A Review of Katie Dauson’s Emotive New Release - ‘The Company We Keep’
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Katie Dauson’s ‘The Company We Keep’ has a great story…
She was sitting at the kitchen table with her dad after dinner, glass of wine in hand, when the words hit her completely out of nowhere. Her face went blank. Her dad thought something was wrong. She grabbed a pen and paper and wrote the whole song right there. That kind of lightning-bolt moment is what every songwriter chases, and the fact that it produced something this fully realised — this emotionally coherent and sonically rich — tells you everything about where Dauson is as an artist right now.
The track is a love letter to 1960s psychedelic rock, and it earns that lineage completely. Strawberry Alarm Clock and the experimental spirit of that era are cited as central inspirations, and you can hear it — the warmth, the colour, the willingness to let a song breathe and move and do something unexpected with structure. But ‘The Company We Keep’ never sounds like a museum piece. It sounds like an artist who fell completely in love with a musical era and found a way to bring it forward without flattening what made it special.
The guitar tone is a highlight in its own right — recorded on a left-handed 2012 Gibson SG Standard in Cherry, Dauson initially planned to go heavy on effects pedals before choosing restraint and opting for a cleaner sound. That decision gives the track space to move. There’s also a subtle structural detail near the end that rewards close listening: the pre-chorus drops away in the final verse, a quiet hint at hope and change that works because the rest of the song has earned it.
The 3D vinyl release — a 7-inch picture disc with 3D glasses included in the packaging — is a physical release concept that deserves its own round of applause. Engineered, mixed, and mastered by longtime collaborator James Nickle, this is a release firing on every single cylinder. We’re completely obsessed.
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