The many sides of Nataly Dawn: From YouTube and Pomplamoose to a new solo album
The singer-songwriter and muscian tells Andrew Buncombe that writing lyrics has been therapy
Do you know Nataly Dawn? It’s quite likely you have heard her voice or her music. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she earned many admirers and rather large audience on YouTube – 380 million views over the past decade – for being the front person of Pomplamoose, a collection of musician friends who beat back the Covid blues with cover versions of the most unlikely array of tunes, from “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” to “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”.
A frequent reaction to these songs, as well as the mash-ups that plunge “Every Breath You Take” into The Proclaimers’ “I would walk 500 miles”, is for people to smile and smile. The performances – Dawn’s voice, light and reflective – is impeccable and disciplined, with most of the videos being recorded live. But for all the care and attention, they are invariably happy vehicles to take listeners outside of themselves and that was particularly true during such grey-etched times. (One of the funniest, is a rather hammy version of “Mr Blue Sky” by Jeff Lynne and ELO)
One also senses the band were enjoying it all too. Often, they would play with a grin spread ear to ear, or a giggle of pleasure only muffled with some effort. But there has always been a more sombre, serious and weighted sound to Dawn, and that what I see during a recent gig in Seattle. Accompanied by guitarist John Schroeder, and Ross Garren on vibraphone and harmonicas, Dawn works through the bulk of a recently-released album, Gardenview, a collection of delicate, originally composed folk songs that somehow sound timeless.
Dawn also shared some news with the small but appreciative crowd - namely that the album is on the ballot for a potential 2023 Grammy Awards nomination, in Folk catagory. Two tracks from the album, “Have You Heard”, and “Joy”, are up for possible success in the American Roots category, for performance and song respectively. (In the rather opaque world of the Grammys, this is the first round of voting. A list of nominations is then released in the middle of November. There’s then a second round of voting to decide the winners.)
Gardenview is Dawn’s fourth solo album and the result of a decision to very much place her voice and songs, and a stripped-down production, at the centre of her efforts. For now, the other projects and collaborations, have been put aside. “I was 19 when I started this,” says Dawn, who is now aged 35.
The songs she wrote during the pandemic were reflections – hymns, she calls them – on her upbringing as the child of two Christian missionaries, and the baggage, good and bad, it left her with. “Those were my first songs that I ever heard growing up, sitting with my mom at the piano, singing hymns, and she was the music director at the churches,” she says.
The songs written during that enforced lockdown, where she says she felt pushed to write something “authentic” were not suitable for the happy-go-lucky approach of Pomplamoose. “Pomplamoose is about joy. Pomplamoose is about inspiring you to get your drums out of the attic and make your own music, and just be creative and let loose, and it’s a lot of fun.”
She says the 13-track Gardenview, with each song written by herself, was in some contrast to what she had done with Pomplamoose. “With the live shows, there are even fewer things so so it's even more pared down and that feels really nice. It feels nice to just be in being a musician in the room,” she says.
A key question for Dawn, is one she asks of herself, when she spoke to the audience in Seattle, and asked if anyone else had a religious upbringing. The gig’s at the city’s Fremont Abbey Arts Centre, a non-profit venue held in a building previously used for religious services. So, what impact did it have on her? There’s something of a pause. Then she says: “Wow. There's so much to say there. I think one of the things I've discovered in the last few years, is how much residual guilt and shame were driving the way that I operated in the world.”
She adds: “The feeling of I'm not good enough, and there's something wrong with me, or I need to be better. I've always been very interested in theology and philosophy. But as I started getting more into Buddhist philosophy, I really started questioning the idea of original sin and just how much it had impacted my framework.”
Dawn’s parents were evangelical missionaries, with the Assemblies of God. Does she blame her parents for leaving her with such feelings? “No. I think my parents were very loving. It's more just Bible stories,” she says. “It's not so much that my parents ever made me feel like I wasn't good enough. My parents were just my biggest fans. I know for a fact that they carried a lot of guilt and a lot of needing to be better, needing to be righteous.”
The lyrics to ‘Have You Heard’ conclude: “What a wonderful sound/ My Jesus in the sky/ He has counted all your tears/ Come and meet Him in the by and by”.
