Dylan Cloud: Round 2
- Oliver Blakemore
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Every now and then, life feels like a story. It’s poetic and makes sense. If you pay attention, you can even see it.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with Dylan Cloud about a song that he talked about as one of the first times he properly felt like he knew what he was doing. It was called “Straight On,” and it was cool.
And yesterday, a more thoughtful and self-aware Dylan Cloud expressed to me that he’s sitting on a library of material that he’s all but vibrating to share with the world.
It wasn’t even that many years, honestly. As two scenes in a story, it was satisfying to me, though, because it’s fun to watch a talented, driven young person delving deep in themself and finding—surprise—themself.
Three Roads into the Blues
It’s odd and magical how roads of introspection lead us into understanding each other more. It’s a truism of the blues, and always has been, that if you want to talk to everyone, then you need to talk about experiences of your own so intimate that nobody else could understand them.
As we come square with figuring out that nobody’s ever going to understand what we say, no matter how we say it, we stumble our way into embodying the truth.
The truth is, it ain’t about people understanding you. It’s about people understanding themselves, and maybe you get to walk with them a while.
Dylan is in the process of recording songs with a band to be released sometime in the near future. He shared three of them with me.
“No Take”, on its way towards becoming a favorite with people who know him, this bluesy boundary ballad rides a restrained ferocity. “What is a boundary ballad?” you ask. I may have coined the term, but you’ve heard hundreds of them. They’re the songs crystalizing those moments in life when the lyricist had to set a boundary. Dylan encoded this element of personal code building in a hard-edged five minutes that promises to be a loud piece of move-your-body rock and roll.
In “Three Days Straight”, Dylan shares a quiet and melodic story about grief. The song flows around the edges and forgiving curves of Dylan’s hybridized guitar style—a metalhead busker, skater, punk, and child of the blues. It’s a musical and hummable song.
“Round 2” stuck in my head. The song delivers, casually and without pretense, a profound sense of the layered emotional landscape of growing around loss, and does so on a backbone of blues rock that gets into the nerves and leaves you wondering about yourself.
At present, Dylan has been taking these songs out for a spin, performing them at bars and small venues. Sometimes he performs them solo, and sometimes with bands—just him and drums sometimes, or him and drums and a bass. He’s trying them out—seeing how they fit the curves of the world.
He’s also in the studio with them, recording them and getting them ready for release. But he’s looking forward to being exploring the versatility of the songs as he’s written them.
Fighting with His Guitar
Dylan plays guitar like he’s in a fight with it. One of these fights between familiar equals, where neither of them expects to win, but they need to show up anyway. He’s a messily calculated guitar player, sometimes plucking out a delicate riff and sometimes slamming metallic cords at unsuspecting passersby. His voice has a similarly wildly precise quality, ranging from true-toned notes that my old choir director would have called “violinesque”, all the way along into a pack-a-day growl that argues with his guitar distortion and sometimes wins.
In light of which it seems only right that his original songs should not be cauterized into definitive studio versions. In an organic evolution of function following form, you will likely see many versions of Dylan’s songs.
Ed Note
More about FPN26 later bute here's a sneak peek into the Playlist of Musicians we are working with closely this year
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