Were The Watchtowers Dallas Good & Richard Reed Parry

• 1 Alone Alone 03:48
• 2 Echo the Part 03:18
• 3 The Brightest Light 03:32
• 4 Your Hand and Mine 02:59
• 5 There's Time 04:02
• 6 Hope I Dream Again 03:10
• 7 Are You Gone (When You're Gone) 04:36
• 8 The Hole in the Wall 05:37
• 9 Not in This World 02:56
• Total Runtime 33:58

Info zu Were The Watchtowers

Were „The Watchtowers“ is the final recordings of Dallas Good of The Sadies, recorded prior to his unexpected passing in February 2022. This collaboration between Good and Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire (originally calling their duo “The Watchtowers“) had slowly been written and recorded over the course of a decade whenever the two had a spare weekend. “It has been the slowest moving musical endeavour of my entire life,” Parry says. “We didn’t plan to do it this way, it’s just how it happened. Tiny, joyous flourishes of activity a couple times a year for over a decade.” Many of Good’s collaborators make guest appearances on the album, including Neko Case, Kurt Vile, Yo La Tengo, Jim Jarmusch, John Doe, Jon Spencer, Scott McCaughey, Gary Louris and Margaret Atwood. The album explores the cosmic, psychedelic Americana sounds that The Sadies perfected on 2022’s Colder Streams that featured Parry in the producer’s chair. The final track on the album „Not in This World“ boasts a chorus of over 500 of Dallas‘ friends and fans from around the world singing together on Dallas‘ final piece of recorded music.

"We met in Dawson City in 2009 and started writing songs together soon afterwards. We worked slowly. A lot of life occurred between then and now, but somehow In the winter of 2022 Dallas was suddenly gone.

Most of these songs had already been recorded but there were a couple that were only half finished and still needed words. We never made demo versions of anything, except for one guitar part that Dallas had come up with and recorded a rough version of at home - he sent it to me and I sang some freeform words over it; Dallas picked out the phrase “Not In This World” from what I sang, and that was all we had for that song.

Laurel Sprengelmeyer helped me write the rest of the words, and Travis, Bruce and Margaret Good sang them with me in Dallas’ absence. Neko Case wrote and sang lyrics for “The Hole in the Wall” - an old instrumental folk tune that my late father’s band The Friends of Fiddler’s Green used to play, that Dallas had insisted we record. Margaret Atwood and Buffy Sainte-Marie lent their voices to a couple of empty spots.Pietro Amato kept me on the rails and added a lot of finishing touches.Hundreds of Dallas’ friends, bandmates, family and fans sang on the final choruses of the final song.

The morning after Dallas died there was a cloud in the sky over my mom’s house in the shape of an exclamation mark, I’m fairly sure that it was his doing." (Richard Reed Parry)

Dallas Good & Richard Reed Parry

Dallas Good
was a Canadian musician, songwriter, and record producer, best known as the co-founder, guitarist, and vocalist of the alt-country rock band The Sadies. Good was a pivotal figure in the Canadian music scene, contributing to a wide range of genres, including country, rock, punk, and psychedelic music.

He was just here at Hillside, playing at our winter festival as we livestreamed the Sadies from the River Run Centre on February 5 th , 2022. Less than two weeks later, he was gone. And just 48 years old. As Jonathan Bernstein writes in Rolling Stone, “The Sadies — Good, his brother Travis, bassist Sean Dean, and drummer Mike Belitsky — cultivated a reputation as ‘artists’ artists’ for their unique blend of roots-music styles, immaculate showmanship, and first-rate storytelling. In his tenure with the Sadies, Good collaborated with everyone from Neil Young, the Band’s Garth Hudson, and Kurt Vile to Justin Townes Earle, Gary Louris and Neko Case.”

