Devon based Indie-Folk singer-singwriter OLLIE DIXON returns with new track 'Islands'....
I’ll admit that not much excites me these days, at 49 years of age, it takes more than the usual humdrum of the daily grind to get me motivated. I receive a ton of emails on a daily basis and come the evening, when I start to read through them, it’s nice when one catches your eye, especially when that one is from a local Devon based musician called Ollie Dixon.
I can’t remember the first time I saw Ollie perform live, it was probably in a soggy field somewhere at a local festival (in the rain) but having watched him over the past 5-6 years, I have seen him mature both musically and emotionally into a gifted songwriter whose music should be celebrated far and wide.
Islands is his brand new track that is due to be released on 14 January 2022 and is the first that he has recorded with his new band member Lee Croad. He admits that they started working on the track in November 2020 and took a whole year of writing, re-writing and adding new song structures, “It was a nightmare. I just wanted the lyrics to be perfect and I can't begin to describe how many times I had writers block trying to do this song” said Ollie of the track.
This is the first time that Ollie has worked and written with someone else and admitted that, “at first, I found it hard to ‘let people in’, but now, upon reflection, I can't imagine writing music on my own ever again”.
Asked about his relationship with his writing partner, he added, “Lee brings so much to the table, things I've never thought of musically. He writes a lot of ambient atmospheric post-rock and when we blended it with my indie folk it fitted so well, it was just like a missing piece of the puzzle that I’d been striving for so long to complete.”
The track itself is a magnificent piece of work, lush fingerpicking kicks things off as the reverb soaked backdrop allows you to drift away into an ethereal, alternative world. With the addition of horns and drums, it literally opens up another dimension to his sound and lays the foundations perfectly for future work which I hope will continue to explore more instruments to broaden his narrative. A multi-faceted offering which changes tempo midway through the track, allowing his tranquil and effervescent guitar style to shine through. It’s a calming track, a chance to detox from everyday life, pop a pair of headphones on, settle back and I guarantee that come the end, you’ll be reaching for the play button again and again.
If you genuinely can’t wait until 14th January for the official release, click play on the link below to watch a 20 second snippet of the fantastic video that accompanies the track;
Asked about future plans, Ollie added that since 2020, Lee and himself have written and recorded a number of new tracks and have them ‘in the bank’ for the next EP which is due to be released after Islands.
The music video for Islands was shot in North Devon in one day with just one camera, courtesy of the incredibly talented Abbie Barton Photography/videography. “We had this idea of a chair in the ocean (as a metaphor) , getting deeper into the water then far out of it, to represent the passage of time. Islands is the realisation that everyone is searching for something, whether it be a meaning, love, life, whatever….. We all do it and sometimes with no direction, not knowing what it is, sometimes it's right in front of us but not within our grasp - searching for something that’s just too far out”.
Ollie added, “The video features a good friend and fellow musician Taylor Latham as the main character (because I didn’t want to be in a music video). The video follows Taylor through a journey to "find" whatever it is he's searching for (the metaphorical chair) and once found, he finds himself ‘in the moment’, caught up in what's going on, embracing the presence, then moving on to the next thing.”
As well as the music video, they also recorded a live session in the Old Schoolhouse in Hatherleigh, near Okehampton (not far from where Lee lives). “We didn't want to do a ‘normal’ live session in a studio, as many bands choose to do. We wanted a more visually pleasing location and this was just perfect. Apparently, we are the first people in 250 years (I believe) to have done anything like this in the building which we thought was a nice bonus.”
Ollie plans to release a track from the live session to coincide with the release of the single which is a great idea and is a sure fire way of keeping his growing fanbase satisfied when it comes to new content. The Islands EP will follow at the end of March.
If I were to offer you one tip for today, head to Soundcloud or Spotify and search for Ollie Dixon, get yourself comfortable and immerse yourself in his world. You’ll identify some of the bands that have influenced him over the years but what still amazes me to this day is that fact that he has created these songs himself and that deserves a great deal of adoration, he has injected endless amounts of energy and love into each song, surely this deserves 20 minutes of your time to revel in his incredible sonic output?
Keep up to date with Ollie Dixon at the following sites;