An enigmatic storm of indie/experimental/pop and, believe it or not, folk, Charlie Treat’s Dawn Is Breaking proves once again that we cannot put a finger on this man. He continues to befuddle his fans and listeners, proving that folk music is not your grandpa’s 45’s, and that pop music is more than mindless dance songs and heartbreakers.
It’s a collection of songs whose paradoxical twists and turns are as unique as the man who wrote them. Raised on a farm in New England, Charlie grew up listening to the music that suited his working-class surroundings — Delta blues, country classics, work songs, and Bob Dylan records — before traveling the country as a busker, accompanied by his acoustic guitar and 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass. After a Kerouac-worthy series of milestones and mishaps led him back to the Northeast, he established himself as one of the region’s folksinging heavyweights before heading south to Nashville, where he found a new home in a city that had become synonymous with Americana music. Charlie easily fit into that musical community, even as his own songs ventured into the genre’s outermost orbits.
It was in Nashville that Charlie teamed up with producer Jesse Thompson to record the self-titled Charlie Treat EP. Released in 2018, the EP announced Charlie as a Nashville newcomer whose songs mixed organic, folky foundations with lush layers of pop/rock and poetry. He promoted the record the old-school way: by rounding up his bandmates and hitting the stage, playing show after show at some of the city’s most beloved venues. They were a chameleonic band, capable of performing a country-inspired gig one week (featuring guests on fiddle and pedal steel guitar) and giving themselves a poppy, synth-heavy makeover for the next performance. That diversity mirrored Charlie’s own artistic tastes, which had moved beyond the world of American roots music to include the pop and shoegaze songs he heard on Nashville’s radios and clubs.
In March of 2021, mid pandemic, Charlie releases The Comet, presenting a versatile frontman and poetic lyricist whose songs paint vivid pictures of wild nights, rocky relationships, the uneasy relationship between humans and technology, and the strange truths discovered during extraordinary times.
The next year, inspired by a high flying and tumultuous 2 year relationship with Americana starlet Sierra Ferrell, Charlie returns to his core and in November of 2022 releases his first ever bluegrass album Into The Wild Mystic Mountain, an imaginative album that finds its creator — backed by some of the genre's best young pickers and soon-to-be legends — working in the raw, rootsy tradition of greats like Woody Guthrie, Hank Sr, Bill Monroe, and Flatt and Scruggs. Laced with acoustic guitar, upright bass, fiddle, mandolin, and banjo it is a record for front porches, campfires, and hollers. It's also Treat's most autobiographical album to date. “It was time to reinvent’, says Treat, “And ironically, Mystic Mountain is not reinventing myself at all. We did in four days something that’s been stirring in me for 20 years.”
In July of 2023 Charlie embarks on a journey into musical stratospheres everything but bluegrass. “No wooden instruments” he told his producer, acclaimed singer songwriter and studio madman Anthony Da Costa. “I made my roots record, now I want to do the opposite, I want to goto the other side of the world”. Over the course of just two and half days Charlie sat down at the piano inside DaCosta’s garage-turned-musical-science-experiment and, with a small live band, tracked his most avant-garde, heady, bold, and poetically charged album to date. “On the bluegrass album I summoned the rhyme dictionary, on this album I summoned the classics”. From The Odyssey, to The Iliad, Greek traditionals, to the Bible, to Rilke, Yeats, Anglo Saxon traditionals, Blake, Bronte, Wallace Stevens, and even medieval poems Charlie, like a looter in a riot, steals freely from literary giants over the course of almost 30 centuries. “‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal’, I once heard. I did not look back. I ‘wrote’ this album in a few weeks -half of it was already written. I was really reading most of the time”.
The other half of the album is inspired by the raw, eccentric, perceptive mind of the man himself. "Goddamn I Miss Earth" is a gaze into the future when bands will tour to other planets, told through the lens of an adventure, a love story, and ultimately a bitter self realization. “I’m in so much pain that I can hear it. It’s right inside but I can’t get near it. What a precious day wasting away slowly turning into a spirit”. "Pennies On The Rail" scorches modernity and a lost world: “America the land of free, unless you’re black, brown, poor, woman or gay. Schools are the real life GTA. We’re headed to church in the meta-verse, Command+Save”. And "Loving Demon" tells the woes of a relationship with an ex heroin addict who, like a ghost, will not leave his home, much more, his soul. "My heart is free but it's abused - a candle in a ghostly forest, searching, melting into the night". Charlie balances the literary heavy, abstract brush strokes of the album with deeply personal, sometimes plainly autobiographical, storytelling and social commentary from the heart. He even has a song about the baby goat that lived with him for 2 months in downtown Nashville. And, goats in the city, what a perfect analogy for the artist: Charlie, a fierce enigma, toes the line between farmer and philosopher, pop star and papa bear, however in this jaunt he sends a clear message from the hill, as if standing on the spaceship waving goodbye to the bluegrass.
The cast of players on Dawn Is Breaking is immense: Anthony DaCosta on guitar; Ross McReynolds on drums; Will Honaker, Calvin Knowles, Jessie Wilson on bass; Josh Blaylock on keys; Lindsay Lou, Rachael Davis, Sierra Ferrell, Jess Nolan, Maya de Vitry, Lydia Luce and Oliver Bates Craven on background vocals. At the center is the sometimes smiley, sometimes mysterious, always changing Charlie Treat. After the three days of tracking Charlie disappeared and Anthony took over in his wiry, whimsical, hypnotic way and the mad scientist, armed with a garage full of synthesizers, guitar pedals, a talented friend group, and a half broken cassette player, turned the mere piano demos into outer space landscapes, colorful bursts and flares, digital sunsets, and moving technological tapestries. “It’s like Neil Diamond in outer space”, says Da Costa “we DID use a few wooden instruments but I ran them through so much gear you can’t tell”. Try as Charlie may he will always be rooted in folk music, like the lungs that brought him here he survives on an ancient thing. While Dawn is his self-proclaimed experimental indie pop record, the lyrics are inspired (stolen) by verse older than the major scale. In this way Charlie has reached a new peak, scaling multi millennia’s of space and time, reaching back to the molten beginnings of literature and folk art and carrying them forward, marrying them with the modern marvels of musical technology, current thought and quirky new chord progressions. Redefining what it means to be a folk singer, Charlie leaves some scratching their heads, some crying, and all in awe of the future of musical storytelling.