by Riley McShane Contributor

Over the phone, Paul Dally tells me he lives in a weird part of Manhattan. It’s north of Hell’s Kitchen but south of the Upper West Side. A strangely indistinct and somewhat claustrophobic swath of the island. Odd setting, I think, for an artist whose songs conjure images of rugged American openness.

But Dally has been all over. The seeds of his first record, 2018’s New American, were planted during a long road trip through the American Southwest. Paul and his “sweetheart”, as he tenderly refers to her, were due to post up in Albuquerque for a while and he planned to craft a record there. But while many of the songs on New American hold an arid poignance that one could mistake for Southwestern, the album came together in Dally’s hometown on Vashon Island, in Washington state. In a small cabin on his father’s property, Dally went about collecting pieces that had been floating around for years. The result was 10 songs, almost exclusively wrought of Dally’s gravelly baritone and sparse guitar work.

During his years of being in bands and playing shows in and around New York, Dally describes a feeling of “the flame looking like it was getting pretty close,” but never fully catching. Then a small spark re-ignited the fuse: “Pink Eldorado”, the first song off New American was selected by the respected online music outlet Reverberation Radio, thereby giving his music its first major nudge out into the world.

The last show Dally remembers before the pandemic hit was at Pete’s Candy Store, in Williamsburg. He'd assembled an outfit to flesh out the songs from New American, but after being jettisoned into the strange new reality of 2020, he got working on a new record. Vagrant Vista began as another process of collecting bits and pieces of songs that already inhabited Dally’s world. “Skin,” for example, was originally written in 2008 as he was coming out of high school. And whereas New American was a mostly solitary effort, Vista was formed by collaboration. The LP was recorded and produced by Dally himself, but much of Vista’s DNA belongs to Ben Roth, a friend from Paul’s youth and multi-instrumentalist behind Bod. Dally made it clear that the aesthetic of the record came from this reunion with Roth, “We made the record together. I wrote the songs and everything, but I owe a lot of it to him.”

Roth’s influence can be felt on the song “Hide,” which was written by Dally all at once on the 4th of July. The nascent version of the track, he tells me, was more in keeping with the rusted spaciousness of New American, but Roth helped shape its final form by adding the synth and the slow, bubbling 80s groove that ties “Hide” together like a pair of trusted old sneakers. Similarly, the swinging, brooding “Reason” plays like it’s crackling out of the jukebox of a roadside tavern in some well-traveled but oft-forgotten part of the country. And the rollicking closer, “Kimmy Rolla'' carries the listener out and down the road with the distinct feeling of getting out of town before it’s too late.

“I was drinking drive-thru daiquiris / with the girl of your daddy’s dreams / she was chopping mysteries / for your heroes.”

But the arguable centerpiece of Vista, and the inspiration for its striking cover, is “Roadside Crosses.” The image is familiar: a simple white cross, adorned with plastic flowers, in remembrance of a life lost to the road. For Dally, the roadside cross is a question, something unexpected. He’s lost count of the number seen in his travels, but remembers especially beautiful iterations on the side of a dirt road in Baja California. Even as we spoke, I remembered the simple white crosses that omnipresently beset the highways around the Columbia River, where I grew up. Memorials that were so unobtrusive they easily slid into the blur just outside the windshield, but every so often if one chose to look, they’d find a hard image to shake.

Vista contains three fully instrumental tracks, each their own sort of peculiarity in the broader mosaic of the LP. Dally explains that this trio was inspired by his interest in film scores, and that they were intended to “score the collection of stories on the album, and allow the listener a moment to contemplate what is all happening.” These intermittent “scores” were a bit of a challenge for a songwriter so inclined toward narrative. “I needed to give myself permission to write a song without any words in it,” Dally confesses. He explained that by starting the record without any words, as he does with the spacey “Silver Violets”, he felt it would encourage people to listen to the whole thing. Indeed, the industrial-esque dissonance of “Mainline Thru The Rockies'' is a booming disruption at the midpoint of Vista. It’s as if Dally has arrived at a thematic crossroad: return to the hazy roadhouse romanticism of the record’s first half or spiral into the void completely. Ultimately, he chooses to come back to earth, but the songs, he explains, “are not meant to just be expressions of the songwriter. They’re meant to give something to the listener.”

As we wind down the call, Dally tells me he’s already at work on a new record. This one, he reports, will be “more synthy, more poppy... honestly, maybe it’s a pop album, but it’ll be like...ballads” he concludes with a chuckle, a note of self-deprecation. Just before the call ends, I tell him I hope to see him play live someday. A prospect that in the midst of the pandemic seems so unlikely it’s almost imaginary.

But from his weird part of Manhattan, Paul Dally leaves me with an unexpected note of optimism.

“It’ll happen, man. No doubt.”