Dylan Fitchett’s solo music creates a relaxing, melodic escape, and the musician who came of age in Williamsburg is set to release his first EP on Aug. 16. Dylan Rockwell Fitchett, whose stage name is Dylan Rockwell, has been playing in bands since middle school, and after playing with a few different groups in the Washington, D.
C., area, he’s releasing his debut solo extended play. Fitchett, 31, moved to Williamsburg when he was 10, and he was based there throughout college before moving to D.
C., where he is now an audio engineer. After years of playing with other groups in the area, he said he’s come into his own.
“The types of songs I was writing changed a little bit. I kind of found a more cohesive voice,” he said on why he was branching off on his own project. “Before, I was kind of taking things just one song at a time — just kind of throwing songs at the wall — and this was an opportunity for a fresh start where I could begin new with my fully kind of figured out, cohesive writing voice and production style.
” “It’s a little bit more acoustic ...
than the previous stuff I was doing,” he said. The EP is called “False Dawn,” and the title track and the song “Pollyanna” have already been released as singles. The EP will have four songs on it.
The groups Fitchett has been in have put out mainly singer-songwriter music, and his new music, though a bit more relaxed, stays true to that style. He said that while playing in various projects, he learned that playing music to play music, instead of to create hits, is what is fulfilling. “Expressing yourself in the purest way is of greater value to you and the world” than trying to put out hits with mass appeal for commercial success, he said.
Regarding “False Dawn,” he said: “I think they’re good songs, and they certainly could appeal to a large audience, but that’s part of this sort of reset as a solo artist is...
the songs have sort of become a little bit more comfortable with themselves I would say.” “They’re not trying to be anything they’re not,” Fitchett said. “In the production of these songs, I was exercising a lot of restraint .
.. doing less, but doing enough, and knowing when enough is enough.
” Fitchett said the music on the EP takes aim at unavoidable, possibly uncomfortable emotion. “I want to make (people) feel the same way that I feel when I listen to music that I love, which can be anything from introspective to maybe even a little sad sometimes, but in a happy way.” He said it’s the kind of music someone might shed a tear at, but in a way that’s beautiful and not just sad.
“I’m particularly proud of ...
‘Pollyanna,’” he said, noting that the song relates to the definition of the term, which is a very cheerful or optimistic person. “I’m very much not like that, but I know a lot of people who are, and so that’s sort of what I wrote that song about,” he said. The song is a slow-opening acoustic ballad that broaches the topic of uncertainty in the world while leaning on Rockwell’s “Pollyanna.
” “How do you keep it all together when the world is so scary, my little Pollyanna, you are my sanctuary,” he sings in the song. Fitchett, who graduated from Elon University in North Carolina in 2015 with a degree in music production and recording arts, said the songs on the upcoming EP are more concentrated than things he’s worked on in the past. “For the first time in my musical career, they have a cohesiveness amongst them as well as, I think, pretty stark individual qualities.
” Though the group behind the music carries the name Dylan Rockwell, Fitchett had some help putting it all together; Patrick Gunning, who Fitchett has played with since college, played drums, and Nick Fliakas played bass on the tracks. They have an EP release show at Songbyrd Music House in the Union Market area of D.C.
on Aug. 17. Sam Schaffer, samuel.
[email protected].
