#365songs (42 / 365)

Richard Dawson deals in some kinda skronky proggy avant-folk story songs, all things that are generally pretty in my wheelhouse, but I bounced off his album Peasant when I sampled it after reading a rave review or two in the wake of its release.

Maybe Peasant was just too ye-olde-sounding; maybe Dawson's voice was weird enough to put me off; who knows, but when I gave him another try with his next album 2020 it really got its hooks into me. Almost all the things that might be hard to stomach about Peasant are still here but the lyrics are decidedly of the (unfortunately relatable) present rather than the distant past, and the instrumentation leans a bit more rock than folk.

"Jogging" is the obvious entry point — and so it was for me — with digestible question/answer phrases in the verses and an instantly-likable opening line: "Recently I've been struggling with anxiety / To the point I find it hard to leave the flat." The melody is appropriately both peppy and melancholy. The lyrics are overstuffed with a charming disregard for strict meter as they hop between amusing-awkward vignettes from the depths of anxiety in the anthemic choruses and the struggle to escape those depths in the verses, the guitar jogging along chug-chugga-chuggingly all the while.

As its protagonist starts to be able to take a little bit of a wider view on his world, "Jogging" becomes another look at the core of 2020, of which nearly every song on it feels like a reflection: "I feel the atmosphere round here / Is growing nastier / People don't care anymore." Every character in 2020 is struggling with this in their own way and "Jogging"'s, for all their challenges, seems to be one of the more successful ones.