Dawn Riding - You're Still Here

Vinyl LP pressing. 2022 release. In San Francisco's Mission District, there's a Victorian house with a garden full of towering tobacco flowers and rose vines so thick they're pulling down the fence. Every Sunday, for a great span of 2021, songwriter Sarah Rose Janko (Dawn Riding) would join producer & engineer Alicia Vanden Heuvel (Aislers Set, Magic Trick) there, to play guitar, sing harmonies, and hum lines for other instruments, before retreating to Alicia's basement recording studio (Speakeasy Studios SF), to roll tape on her Otari half-inch 8-track. This is how, week by week, Dawn Riding's record You're Still Here, was chipped out of the ethereal and into an expansive album of meticulously crafted and deeply captivating songs. It's an album steeped in intimacy and warmth, each song built with a level of restraint that leaves room for Sarah Rose's quietly fierce vocals and her powerful songwriting to sit front and center. Nothing is rushed and each song is presented almost as a vignette: some with so much stillness you can feel the relationships, some that build from the heart's interior solitude into swells of emotional catharsis. You're Still Here is a songwriter's album and Sarah Rose Janko, in the tradition of great American folk musicians, is laying most of her cards on the table - endearing you to her portraits of American life, and leaving you thirsty for the stories that haven't yet been told.