I only wish I were a writer for the Willamette Week. Not really. But if I were, I’d be able to return Annie the favor. You see, Annie Bethancourt happens to be a singer/songwriter herself. In fact, she’s a phenomenal one – on all counts: vocals, guitar, the craft of songwriting, etc. I was honored to be able to open for her this week at her homecoming/birthday show at the Mississippi Pizza Pub.

If I were so able, I would write an epic, florid, grandiloquent review of Annie’s music. Not because I feel somehow obligated to (though I do) but because I want the whole world to experience what I did when her Myspace page finished loading on my laptop for the first time and her rich, beautiful voice and deft musicianship poured from my computer’s tinny speakers and instantly captivated me. I’m so glad that she’s not a huge hit yet, if only because I get the privilege of introducing her to you.

Here are a couple of her songs. Enjoy!

This one is my personal favorite (thus far):

Birds of the Air by Annie Bethancourt

…and here’s my second favorite (recorded at Mississippi Pizza Pub): Glory

This is the full text of what Annie wrote about my music:

Dustin Pattison (Schizoprenifolk)
Dustin Pattison’s pure voice and simple acoustic style are stripped-down folk at it’s finest. Yet while his melodic timbre resonates serenely, the themes of Pattison’s well-crafted songs tread sneakily on fragmented ground–swinging from Irish lullabies, to a life history of Jesus, to a tale about burying a woman in his backyard and confessing to a priest. The effect should be jarring, but although the stories are schizophrenic the sentiment is somber, peaceful even. As Pattison sings “You go get the bottles, and I’ll go get the gun…One by one by one, we will blow them away” in a Bonnie-and-Clyde style tale of longing for freedom(“One by One”), his simple, sad voice makes you somehow sympathize with those desperate words, as if, in a different time, they could have been your own.

I want to give a quick shout-out to the good people at Acoustic Conversations (you know who you are). This is a great online broadcast showcasing some of the region’s most promising new talent. It offers a high-quality, insightful look into the work and workings of fellow singer/songwriters. It’s truly a labor of love for it’s two founders, Curt and Pete, and is sort of like a Daytrotter for us cool kids in the Pacific Northwest.

The next episode just happens to feature Yours Truly and will be posted early this week. If you subscribe to the ITunes Podcast, you’ll have access to this episode which includes an interview with me and some downloadable, never-before-heard recordings of 6 or 7 of my songs (trust me, these will be worth something someday).

Keep listening, keep in touch, and stay tuned for an announcement of some more upcoming shows.

Thanks.

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.

Hope you enjoy.

Dustin, Cara, and Moses. Thanks to Holly Sharp for this photo.

Sleep Well, Moses started out merely as a melody I would hum as I rocked Moses to sleep each day when we were together at the orphanage. It seemed to be a melody he either really liked or found extremely boring because it always lulled him to sleep quickly. After a while, I decided to put some words to it. I came up with a first stanza and chorus but was having trouble coming up with a second stanza. I finally decided that instead of forcing it, I would allow the song to be a work-in-progress. I would allow myself time to really get to know my new son because, as he grows, develops, and changes, so will his interests and his desires and his dreams. So this is a lullaby just for Moses that will be written and tailored to him over the years, maybe not fully finished even in my lifetime. who knows?