From a Text to Opening the Grammys: Inside Dawes’ All-Star Performance of ‘I Love L.A.’

The first day of the Los Angeles wildfires, Brad Paisley texted his friend Taylor Goldsmith of the band Dawes about the impact on the Pacific Palisades, where Paisley once owned a home. In one of his replies, Goldsmith told Paisley that the fire was now encroaching on Altadena, where Goldsmith, his wife Mandy Moore, and their children live. They had to evacuate.

“The next morning,” Paisley recalls, “he said, ‘Everything’s gone.’”

Goldsmith, whose house was damaged and recording studio destroyed in the Eaton fire, sounded a more hopeful note, all things considered, in a subsequent text to Paisley. He told the country singer that he’d just had “the coolest conversation ever” about putting together an “all-star band” for the Grammys. “And then it snowballed,” Paisley says.

That “coolest” convo ended up being about opening Sunday night’s 67th Grammy Awards with a cover of Randy Newman‘s “I Love L.A.,” played by a group of musicians who each represent a somewhat different genre of music. Dawes, the duo of singer-guitarist Taylor and his brother, drummer Griffin Goldsmith, were rock; West Virginia guitarist Paisley was country; John Legend, playing piano, was R&B; and so on. Ultimately, Sheryl Crow (bass), Annie Clark a.k.a. St. Vincent (synthesizer), and Brittany Howard (guitar) all came aboard. As Paisley quips, “No fortune teller would have ever said to me, ‘I see you onstage with Brittany Howard and St. Vincent playing a Randy Newman song.’ “

The choice of the song and the assembling of the unlikely musical crew had its origins in Dawes’ mid-January performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which helped raise money for the Recording Academy’s aid for musicians affected by the fires. (Taylor Goldsmith’s house remains but he lost his home studio and gear; Griffin’s was destroyed entirely.) A link to that performance, of the band’s 2011 song “Time Spent in Los Angeles,” made the rounds in the music business.

Driving through the city in the first few days of the fires, Grammys executive producer Ben Winston happened to play Newman’s 1983 song, an ode to his hometown and his complex feelings toward it. “I played it and I got really emotional listening to it as I drove from downtown, leaving my kids where we’ve been evacuated, back to my house,” Winston says. “I played it three times in a row.”

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In talking with his friend Brandi Carlile, Winston shared his idea to have the song performed on the Grammys and asked her advice on who to enlist. “Brandi said, ‘You should consider Dawes for this because they could be really cool,'” says Winston, who had seen Dawes’ performance on Kimmel. “As soon as she said it, I was like, ‘That’s it.'”

Taylor Goldsmith says he was taken aback when the Grammys called with the opportunity. “We’ve never been nominated or acknowledged,” he says. “I’m not blaming the guys at the top. We’ve just never been part of that world. We’ve put out nine records, but it’s fair to say we’re by no means a ‘buzz band.’ But we have our fan base and it’s an awesome existence.”

To Goldsmith’s additional surprise, Winton said the Grammy producers would help put together a band behind them. “They said, ‘Who do you want?’” Goldsmith says. “‘Throw out anybody. We’re just going to go for it,’ and I was like, ‘Sure!’ We felt like kids in the candy store getting to run up whatever bill we wanted.” That led first to Legend, then to Clark, and then Howard. Paisley, in turn, directly asked his friend Crow, who immediately signed on.

For Dawes, the first step was recording a cover of “I Love L.A.” themselves, without any special guests, on the day the group played the FireAid benefit last Thursday. At the suggestion of the Grammy producers, it was decided to revise some of the song’s lyrics: “Look at that bum over there, man/He’s down on his knees.” As Goldsmith says, “How do we make sure we’re honoring this moment? There’s, like, an edginess to Randy Newman songs that would draw more attention to it in a way that would just not be helpful. And frankly, to give them credit, the Grammys were on that page, even before me. They said, ‘We want to change a few lyrics so it doesn’t seem insensitive and we’ll run it by Randy.’”

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With that direction, Goldsmith revised some lyrics: “Look at this city getting back up off its knees/Look at these firefighters/Ain’t nothin’ like them nowhere.” Goldsmith calls the edits “very, very minor adjustments that would only work in this kind of one-time-only capacity.” But, as he says, it made a difference onstage on Sunday night: “I could feel it in the room.” (Goldsmith says he and Newman didn’t meet but that Newman gave his blessing to the rewrites.)

“I’ve lived in Los Angeles for all of my life, and in Pacific Palisades for more than 70 years,” Newman told Rolling Stone after the show. “I grew up here and could never have imagined anything like this disaster. I was glad that my song could help with the Grammys’ fundraiser. Dawes and the musicians did a great job. It means a great deal to me that ‘I Love L.A.’ means so much to this city.”

The day after FireAid, the all-star band of seven musicians met in a rehearsal space in Burbank. It was the first time the Goldsmith brothers had met Clark and Legend, and Paisley’s first encounter with Howard and Clark. Then the challenging work began. During a two-hour rehearsal, everyone, including producer Mike Elizondo, bore down on a complicated song with complex chord changes and sections that are completely different from the ones that precede it. “When I finally started to learn it, I said to Taylor, ‘What is this?’” Paisley says. Of the initial run-through, he says, “Let’s say we didn’t nail the first one, but it wasn’t bad. All hell breaks loose when you play something the first time. You say, ‘Well, that part needs some work!’ There’s a reason you don’t walk down Broadway in Nashville and hear a cover of that song.”

Since a synth was needed, Clark, normally associated with guitar, switched instruments. Legend looked over the jazzy piano intro but told Goldsmith, “Cool, I got this.” Everyone asked how many times they had to shout, “We love it!” Paisley says that Crow joked to him that he should have specified exactly which song they were playing, jokingly threatening, “I’m going to kill you!” They also had to make sure that Legend’s piano intro would be in sync with host Trevor Noah’s lead-in.

“Trust me when I say, this could have been a nightmare,” Paisley says. “If you’d picked any other people, it could not have gone well. But these were really collaborative people.” It was also mutually decided that Taylor Goldsmith should sing lead despite the presence of five distinctive vocalists in the room. “We thought, ‘This is their moment,’” Paisley says.

Bit by bit, a seamless cover of “I Love L.A.” came together. “There’s a lot happening in that song,” Goldsmith says. “It was really hard, but it gave us all focus. We had to really lock in. We all erupted in cheers when we got it right.” (The musicians formed unexpected bonds too: Howard asked Paisley if likes to fish, which could manifest as a first-time fishing trip in their mutual hometown of Nashville.) 

Finally, after a dress rehearsal on Saturday, the band assembled onstage for the live broadcast. The audience knew the performers, but not what song they were about to play. “It was pretty hard,” Goldsmith says of keeping the secret, which somehow didn’t leak. “I was so tempted to tell some of my best friends.”

Right before airtime, Clark went over to Taylor Goldsmith to tell him his jacket was bunched up behind his guitar strap. But the intense two days of rehearsals paid off: As “I Love L.A.” blasted, Griffin Goldsmith looked out and saw Bob Weir rocking out in his seat. The song was connecting.

“A friend of mine said afterwards that it was a blade of grass that comes up in a scorched landscape,” Paisley says. “That text chain with Taylor started out as, ‘Are you guys okay?’ and ended with Taylor texting, ‘Can you believe we did that together?’”   

Additional reporting by Brian Hiatt