This summer, Chicago-based singer/songwriter Steve Dawson released the album Ghosts. On the new album, Dawson, who formerly led alternative Country band Dolly Varden, finds human connections, even in the midst of the ghosts we all live with. Sometimes that’s a process of dealing with the past. He’s recently released a new video for the track “Leadville”.

Dawson says of the album:

I’m very aware the opening song says, ‘The past is gone,’ and then the rest of the album digs through the past. 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. 

On the Country rocker “Leadville,” Dawson draws on his youth in small town Idaho to “catalog the crimes of racism and toxic masculinity in a devastated American landscape (two stoplights, six churches, and a jail).”

For this album, Dawson called in many of his longtime Chicago musician friends to contribute. And he also took a live approach.

He explains:

Many of my favorite albums were recorded live in the studio. I was reading about Neil Young making Zuma and Tonight’s The Night, all the 1970s Dylan records, the Band’s second record. The arrangements on this new album were created on the spot, and rather than a collection of overdubs, the album is a performance.