Dustin Pattison

Here are a couple of my older, highly-amateur home recordings:

I wrote One by One by One a couple of years back when my brother who, among many other things, writes for the Burnside Writer’s Collective, said that they would be putting together a “Summer Mix-tape” of songs that in some way related to or represented ‘Summer.’ After I sat down and put this together, I had no idea why I considered it a song that had anything to do with summer except maybe it’s sound had a summer-like quality – I don’t know – but I submitted it anyway. I think I like this song and like playing it because of its simplicity. With fairly broad brush-strokes, I tried to paint a picture of a specific scene but still leave a lot to the imagination. One reason I’m not so happy with this recording and prefer to play it live is because in a live setting, I can pull out a little more of the required emotion. Though I do like hearing, in the bridge, the cheap little foot-long keyboard I bought at Goodwill for a buck.

Right Before Our Eyes was written in 2003, soon after I came back from my first trip to Malawi. I was really struggling, at this time, with what I had seen and learned on that trip. I knew that, somehow, it was not for no reason that I had gone and met the people I had met and seen what I had seen. I wondered how responsible (or response-able) I was to the things I now knew and the people I now had relationships with. At the same time, I wondered what sort of responsibility we have, as citizens of the US, who consume an amazing amount of the world’s natural resources and whose greed and hubris are often the root cause of many of the world’s problems, and who have the technology to watch these problems (i.e. disease, hunger, genocide, etc.) play out in real-time. This song, I guess, was my attempt at laying down some of those thoughts and questions as they emerged.