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
From the first album both right, yeah, okay, so you'd
be playing these fresh to people who, obviously, if the
album start coming out to next year, wouldn't have heard
them before.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yeah again, another similarity for fly My Pritties.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
True, so they because do they have a lot of
released music or not.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Really well, they tend to play stuff live, record that
and then then release it right.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Yeah, I mean it's a really good way to like
road test things. Like my preference in the process would
be to write songs, play them live, see what happens,
and then decide which ones to record, because you can
you can get quite a good indication of how it
goes in a sitting and whether it works as to
you know whether or not it should make its way
up onto a record.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
I was hearing a story the other day about Ed
Roland from the band Collective Soul, and when he came
up with that song shine Way, We're tooking like thirty
eight years ago, he sort of handed out a few
people and he ended up doing a gig and the
place went off and he ended up playing that same
song six times in the same night. And I've never
(10:48):
heard of a band doing that before. Is that something
you've ever seen?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Only one star?
Speaker 1 (10:52):
I was an orcand once for a show by a
guy called him And who's like a pop artist from Auckland.
And you know how bands, a lot of bands these
days they're playing with like backing tracks and like all
like Ableton setups where they've got you might have like
a live drummer and a guitarist and a singer, but
then everything else is on tracks.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
That was the setup that he was running, and so
for his encore.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
They didn't have any new songs, so they just played
a song that they'd already played once again.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Twice twice nice, so three times total. Well, if you've
got one album out already and another one on the way,
there's no shortage of tunes for you to fill out
a set with, so you probably don't feel the need
to perform a song more than once. But hey, we'll
just watch this space, I guess, and as you announce
shows and things. Where's the best place to find information
(11:45):
about you and your music?
Speaker 3 (11:46):
On Instagram?
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Most other social media platforms are dying or owned by
crazy people from overseas, so Instagram is probably the best.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
But you got to shop local a so get old
yea Q. What's your handle?
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Just Elliott Elliot Dawson, two l's two t's.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
T's Elliott Dawson. Thanks for your time on hed ache.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Radio hold Aches off the Record podcast.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Why not subscribe so they download automatically and.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Don't forget to rate us five stars? Thanks mate? Find
out more about this.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Podcast and the people who make it at hodache dot
co dot nz. It
Welcome to Radio holdar kis Off the Record podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
With Let's have a Chat with Elliott Dawson Calder.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Nice to meet mate. Has the Capital City been today.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Strangely sunny given what has been going on recently, which
I personally am loving.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah. We spoke with Tessa from Mystery Waitress the other
night and she said it been to her of a day,
so things have come right. And as they say about Wellington,
you just can't beat it on a good day.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
No, you can't, you can't.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
You also actually can't beat that new Mystery Waitress album
I've been listening to about a lot recently.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Yeah, really good.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
As your sound similar to theirs.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I think it's probably drawn from the same New Zealand
guitar sounding family, but mine is a lot more dramatic
and a lot heavier, particularly with the news stuff. Yeah,
definitely definitely wouldn't mind being put in the same bracket
as them.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
So what kind of stuff have you been influenced by
over the years?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Stuff that I loved when I was a kid was
like punk punk, pop, punk rock, kind of like michemilical romance.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
And in my limited maturity, depending on your perspective.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Have also come to have quite an appreciation of that
post rock, particularly stuff coming out of the UK, that
country neuro Fontane's DC kind of people of the World
mixed with a bit of jazz.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
There's a pretty good jazz school in Wellington. Guys from
Trinity Roots went through there back in the day. Did
you go there or did you study something else?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
No, I didn't. I didn't study music at Union.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I studied law but sixty but most of my band
members went to the jazz school here in Ponicke. And
so the music that I write and the musicians that
I'm playing with definitely come from from that area of
the world.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
And so together you've come up with this song quarter Life.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
The vibe is existential dread.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
I had a bit of a moment as a lot
of when I turned twenty five where I was like,
oh God, and I'd finished kind of the pipeline of
like high school and then you do your degree and
then finished that, and was feeling very vulnerable in front
of the shape of the next forty years, being like, okay, great,
what do I do now?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
You sort of get to that point after UNI we
basically round about that time, you sort of think, Okay,
I'm an adult now. Yeah, hang on.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, that fully developed frontal cortex and the consequent fulsome
understanding of your own mortality hit me like a brick
through the window.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
It's interesting looking back on it now because I'm twenty
seven now. So I wrote a song about two years ago.
I'd like to think that I've got things a little
bit more sordid now, and it's nice to look back
on that song, particularly now that it's out, and be like, Okay,
I was going through it, but we're all good now
with a different kind of perspective.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Do you think it was a good idea to hold
on to it for a couple of years.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Oh that's such a good question.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
I think probably yes, because if I had put it
out immediately.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
You still would have been dealing with it, wouldn't you.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, Yeah, you know, we might have been having this
conversation and I could have been completely all over the place.
I'm glad to have survived that, for sure, And I guess.
I guess also I think particularly for people who are
my age, like my friends, and that it's more relatable
to them now looking back than it would.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Have been at the time.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Oh yeah, hindsight is yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Yeah, it's good joining me on the on the tracker.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Musicians that I play with regularly Olivia Campion on drums
who also drums, and Mystery Waitress Harry Skolls on bass
and Rubin topsand on keys.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Well, what a lineup. Let's hear it all put together.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Hi, this is Alliot Dawson.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
You're listening to Quarterlife, my new single on Radulo Hoback.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Hear colon love.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
I'm killing the sun Sma Brena fother this old the
wood is when the wind is how Settle.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
In for the.
