Rich(ard) Dawson

Rich(ard) Dawson is one of the most fascinating and accomplished songwriters to emerge from the British folk scene in decades. Born in Newcastle and building his catalog with the same Baby Taylor guitar he’s had for two decades, Dawson’s lyrics are chockablock with the highly specific lyrics of the Isles—“the smell of freshly baked oaties,” pints of Guinness, historic border forts, tense football bouts. But even as Dawson has dug into his homeland’s vernacular, his records have transcended being “British,” especially since 2017’s astounding Peasant. With that record, Dawson began a trilogy that started with the strains of pre-Medieval life, perfectly captured the tedium and terror of modern technological existence on 2020, and imagined the bittersweet redemption of it all being washed away on 2022’s The Ruby Cord. Dawson compressed the sweep of history into three albums.

As if that weren’t accomplishment enough, Dawson compressed history yet again on 2025’s End of the Middle. A relatively simple album of picked guitars, circling drums, and occasional clarinet and harmonies, it is a deceptively complex window into the hellish cycle of family history, how we can be doomed to repeat the inheritance of histories we did not choose: —alcoholism, bullying, noncommittal marriages, capitalist drudgery. It is, again, stuffed with wonderfully evocative scenes of Britain, but the cracks in Dawson’s voice, the way it dips and dives on an emotional seesaw, are testaments to how human and borderless these pathways are. Dawson is a wildly experimental musician who works with Finnish renegades Circle and has a psych-rock band of his own; when he drills into our shared reality, though, he is one of our best lyrical analysts.