The musician Jean Dawson spent months in his bedroom in Inglewood, California, chain-smoking cigarettes and ripping his hair out, trying to figure out what was wrong with his latest album. “You should have seen it, the room looked crazy,” he tells me. “You know those movies where a dude is trying to figure out a crime and they have pieces of yarn connected to pins on the wall? It was essentially that, with drawings and guitar progressions written out and shit.
Dawson embraced mess as part of his process—one which he refers to as similar to method acting. The emotions and ruminations of his real life are the source of his music, which recalls the pop-punk guitar riffs of Blink-182, the vocals of emo bands like Brand New, the emotional prose of The Shins or Fleet Foxes, and heavy drums mixed with bars and beats that could easily be interchanged with a radio-friendly rap song. Oh, and there’s a sprinkling of country and classical elements in there, too.
The genre-less aspect of Dawson’s sound has left the industry scratching its head, grasping for an artist to compare him to, in hopes of making him easy to understand. But his record—the release of which coincides with the start of a U.S. tour—was made for those who might not fit in a societally accepted box. “I’m just a dude making music,” he says. “I have to allow them to form their own ideas of it. I don’t know how the world looks at me. I’m just my mama’s son.
In his lyrics, Dawson covers topics ranging from anxiety, depression, feeling like an outsider, and fragile masculinity. The 26-year-old grew up on the Internet, making music with a friend during high school, then posting his first songs onto Soundcloud and Bandcamp before pursuing a more traditional route into the music industry after leaving Cal State Los Angeles, where he studied film. Growing up, he split his time between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico .
“I don’t want anybody to feel excluded,” he adds. “One of the things I value most is inclusivity. Giving people a safe space to listen to music without having to be a certain thing is really important because I feel like there’s a lack of that. That’s the environment I want to create. We’re all trying to figure it out, and we live in a troubled world; every generation of people has always lived in a troubled world. A little thing that we can do is just to say, Hey man, come over here.