One of Dawn’s videos features her and her mother performing a duet of “Bridge over Troubled Water”, sitting together at the piano. Her parents are now divorced, and her father – but not her mother – is still a missionary. She says she has not spoken to him for seven years. What was the way she confronted her the feelings of guilt and shame she has spoken about? She says she read that fears were not something to pushed away, but rather embraced and examined.
“I’d spent my entire life casting out demons, pushing them away. You know, if you have that thought you don’t think about it, you push it away. And for the first time I started looking at these thoughts without judgment and realising that if I’m having insomnia, and if I'm having this anxiety in the middle of the night, that it’s something worth actually looking at that it serves a purpose.”
She adds: “It’s not all bad. You can just spend some time with it. So I’ve been spending time with my demons. That’s all.”
Has it helped her music? She laughs. “I don’t know who would choose it. I think we’d all rather just get a good night’s sleep. But it’s true, you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep, and you grab your guitar and write a love song to your demon.”
Dawn, who is touring with singer Bella Porter as support, was born Natalie Knutsen, in Sacramento, California, spent the early part of her life, with her parents as they worked as missionaries in several European countries.
One positive aspect of living in countries such as France and Belgium is that speaks – and sings – pretty good French, good enough so that one of Pomplamoose’s recent album’s, En Francais she sang in French, and learned some “jazz chords”, something she jokes about with the audience and her band.
Back in the US, she studied French literature at Stanford, where she met fellow musician, Jack Conte, and formed Pomplamoose with him. A few years later they married. In one of the video performances posted during the lockdown, it is Conte who has perhaps the biggest, irresistible smile on his face as the band plays. When musicians are driven to perform there is no holding them back, but amid all the pleasant distractions, Dawn – an indie darling for a decade – has recorded four albums of her own songs, all recorded with utter precision, and the lightest of touches.
The producers of Gardenview, which has the less-is-more quality of 1990s cult band The Blue Nile, are Schroeder and Garren. Dawn says the album was recorded in two weeks. The team often found themselves trying out possible parts, but deciding the result was better without them, and sounded more urgent and authentic pared back. “It was very fun and very meticulous, a lot of attention to detail, a lot of care went into the songs and the production and not wanting to overburden them with stuff,” she says.
Does she mean the songs themselves or the production? “Just not wanting to overburden the production, like it's very minimalist. And we would try things out and then compare it to before and just be like, ‘No, I think I think it's better before we added this’,” she says. “So so we ended up just not adding a lot of things. And then with the live shows, there are even fewer things, so so it's even more pared down and that feels really nice.”
Gardenview is on the ballot for a potential Grammy nomination under the folk section, and her song “Have You Heard”, for American Roots Performance. Another track from the album, “Joy”, is also on the ballot for a possible nomination for American Roots Song.
It starts: “Oh you don’t need to worry/ About life going too easy on you/ That’s the truth/ So when Joy comes knocking/ Maybe stop talking to yourself/ Invite her in for a drink or two”.
There are slots on the ballot for production and video. Does she think she can get a nomination? “It’s really exciting. I’m really, really proud of the record. I think it feels very genuine and it just is what it is,” she says. “I’m really glad that it actually fits into a genre. Sometimes you write something and you’re like, ‘Well’.”
She says she knows from a technical standpoint how voting works for the awards – with these first round of voting to cut the list down to the nominees and then a second, final round before the actual awards show (to be held in February 2023) But Dawn says that it can be tough for artists not signed to major labels.
“And what does it take for an unsigned artist to actually stand a chance of getting nominated? I don’t feel like labels are bad or anything like that, I just feel labels are made up of people who have relationships with other people. It’s this network of relationships [that] works together to support and bolster these creative acts and if you don’t have that network, and you’re entering into something like the Grammys, it’s like, ‘Well’.”
But hopefully it’s about the music and that people will connect? Dawn says she is a voting member of the Recording Academy (that organises the Grammys) and that at this time of year, she gets to hear a lot of new and interesting music.
“So I think that actually people do their homework,” she adds. “But it’s not really about that, so it’s fine either way.”
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments