Dawes at Hangout Fest 2012: An Interview and Backstage Set With 92ZEW

California rock band Dawes made the most of its Hangout Fest 2012 stop in Gulf Shores, Alabama, sitting down with 92ZEW’s Lee Ann Waters for an interview and an intimate backstage performance. The set included the songs “If I Wanted Someone” and “A Little Bit of Everything,” both from the band’s 2011 album “Nothing Is Wrong.” The appearance gave Gulf Coast listeners a closer look at a band that was steadily building a national following, captured in the kind of relaxed, up-close setting that the beachfront festival weekend is known for.

The backstage session had a different feel from a full festival slot. Instead of a big stage and a large crowd, the band played its material in a stripped-down setting for a small audience, with the conversation with Waters woven around the songs. For fans who had only heard Dawes on record or on the radio, the format offered something a main-stage set could not: a direct, unfiltered look at how the band’s songs work up close, with the vocal and guitar work carrying the arrangements rather than a full stage production.

The songs behind the session

Both songs in the backstage set came from “Nothing Is Wrong,” the album Dawes released in 2011. That record was the band’s second full-length release and the one that widened its audience well beyond the Los Angeles club scene where the group first came together. Built on a warm, classic-rock-inspired sound, the album leaned on strong melodies, layered harmonies, and lyrics that favored narrative storytelling over abstract imagery, a combination that earned the band steady attention from critics and radio programmers that year.

“If I Wanted Someone” served as one of the album’s most recognized tracks, a driving tune built around chiming guitar figures and a melody designed for singing along. In a full-band setting it lands with a rolling momentum, and in the reduced backstage format the song’s structure and harmonies had room to stand on their own. Choosing it for the session put one of the record’s most immediate songs in front of the 92ZEW audience in its most basic form.

“A Little Bit of Everything” is the album’s closing track and a different kind of song altogether. It unfolds as a series of connected vignettes about people at different points in life, each verse introducing a new character and a new perspective before the song pulls the threads together at the end. The song has become one of the band’s signature pieces precisely because of that storytelling construction, and it is the kind of number that survives an intimate setting well, since its power comes from the words and the melody rather than volume or production.

Playing those two songs back to back gave the session a natural shape: one song showing the band’s energetic side, the other showing its quieter, more reflective one. For a radio station taping, that contrast is valuable, because it captures the range of an artist in a short amount of time and gives listeners a genuine sense of what the band does across a full record.

Who Dawes is

Dawes formed in the Los Angeles area and built its identity around the songwriting of frontman Taylor Goldsmith, whose lyrics draw on the folk-rock and singer-songwriter traditions of 1970s Southern California. The band’s lineup features his brother Griffin Goldsmith on drums, Wylie Gelber on bass, and Duane Betz on keyboards, a configuration that gives the group both a familial tightness in the rhythm section and a broad tonal palette across the rest of the arrangement. That chemistry is a large part of why the band developed a reputation as a stronger live act than most of its peers.

The group’s sound sits in a lineage that listeners often trace back to the Laurel Canyon era: bands and songwriters who blended rock energy with country and folk textures and put the story at the center of the song. Dawes brought that approach to a new generation, and by the time of the Hangout Fest appearance the band had released two albums and logged extensive road time supporting them. Tours with better-known acts and festival slots across the country had turned the band into a reliable draw for audiences that valued musicianship and craft.

That touring background matters for understanding the 2012 festival season. Bands at this stage of their career use festival appearances to reach casual listeners who know a single song or have heard the name but have never seen the group play. A backstage session like the one with 92ZEW compounds that effect, because it gives a station’s audience an extended, personal introduction rather than a twenty-minute stage set heard from a distance on a crowded beach.

Hangout Music Festival and Gulf Shores

The Hangout Music Festival is an annual beachfront music festival held in Gulf Shores, a coastal resort city on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. The event takes its name from The Hangout, a well-known Gulf Shores restaurant and entertainment venue, and it stages multiple performance areas directly on or adjacent to the beach, giving it a setting few American festivals can match. Since its launch in 2010 it has grown into one of the region’s signature events, drawing thousands of attendees each May from across Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, Mississippi, Louisiana, and beyond.

For a city like Gulf Shores, the festival is a major economic driver. Hotels, condominium rentals, restaurants, and shops in the area fill up for the weekend, and the event showcases the city’s beaches to a young national audience that may be visiting for the first time. The festival’s lineup each year mixes nationally known headliners with rising acts, which is exactly the tier where a band like Dawes sat in 2012: established enough to land a slot, still climbing toward the broader fame that came later.

The festival also matters to local radio. Stations from across the Gulf Coast cover the event, and ones with an album-rock or adult-alternative format find it a natural fit, since the lineups consistently include artists from those formats. That context explains how a Mobile station ended up producing interview and performance content from the festival grounds in Gulf Shores, roughly an hour’s drive from its home market.

92ZEW and the local radio connection

92ZEW is a Mobile, Alabama radio station, broadcasting on the FM dial and serving the central Gulf Coast with a format built around album-oriented and adult-alternative rock. Stations in that format play album tracks and deeper cuts rather than only chart singles, which makes them early and committed champions of bands like Dawes, whose music fits comfortably alongside both classic and contemporary rock programming. For touring acts coming through the region, the station is a regular stop for interviews and in-studio or on-site sessions.

The Hangout Fest session with Lee Ann Waters followed that established pattern. A festival provides the opportunity: dozens of touring acts are already in the area for the weekend, and a station can arrange short interviews and performances without the logistics of booking a studio visit. Waters conducted the conversation while the band performed its songs on-site, packaging the two elements into content the station could share with listeners who attended the festival as well as those who followed along on the radio.

For the band, the value is straightforward regional exposure. An interview and performance on a station whose listeners overlap heavily with the festival’s audience reinforces the live appearance, giving concertgoers a reason to pay closer attention and giving everyone else a reason to seek out the album. For the station, the session is distinctive local content that national outlets cannot offer, produced with an artist at the moment its profile was rising.

What the session meant for Gulf Coast fans

Appearances like this one are a meaningful part of how the Gulf Coast connects to the wider music world. The region sits between larger markets, and touring bands often pass through on the way to New Orleans or Atlanta. When a festival like Hangout brings national acts to Baldwin County’s beaches and a homegrown station captures them in an intimate setting, local fans get access to the kind of artist coverage usually reserved for big-city markets.

The 2012 festival, in hindsight, caught Dawes at a notable point in its career. The band continued to tour and release albums in the years that followed, expanding its audience well beyond the club and festival circuit of the early 2010s. Backstage recordings and radio sessions from this period preserve an early picture of a group whose songs were already fully formed, performed a few feet from the interview microphone with nothing to hide behind.

For listeners, the two songs say the most. “If I Wanted Someone” and “A Little Bit of Everything” remain the clearest introduction to what Dawes does: sharp, well-built rock songs with characters and stories at their center. Captured on the Gulf Shores sand during a festival weekend, with a Mobile radio host asking the questions, they document a band and a community meeting at exactly the right moment.