Dawn Landes is going to be playing with Will Hoge & Jason Isbell (formerly of the Drive-By Truckers) on Feb. 29th at Headliners and we have a pair tickets to give away. Just comment to this post below (one entry per person only) with one sentence about what you love about music and you are entered (an email addy would be helpful). The winner will be selected at random from the commenters, so if you don’t do the sentence thing, you’re still in the contest provided you leave a comment, it’d just be a little more fun. We’ll announce a winner on Monday the 25th.

As for Dawn, I first learned of our hometown girl (now a New Yorker) Dawn back in 2000, when my then roommate and coolest girl I know, went to her show because they’d been friends at Governor’s Scholar. In fact, I have her CD somewhere amongst the towers of old discs. Dawn is another in a series of great female singer songwriters, both traditional and experimental. I’m looking forward to the chance to finally see her as she comes home. She’s also going to be at SXSW this year, if that gives credence to her talent.

Since that time, and particularly recently, Dawn has emerged as an amazing artist with a lot of buzz behind her. If you haven’t yet heard the buzz, it’s something like Cat Power meets Patty Griffin meets Feist. She’s got an upcoming album entitled Fireproof, from which the track below comes from. Much of Fireproof was written following the break-in of her Brooklyn apartment, leaving Dawn with her second album and years of creative work gone. Dawn rose above that though, and has garnered much attention and anticipation for Fireproof, to be released on March 4th through Cooking Vinyl records.

Here’s what the press release has to say about the album:

The aptly named album was recorded live to 2″ tape in a single day in an old fire station in Red Hook, Brooklyn (along with drummer Ray Rizzo, bassist Jonny Flaugher and engineer Adam Lasus.) It’s an astonishing mixture of the urban and the rural. Fireproof is like a little kitchen garden planted between high-rise buildings; in it’s own way, a remarkable act of resistance.

“I think albums are always marked by the places where they were conceived or written. New York was bound to color many of the sounds I recorded for Fireproof,” explains Dawn. But at the heart of these songs, there’s still that girl playing the guitar in a cornfield in the Midwest. The only difference is that the corn has been replaced by high-rise buildings.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Drew for winning this one.

Dawn Landes – Bodyguard