Bridging indie rock, alt-country, and folk traditions, singer/songwriter Dawn Landes has collaborated with an equally varied array of performers that includes Fred Eaglesmith, Amy Rigby, John Gorka, and Rainer Maria. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, she relocated to New York to enroll at N.Y.U. while pursuing music, securing a weekly slot at the Jack Hardy song exchange and appearing regularly throughout the city as well as on the campuses of Yale, Sarah Lawrence, Barnard, Columbia, Brown, and her own university.
By the late '90s she had trained as a sound engineer, a craft she continues to practice alongside her own recording projects. Her engineering credits include work on albums by Ryan Adams, Joseph Arthur, Hem, Jolie Holland, and Ruth Moody.
Landes issued her first full-length album, Dawn's Music, in May 2005. The following year brought the mini-album Two Three Four, recorded with members of Hem. During her courtship with singer/songwriter Josh Ritter—whom she married in 2009—she released Fireproof in 2008. Sweet Heart Rodeo appeared in 2010; the couple divorced eighteen months later. In 2012 she put out the French-language album Mal Habillee. After devoting a year to other artists’ sessions as both performer and engineer, she recorded Bluebird with producer Thomas Bartlett, known as Doveman, which came out in February 2014.
For 2018’s Meet Me at the River, Landes partnered with legendary producer Fred Foster, whose past hits encompass work with Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson, and Dolly Parton. Two years afterward she released Row, an album drawn from the musical of the same name that she created with Daniel Goldstein and that features appearances by Will Oldham, Carly Johnson, Sheryl Rouse, and Kimmet Cantwell.
