One night near the tail end of 2021, I received a text from Dillon Warnek. I didn’t recognize the number, a Washington state area code, or the name, but he said he was a songwriter here in Nashville with a record coming out, and that Margo Price and Jeremy Ivey played on it.
“I only bring that up so that you know that I at least have other crazy people vouching for my craziness,” Dillon wrote.
I appreciated the hustle, and the postscript of his text — that he was really a foreign prince with millions in a bank account. Finally, an artist who didn’t take himself too seriously or ramble on about authenticity and living his truth. So, I listened to the first song, a rollicking barroom farce called “Good Man” about dying in ignominy but having your buddies tidy up the crime scene. “Tell my wife I loved her/My last words were ‘She was the one’/Then throw me five different funerals/So all of my girlfriends can come” made me laugh, and I immersed myself in a debut album caustically titled Now That It’s All Over. Over 10 songs, Dillon told tales of historic con men, recounted hazy mornings spent in a strange woman’s trailer in Alabama, and, in one track, vowed to clean up his act — as soon as he got out of the can.
He was speaking my language. When I finally saw him live, banging away at his piano in a local club, flailing his arms in a way that would make Joe Cocker seem reserved, and telling self-deprecating jokes at every awkward interlude, I knew that this guy — a construction worker by day and poet by night — was for me.
Now, this isn’t some Landau letter. I’m not proclaiming to have seen the future of rock & roll, or discovered the next Springsteen. I’ve just been compelled to write some words after spending the last few years listening to a songwriter who puts it all into his lyrics, and watching a performer unafraid to throw a little grease in the pan. Even if it burns him.
“I like things that sizzle,” Dillon tells me. “I want the waitress to warn you the plate is hot. Every head in the restaurant turns when it comes out of the kitchen, still hissing. It doesn’t matter what you ordered; in that moment, everyone wishes they ordered that. I write some songs that are well crafted and solid, but I don’t use those ones. They end up in a storage unit. I only use the ones that sizzle.”
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Dillon’s new album, As the Neighbors Tried to Sleep, then, is a head-turning plate of fajitas, heavy on the peppers and onions. “There’s enough dynamite in my pocket/To blow you all through the roof,” he sings in the very first line of the record, in a song called “Pistol and a List of Demands.” It’s not a warning or a boast, but a declaration of the Batman BOOM! that is to come.
Recorded at the Bomb Shelter in Nashville and produced by Drew Carroll, As the Neighbors Tried to Sleep (out Aug. 22 on Soggy Anvil Records) nods to when Dillon does his best work: the hours between 8 p.m. and 3 in the morning. Then he wakes up at 5 o’clock to head to his construction job. “Most nights are fruitless, miserable, exhausting, disheartening, and occasionally dangerous,” he says. “Being on a roof or having your fingers near a table saw when you’ve slept 45 minutes and spent all night writing badly is bad math. I keep doing it though, because on rare occasion I get what I’m looking for.”
He finds it in “Born in 90,” an autobiographical story-song without a chorus. Dillon loves Dylan, and it shows here, as he summons detailed memories from his childhood in Monroe, Washington: about 9/11, about his father building (and losing) the family house, about toothless defiance — “Saying we ain’t gonna take it no more/Right before they took it some more.”
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In the searching “Bluebird,” he wonders “why the hell would Jesus ever come back here,” to a trash-strewn existence soundtracked by sirens. “They call it the projects/’Cause it don’t get fixed,” he mutters, as his old friend and champion Margo Price harmonizes behind him.
Price cowrote “Bluebird” with Dillon and her husband, Jeremy Ivey, and she appears on the exquisite “Speeding Bullet Out of Georgia,” too, another piano ballad built around the type of clever wordplay and erudite lyricism with which Dillon first caught my attention. “It is what it is/Life isn’t fair,” they sing together in this tale of escaping a bad situation as fast as you possibly can, “speeding bullet out of Georgia/Riding on a spare.”
Ivey turns up in “Pretend You Miss Me,” with Paul McDonald and Leah Blevins. It’s yet another example of Dillon taking pot shots at himself — “I don’t stand a chance/I can’t stand myself” — but he lands them so deftly that it’s hard to tell him to stop. He’s expert at celebrating his fuck-ups, like when he talks about drunkenly mistaking a chandelier in a Mexican restaurant for a piñata in the supercharged guitar jam “Bad Lawyers and Worse Luck.” (Hey, who among us?)
In the piano-rocker “Other People’s Money,” he fantasizes about spending a night on the town like the one percent. There’s a trip to a department store for a fit check, a cameo at the ballet (just to tip the valet!), and a repast of steak, lobster, and champagne. It’s outrageous, but Dillon sells it with help from guest vocalist Nicki Bluhm — right up to the moment that he drives them both off a cliff.
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As the Neighbors Tried to Sleep is a journey, one that travels from the youthful bravado of “Pistol and a List of Demands” to the long-in-the-tooth lament of the final track, “Bad Accordion.” It’s a trip through the mind of a hyperliterate cynic who fancies his tequila and sodas almost as much as he likes re-reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues or listening to Warren Zevon, Randy Newman, Lucinda Williams, and Dylan.
“Every one of those writers have songs that I don’t understand how they came up with the idea,” Dillon told me. “But part of this gig is that you’re just as much a burglar as anything else. I’ve stolen a lot from my heroes. They always leave the door unlocked.”