DAWN LANDES – SWEETHEART RODEO

If Gram Parsons was a little more careful and a little less carefree perhaps he would still be alive today. If he were a she (to paraphrase Lou Reed) and had a playful sense of humour then he would be Dawn Landes. It is not only the title of Sweetheart Rodeo that brings the originator of country-rock to mind. The spirit of Gram Parsons lives on in Dawn Landes here in the way she is prepared to take framework – in this case the country-rock’n’pop that Parsons created and expand upon it. From the gleeful 60s girl feel of Young Girl to the knee-slapping country-rock hoe down of the sorta title track Sweetheart of the Rodeo Landes takes her genre of choice and flirts with it outrageously without ever coming over. More playful than its predecessor, the excellent Fireproof, Sweetheart Rodeo is a perfect antidote to any pretensions of serious you may be suffering. “If I’d have known her better, I’d have wrote her name in a little letter / Tied some hundred dollar bills together, sugar and spice don’t stick together / Like girls, working girls, two working girls…”

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