Much of the discussion about the solo work of singer-songwriter Richard Dawson paints a picture of him as an outsider folk figure. He is perhaps a one-person vanguard, though his idiosyncrasies ensure that his particular approach to guitar and storytelling through song is not replicable and not likely to spark a musical revolution. The content of his work supports such characterization.
Most recently, he completed a trilogy of complex, interlinking albums that were among the very best releases of their respective years (2017’s Peasant, 2019’s 2020, and 2022’s The Ruby Cord), spanning historical, contemporary, and virtual conditions with considerable powers of research, observation, and imagination. Dawson is indeed in a category of his own.
What makes Richard Dawson‘s new album End of the Middle feel like such a significant pivot is its smaller canvas. 2020 was incredibly timely, even prescient in some ways, but the gonzo style might have been off-putting for listeners who might otherwise relate to the lyrical content. Peasant and The Ruby Cord were remote in style and substance, concerning the past and possibly the future, and involving characters whose circumstances were less suited for casual listening.
End of the Middle is, by design, an album about the “small-scale domesticity” of “a typical middle-class English family home”, according to the explanatory biography accompanying the record. While this context is far from universal, the turn toward the home as a subject and additional inspiration from the narrative approach of filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu result in a more streamlined effort that is no less engaging and perhaps more accessible than Dawson’s previous concepts.
This more contained approach is also compatible with or akin to ideas presently in the air and other artworks, bringing Richard Dawson further in from the outside to join an existing tradition. In the context of other musicians, the domestic scenario has similarly inspired many. Björk initially planned for 2001’s Vespertine to be an album about and sounding like a domestic setting and events, with the working title of Domestika. Recently, the double LP compilation Yasujiro Ozu – Hitokomakura and Ki Oni’s Indoor Plant Life albums have explored similar influences and themes. However, their musical results differed from what Dawson creates here.
Beyond the world of music, it is present-day film storytelling (not just Ozu’s classics) with which End of the Middle so naturally, if inadvertently, aligns. Several films released in 2024, including Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here and Steven Soderbergh‘s Presence, likewise examined the family home as a place of individual and collective drama and transition.
Robert Zemeckis‘ Here, an ill-conceived adaptation of Richard McGuire’s groundbreaking graphic novel, worked with these same elements in theory but, in practice, failed to achieve what Salles, Soderbergh, and now Dawson do: To examine the home dimensionally and dynamically inviting reflection on the inhabitants’ inner lives and sometimes private trials. As Dawson’s music lacks the visual component available to filmmakers, his lyrics provide the domestic storytelling on End of the Middle, and they live up to his reputation for trenchancy even as the music is deliberately less wild and virtuosic.
The first track on End of the Middle, “Bolt”, exhibits Richard Dawson’s intention and effects, as his halting vocal delivery departs from much of his previous style. His singing underpins the intrafamilial isolation that is, in part, the song’s subject. In the first stanza, characters are depicted in relationship to different forms of communication or entertainment: a whistled tune, a newspaper article, a television program, and a telephone conversation.
However, each person is siloed, apart even as they are living together. The event that provides an unavoidably shared experience for the characters is lightning striking the house, which prefigures the most noteworthy musical aspect of the album: Faye MacCalman’s “clarinet bolts of lightning”, which feature on most of the record’s songs following “Bolt”. MacCalman’s clarinet serves many functions on End of the Middle, amplifying the emotional variety of the experiences therein.
In “Bolt”, the narrator’s attention to a force emerging from the clouds shares the sky-watching perspective from the conclusion of The Ruby Cord‘s epic “Hermit” as well as 2020‘s “Black Triangle”, a song that seems to have some influence on the way End of the Middle‘s “Gondola” develops. “Gondola”, whose vocal melodies are perhaps among these new songs the most reminiscent of Dawson’s previous work, is about the passage of time and losing time to TV shows as the mind gnaws with regrets about unaccomplished goals and dreams. “Bullies” unfolds like Belle and Sebastian‘s “Lord Anthony”, though the shifts between characters and arguably unreliable narration amount to a more multifaceted song.
Richard Dawson’s past references to visions and hallucinations from his memories and in song lyrics (like “Grandad’s Deathbed Hallucinations”) prepare the way for “The Question”, which is one of the LP’s highlights. “The Question” features a pair of characters – a young girl growing up and the apparition of a deceased train station manager – who are linked by the same house and a darkly humorous parallel involving the girl growing into her head (her intellect) and the station manager losing his head (quite literally). Dawson’s sung-spoken delivery of the apparition’s refrain, “Where are you going?” demystifies the title and illustrates that identities and roles persist even after death.
“Boxing Day Sale” could be considered a sequel or companion to 2020‘s “Fulfilment Centre”, in which the dystopian horror of working in a storehouse for consumer goods transforms into a tongue-in-cheek version of a UK Christmas number one. The repeated line, “You owe it to yourself”, is either the pitchman’s way of selling the products, the rationalization of the consumer, or some other perspective that contrasts with the basic dignity the worker of “Fulfilment Centre” deserves but is denied.
Thus, “Boxing Day Sale” is a sweet-sounding track that makes the resigned bitterness of “Fulfilment Center” more so. “Polytunnel”, which brings to mind Mike Leigh‘s 2010 film Another Year, shares with “Fulfilment Centre”, a chorus that contrasts with the verse by shifting into the narrator’s routine as a form of escape that is ultimately too brief. Both songs’ choruses are respites from anxiety and uncertainty that the listener shares with the characters.
As End of the Middle reaches its near end, “Removals Van” draws together many of the subjects of the previous action: television, hobbies, and intergenerational influence. Reflecting on the LP in the context of films like I’m Still Here, Presence, and Here reveals an essential difference between this song about people moving between homes and those cinematic portraits of the same. Whereas the conclusions of these films devote significant attention to the voided shell of the family home or its emotionally and cognitively drained family members, “Removals Van” ends with the anticipation and hope of new life rather than an empty space.
Finally, those familiar with the prodigious output of another Richard Dawson project, Bulbils, will recognize Dawson’s essential other half, Sally Pilkington, on the finale “More Than Real”. Her vocal and synthesizer contributions make the track sonically distinct within the set of songs, and the lyrics (about mercy, care, birth, death, and a desire or commitment to change) are recursive in a way that reinforces the record’s themes while introducing some new layers. In the chorus, “Words are mere echoes of the world” becomes “words are the foundations of the world”, statements that reflect traditions of philosophical and theological thought, even as the album mainly displays Dawson’s characteristic humanism.
More pertinent to this phase of Richard Dawson’s career, though, End of the Middle is an album in which the tamped-down musical approach allows the lyrics to come to the foreground more than ever before. End of the Middle might be more musically restrained than Dawson’s previous albums, but a minor work, it is not.