Speaker 5 (04:31):
No long.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Cordon love. I'm killing the tongue.
Speaker 6 (04:42):
I thought you said it would be pretty. You're catching
case you hand it straight. Settle in for the lon, don't.
Speaker 5 (05:08):
I want to know. I want to know why you
think no chance? I want to know. I want to
know think I have no chance?
Speaker 6 (05:36):
Caught a lot some losing my strong running down for
the sixth time?
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Was it seven?
Speaker 6 (05:44):
So the sinner Sagan begging breathe.
Speaker 5 (05:47):
From the family. I want to know. I want to
know why.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
It's radio heard. That's brand new from Elliott Dawson. It's
called quarter Life and we're lucky enough to have Elliott
on a zoom with us now all the way from
Wellington Cure Elliott, thanks for bringing us that tune.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Thank you, Thank you for having me and playing it.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Is that part of a wider project? Is there an
EP or an album in the works?
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yes? Yeah, there is a full length album which is done.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
It will come out next year and there'll be another
single before the end of the year, in November or
their Adults.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Those are the plans.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah, yeah, it's good to have a plan. You said
that you write that song a couple of years ago.
The other songs have you been holding on to those longer?
Have they come about this last summer?
Speaker 3 (07:28):
We know we got it's a bit of a mix. Really.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
I put up my first album in twenty twenty two,
which is called hang Low, and there's a few songs
that were written kind of around the time just before
that album came out, and then the rest of them
were all twenty twenty three. It's a nice good spread
of that two years post finishing UNI.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Now that you've finished UNI and you sort of wrote
a song about that turning point about becoming an adult,
do you still catch up with the old UNI mates?
And still party like you're twenty two.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Not quite, But the reason for that is all of
my friends have left Wellington and are doing their are
we living overseas thing?
Speaker 2 (08:09):
If we cast our minds back twenty years ago, bartab
Be Weird did the whole fly My Priddues thing, which
is about exactly that, people leaving Wellington to go and
conquer the world.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
And oh really, I didn't know that that's what it
was about.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
That's cool, and you're going through that same thing with
all your mates.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yes, hopefully I can be as successful, although my music
is potentially a little bit more abrasive than Barnaby's.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Right, So you're not part of the next Flimo Priddies
project in Wellington next month?
Speaker 3 (08:37):
No, No, unfortunately not. But yeah, you're putting a good
word barnab me. I'm always I'm always available if you're
listening to this.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
There we go, Barney. His name is Elliott Dawson. Ellie
you mentioned that, I mean Flymer Priddy is massive. Bands
like twenty people in it. You've got half a dozen
people that play live in your band and you've pinched
them from other bands. In some cases, do you get
opportunities to pull everybody together and do shows.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
I played a show when the single came out at
San Fran here in Wellington a couple of weeks ago,
which went really good.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Although you are very correct.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
To assume that it is quite hard sometimes generally in
the live setting there's only five of us, although there's
more people that play on the recording than we would
normally have in a live setting, so it's not so unmanageable.
But I am un in favor of having a lot
of people on stage because it sounds better.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
And it looks cool.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
And how did that show go at San fran.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, yeah, really well, it was a bit nerve wracking
because it had been about a year or so since
I had played a show, but it was good. It
was really nice to play some of the songs from
the album that we haven't really done live that often.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
From the first album both right, yeah, okay, so you'd
be playing these fresh to people who, obviously, if the
album start coming out to next year, wouldn't have heard
them before.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yeah again, another similarity for fly My Pritties.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
True, so they because do they have a lot of
released music or not.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Really well, they tend to play stuff live, record that
and then then release it right.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Yeah, I mean it's a really good way to like
road test things. Like my preference in the process would
be to write songs, play them live, see what happens,
and then decide which ones to record, because you can
you can get quite a good indication of how it
goes in a sitting and whether it works as to
you know whether or not it should make its way
up onto a record.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
I was hearing a story the other day about Ed
Roland from the band Collective Soul, and when he came
up with that song shine Way, We're tooking like thirty
eight years ago, he sort of handed out a few
people and he ended up doing a gig and the
place went off and he ended up playing that same
song six times in the same night. And I've never
(10:48):
heard of a band doing that before. Is that something
you've ever seen?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Only one star?
Speaker 1 (10:52):
I was an orcand once for a show by a
guy called him And who's like a pop artist from Auckland.
And you know how bands, a lot of bands these
days they're playing with like backing tracks and like all
like Ableton setups where they've got you might have like
a live drummer and a guitarist and a singer, but
then everything else is on tracks.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
That was the setup that he was running, and so
for his encore.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
They didn't have any new songs, so they just played
a song that they'd already played once again.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Twice twice nice, so three times total. Well, if you've
got one album out already and another one on the way,
there's no shortage of tunes for you to fill out
a set with, so you probably don't feel the need
to perform a song more than once. But hey, we'll
just watch this space, I guess, and as you announce
shows and things. Where's the best place to find information
(11:45):
about you and your music?
Speaker 3 (11:46):
On Instagram?
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Most other social media platforms are dying or owned by
crazy people from overseas, so Instagram is probably the best.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
But you got to shop local a so get old
yea Q. What's your handle?
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Just Elliott Elliot Dawson, two l's two t's.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
T's Elliott Dawson. Thanks for your time on hed ache.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Radio hold Aches off the Record podcast.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Why not subscribe so they download automatically and.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Don't forget to rate us five stars? Thanks mate? Find
out more about this.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Podcast and the people who make it at hodache dot
co dot nz. It
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