Artist description Jeff plays guitars, bass, keyboards, drums, sings, write songs, produces and engineers. All types of music come out of his ever-growing studio.

Music Style All styles, classical to rock

Musical Influences Steely Dan, Neil Young, Bob James

Artist History Jeff has written hundreds of songs, and the home studio keeps growing. Unless noted,he is playing all the instruments and performing the vocals,and is also the writer of music and lyrics.Several of the songs here were recorded on a four-track TASCAM Portastudio 244 (shown on the cover art for True Love), which I bought in 1983. Those songs are Misty Morning Sunrise, Summer Interlude #1, Love for All Time, Alpha Centauri, Getaway and Misery. Also, the basic tracks for Just Passing Through were recorded on that deck. I had a new head put on it in 1996, but now it needs repair again. Now that I have virtually unlimited studio capabilities (analog and digital), I'm still fond of this little Portastudio. Its two-band semiparametric EQ on each channel sounds to me much better than EQ on some much more expensive analog mixers. There are many songs that I wrote and recorded on that deck, often bouncing tracks to a half-track reel machine and back to free up tracks. I was going to mix several of them through a digital mixer to hard disk a few weekends ago, but the Portastudio suddenly speeded up, and the "munchkinized" vocal on one track suddenly sounded cool. Curiously, I discovered it was a good song which I didn't like much at the time I wrote and recorded it, so I recorded over part of it. Guess that means one should not judge one's own work but let the audience judge, because many songs I thought sounded terrible when written years later sound good.I have so many songs I need to produce, it would take years just working on the material I have, but I almost can't pick up an instrument without writing a song. I'm currently upgrading the sonics in my studio, both on the analog and digital side (I keep both analog reel decks with an analog mixer and a digital mixer for the digital path). Each has its own strengths. I just added a 24-bit digital I/O card to one of the workstations. You can hear the difference. I've raised the bar of sound quality all around, with clean mic preamps, etc. That said, I'm wanted to slam an analog deck without using noise reduction, but with high-output tape and calibration for that tape, noise is not much of an issue anyhow--except noise we want to make! Noise can be beautiful. I have a few South American wind instruments I recieved as a gift, but I'm not sure what to do with them (sample them maybe?).

Group Members Jeffrey Watson Dawson, other musicians when mentioned

Instruments Guitars (acoustic, electric, bass, midi), keyboards, drums, vocals

Albums Memorabilia (self released in 1996), CD in work

Press Reviews "Jeff Dawson's stripped-down, but smartly arranged tunes come off like early Tom Waits minus all the odes to drunks and bums. Like Robbie Robertson channeling James Taylor." –Listen.com

Location Orlando, Florida - USA

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