Dogwood Tales & Euphoria Again

When you play music, you meet a lot of people. It’s often cordial between us and the many bands we meet, mostly resulting in wholesome internet friendships but rarely going much beyond that. It’s especially rare to meet a band that you love hanging out with so much that you pick a hot August weekend to take off work, link up in the Shenandoah Valley, let loose, and make a whole record together with almost no preparation. What started off as a plan to track a split with some potential collaborative vocals and guitars solos immediately turned into an 8-piece live band learning and molding melodies and arrangements on the fly only to record them moments later, all together, all at once. It’s easy for me to cherish every moment of this record because it’s made by people I genuinely trust and respect deeply in music and in life. In spite of being from fairly different environments in Harrisonburg and Philly, we share an identity in music that creates a lot of understanding that can be hard to find in other kinds of relationships. This record is about celebrating these kinds of friendships and the songs that bring us all together. It’s about letting go of your ego just long enough that the big picture can really come through. I’m honored to have shared such a special process with some of my favorite musicians and closest friends.

Dogwood Tales hails from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Beginning in the basements of Harrisonburg as a duo in 2016, Ben Ryan and Kyle Grim started with the intention of writing, playing, and singing as one, grounded in a love of working together. Upon releasing their first album and beginning to tour more frequently in 2018, Dogwood Tales expanded into a full band, joined by their best friends and collaborators, Jake Golibart, Danny Gibney, and Stephen Kuester on the drums, bass, and pedal steel. Influenced by an eclectic local DIY scene of lo-fi, shoegaze, and country acts, as well as songwriting staples like Neil Young and Jason Molina, Dogwood Tales present their own alt-country sound with Grim and Ryan singing away their valley blues to the backdrop of lush steel and humming electric guitars. Their new EP, “13 Summers 13 Falls” was released in fall of 2022 via WarHen records, with the follow EP “Rodeo” set to release in Spring of 2023 alongside a vinyl pressing of the two EPs.

In a decade plus of songwriting as Euphoria Again, Johnny Klein has explored everything from lo-fi bedroom pop, to Nashville recorded alt-country, and even stands as one of the earliest contributors to the now exploding shoegaze revival. Beside this ever-evolving project, Klein has also split his time as hired studio guitarist, member of Philadelphia Grateful Dead cover band Friends Of Jerry, and now long-time member of Philadelphia’s moody slow-core favorites Knifeplay. Heard through all of this work, is Klein’s unique brand of earthy, spectral authenticity, a quality which has earned him a cult fanbase with Euphoria Again, and which shines powerfully on his newest record Waiting on Time to Fly(Born Losers 2024).