Dana Gavanski "Yesterday Is Gone" Out 27th March 2020

Includes Catch, One by One and Good Instead of Bad
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Dana Gavanski has announced her debut album Yesterday Is Gone, out 27th March 2020. To mark the announce, and following on from her BBC 6Music A-listed single ‘Catch’, Dana is sharing her new single Good Instead of Bad’. The album is available to pre-order on limited edition orange vinyl + CD.

Speaking about the meaning of the song, Dana explains “it’s about reflecting on the end of a relationship and how quickly things change. The desire to make up for everything that wasn’t done or wasn’t done right. The muddiness of breaking up, and not knowing if it’s the right decision. Not saying the right things, not being able to express the complexity of what we’re feeling. Things change and that’s that - not being able to turn back and undo a bad move. It’s an attempt to see from the other’s perspective and understand how hard it is for them as well. Reflecting on the intractability of certain decisions.”

Yesterday Is Gone is a co-production between Dana, Toronto-based musician Sam Gleason, and Mike Lindsay of Tunng and LUMP. On the title track, Dana Gavanski sings ‘I’m learning how to say goodbye / to let you go and face the tide / to wrap my feelings in a song,’. To wrap her feelings in a song: this is the task Dana has dedicated herself to with this record. By turns break-up album, project of curiosity, and, as Dana puts it, a reckoning with myself, Yesterday Is Gone is her attempt to “learn to say what I feel and feel what I say” - an album of longing and devotion to longing, and of the uncertainty that arises from learning about oneself, of pushing boundaries, falling hard, and getting back up.

 

Born in Vancouver to a Serbian family, Dana has always harboured a desire to sing. In her final year of university in Montreal, she picked up the guitar left by her ex-partner and decided to re-learn. But with a father in film and a painter mother, other art-forms clamoured for her attention. She spent a summer as her producer father’s assistant in the Laurentians, in a derelict hotel-turned-office reminiscent of The Shining. The long days behind a computer cemented her desire to make music, “because it was so impossible to play that I needed to, in order to feel like it was real.” The income she saved that summer funded a year of writing religiously, leading to EP Spring Demos in September 2017, which Dana describes as whatever was coming out of me. A flood.”

 

Following Spring Demos, Yesterday Is Gone reflects Dana’s aim “to make something bigger, more thought through”. Steeped in determination and uncertainty in equal measure – the album took shape after she returned from a writing residency in Banff, Alberta. She’d begun to learn the art of empty time, of being alone with her emotions, losing herself in a landscape. She thought of Vashti Bunyan, riding in a horse and cart for hours and writing, writing, writing. She considered how she might use writing to make sense of her life after the tumults of a break-up and a new city. Adrift in Toronto, Dana struggled to feel at home and connected to people, but the solitude also allowed her to ground herself in writing. She kept office-style hours at her bedroom desk every day until she started to understand the writing process, to see that “transforming a burning desire into something clear and tangible is a vulnerable and delicate act. You have to be able to let things happen, to accept losing control.”

 

Commenting on her collaboration with Sam Gleason and Mike Lindsay - Dana says Sam helped her bring out the tunes, whilst Mike’s input marked “the beginning of developing a sound that was closer to what I had in my head”. The album shapeshifted as it passed through the hands of Dana, Sam, and Mike, taking on different tastes, feelings, and visions. When Dana performed the songs with a band, they found new form again. She was intrigued by performers like David Bowie and Aldous Harding, who inhabit different personalities on stage, physically tuning themselves to their music. “Watching these kinds of performances,” Dana says, “I feel my body longing to express myself in exaggerations … to leave behind self-consciousness and become this energy.”

 

But a three-month trip to Serbia in autumn 2018 really pushed performance to the forefront of Dana’s mind. She took singing lessons to learn how to sing with the resonance that defines traditional Serbian song. Stirred by the bombast of fifties, sixties, and seventies music, including the high-energy kafana, or café music, as rooted in expressive pouts as it is vocal resonance, the trip incited a yearning to completely inhabit herself on stage.

Stood on a crowded train last spring, Dana sang the Macedonian song Jano Mome to an audience of cheery Scottish ladies. The moment, brief but beautiful, lays bare Dana’s craving for live spontaneity. But it also reflects her injection of stylish drama and vivid emotion into the folk landscape that inspires her, from contemporary singers H Hawkline and Julia Holter, to stalwarts Fairport Convention, Anne Briggs, Connie Converse, and Judee Sill. Expressive urges run all through Yesterday Is Gone. Moments of beguilement splinter a backdrop of tenderly picked guitar, bass, synth, and poppier elements, which commune to produce her own kind of wall of sound. Each component is meticulously placed, yielding a deeply sincere response to the chaos of human emotion.

“Often we have to go a little far in one direction to learn something about ourselves,” Dana says. The months of solitary writing and self-doubt testify to this, but they’ve led to Yesterday Is Gone: an optimistic, steely-eyed gaze into the future.

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