We remember Dallas for his cool outfits, his quiet, unpretentious manner, his stunning musicianship, and his ability to perform live like no other, improvising and co-creating with other acts while never overshadowing them. For instance, we remember the time The Sadies happily played in a workshop with Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet at the 2013 summer festival. They covered Alice Cooper’s Love It To Death album from 1971 and it was thrilling to witness, not just because it showed the bands’ range and influences, but also because they did it with such exuberance and such joy. They ended up performing that Alice Cooper album together at the Garrison in Toronto afterward. And then there was the time they played with Buffy Sainte-Marie at our 2016 summer festival. As Sarah Greene wrote in her review: When the Sadies came out, they launched into Farm In the Middle Of Nowhere, a jaunty country ditty perfectly suited to the Good Brothers’ guitar playing. Then Sainte-Marie reminded us about the Sadies’ cover of her song We Are Circling (which you can hear on 2013’s Internal Sounds), suggesting that no one has heard it. Dallas Good gently teased her, “Well, some of them heard it, Buffy.” What followed was a maybe once-in-a- lifetime cross-pollination of both versions that showcased beautiful in-the-round singing.

Alone onstage, Sainte-Marie is a captivating, multi-faceted performer, but with the Sadies, she was able to really dig into one of her comfort zones: frenetic, hard-hitting blues. The band played Sweet, Fast Hooker Blues from 1974’s Buffy, and it was so honest, strong and rocking.

Dallas Good transported so many of us with his music, and yet he was always humble about his talents. He and his band gave so much to Hillside. We were preparing to do an interview with Dallas for a session in our Now & Then video documentary series when we learned he had died. The world feels smaller for his passing. We always felt like our hearts grew when he was around.

Richard Reed Parry
is the red headed musical polymath at the heart of the endlessly inventive art rock band Arcade Fire, but his work and story reach far beyond.

Born in Toronto in 1977 and raised in a community of ex-pat British isles folk musicians, he attended Canterbury high school in Ottawa, Canada where he graduated from the first generation of its Literary Arts programme. In 1998 he headed to Montreal where he studied electroacoustics and contemporary dance at Concordia University, paving the way for a career on the wilder edge of music.

As well as navigating Arcade Fire’s meteoric rollercoaster ride around most of the globe over the past 15 years, he also released his debut album as composer “Music For Heart and Breath” in 2014 on legendary classical music label Deutsche Grammophon, formed and toured in the acclaimed contemporary instrumental ensemble Bell Orchestre with AF violinist Sarah Neufeld, formed the sonic folk ensemble Quiet River of Dust, and collaborated and performed endlessly with artists from across a dazzling musical/artistic spectrum including David Bowie, David Byrne, the New York Philharmonic, Neil Young, Kronos Quartet, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Mick Jagger, The National, Spike Jonze, Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Justin Vernon, yMusic, Caroline Shaw, Sam Amidon, Terry Gilliam, Garth Hudson, Nadia Sirota, Colin Stetson, Britten Sinfonia, Barr Brothers, Little Scream, LaLaLa Human Steps, Bang On a Can, Alexi Murdoch, and The Unicorns.

In 2017, Parry premiered Wave Movements, an hour-long composition for string orchestra which he composed in tandem with frequent collaborator Bryce Dessner, alongside a film created by Hiroshi Sugimoto, at Barbican UK and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wave Movements was recorded by the New York Philharmonic and was used in the 2017 drama feature Marjorie Prime alongside the score composed by Mica Levi. 2017 also saw the premiere of Black Mountain Songs at Brooklyn Academy of Music, a multi media music performance based around the Black Mountain School, which he co-curated and co-composed with Caroline Shaw and Bryce Dessner for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, released as an album on New Amsterdam Records.

In 2018 and 2019 he released Volumes 1 and 2 of the Quiet River of Dust album series on Anti Records, which he launched with a 4 week performance residency inside the Satosphère dome of Montreal’s Societé des Arts Technologiques, where he performed both albums in their entirety inside a 360-projected visual world built around the music, for the Festival International de Jazz Montreal.

2020 Parry’s debut feature film score, for The Nest starring Jude Law and directed by Sean Durkin, premiered at the Sundance Festival. He also received a nomination from the Canadian Screen Awards for best Original Music in the feature length documentary: Adrienne & The Castle. His other film credits include the Sundance feature Eileen starring Anne Hathaway, the highly successful A24 feature The Iron Claw starring Zac Efron, and the Neon produced drama The Actor starring Andre Holland and Gemma Chan.

He has won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, multiple Juno Awards for both Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre, The Polaris Prize, Brit Awards, and Socan Awards among others. He speaks English, French and is currently studying Japanese.

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