We Speak Music
Katie Dauson Delivers New Album ‘Dauson City Gold Rush’
Katie Dauson’s Dauson City Gold Rush is an album driven by narrative, empathy, and emotional detail—a record that feels like a songwriter peeling back the film on memory to study the flicker underneath. Across eight tracks, Dauson blends blues, folk-rock, and 1980s pop reverie with an ear for textures that expand rather than overwhelm. It’s a deeply human album, concerned less with answers than with learning to sit with the complexity of feeling.
The opening “Scene Stealing Casanova” frames that emotional thesis perfectly. It is fleet, witty, and gently self-mocking—an acknowledgement of the strange push-pull between ambition and doubt. Dauson’s delivery feels lived-in, the kind of songwriting that turns private anxieties into communal recognition.
“Just Another Love Song” unfolds like a sepia photograph rediscovered in a drawer. Its melodic grace nods to the lineage of classic pop writers, but Dauson treats influence as dialogue, not costume. She writes with the perspective of someone who understands that sincerity is not naïve—it’s courageous.
At the album’s core sits the instrumental “Gold Rush,” which speaks in atmosphere where words would have cluttered the message. The slide guitar carries a kind of wistful promise, and in that promise is the emotional axis of the project: the sense of searching without expecting certainty.
The record ends with “Sing a Song,” a track that refuses grandeur in favour of gentle uplift. It’s not the triumphant finale of a hero returning victorious—it’s the sound of someone choosing to keep going. Dauson City Gold Rush is Katie Dauson’s reminder that growth is process, identity is mosaic, and music can hold the vulnerable parts of us without asking for shame.
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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