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“I’ve felt myself coming down to Earth these past few years in a really beautiful way,” says Dan Wilson. “I’ve been very intentionally focusing on tightening my orbit, on connecting with the people that I cherish the most, on gathering everyone I love and pulling them as tight as I can.”
Listen to Wilson’s poignant new EP, Dancing On The Moon, and you’ll hear that sense of emotional groundedness underpinning every single track. Written and recorded in Wilson’s adopted hometown of Los Angeles, the songs are striking, close-up portraits, their subjects in tack sharp focus while all of the chaos and noise surrounding them dissolves into a hazy blur. Lovers find a safe haven in the midst of a desolate wasteland; a devastating fire offers lessons on living in the present; the impending apocalypse puts a petty feud into perspective. Despite the often-dark setups, there’s a persistent optimism to the collection, a relentless hope reflected in the music’s bright and buoyant arrangements. Wilson leans on a more pop-centric and experimental sonic palette here than much of his previous solo work, and the results are utterly intoxicating, balancing raw vulnerability and joyful abandon in equal measure as his characters search for comfort and companionship in an increasingly uncertain world.
“I drew an astronaut’s bootprint for the cover, but I tried to make it feel like one of those old dance diagrams,” explains Wilson, whose unique artwork and calligraphy often accompanies his releases. “I wanted to convey that feeling that comes with being toe-to-toe with someone you care about, where even if you’re out in the midst of the vast emptiness of space, you’re still completely dialed into each other and nothing else matters.”
While Wilson first rose to fame as the frontman of Minneapolis alt-rock trio Semisonic, which went platinum on the strength of its chart-topping hit, “Closing Time,” he’s spent much of the past two decades behind the scenes penning what the LA Times has hailed as “some of the era’s great contemporary smashes.” One of the most prolific and accomplished songwriters working today, Wilson has taken home an Album of the Year GRAMMY for Adele’s 21, which featured three of his co-writes (including “Someone Like You”); landed a Song of the Year GRAMMY for “Not Ready To Make Nice,” one of six tracks he co-wrote on The Chicks’ Taking The Long Way; and collaborated with living legends like Carole King and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, country artists like Chris Stapleton and Tenille Townes, rising pop stars like Noah Cyrus and Alec Benjamin, and indie rockers like My Morning Jacket and Phantogram. In just the past year alone, Wilson could be found teaming up with Mitski for her first released co-write, “The Only Heartbreaker,” working with Taylor Swift on re-producing his co-writes on Red (Taylor’s Version), and writing with Leon Bridges, Tom Morello, Joy Oladokun, Claud, and Cuco.
As if all that wasn’t enough, Wilson also earned rave reviews with a series of solo albums, which found him working in the studio with everyone from Rick Rubin to Blake Mills, and garnered a devoted following online for his “Words & Music In 6 Seconds” series, which offered pithy insights and advice drawn from his storied career as a writer, performer, and collaborator. (The series became so popular that Wilson eventually turned it into a 75-card deck covering everything from inspiration and creativity to working relationships and mental health.) And though Wilson’s never been the most conventional artist—his most recent album, 2017’s Re-Covered, featured reimaginings of some of his best-known tunes accompanied by a 56-page book of illustrations, lyrics, and stories—he decided to get even more adventurous these past few years, trading in the traditional album cycle for an open-ended series of singles.
“I was ready for something different,” he explains. “After a lifetime of collecting batches of songs and waiting to put them out all at once, I figured I’d just start recording and releasing music as I wrote it, which was really refreshing.”
Wilson would go on to release 18 songs this way, but deep down, his love for a well-crafted album remained. In 2020, he reunited with Semisonic for their first new EP in nearly two decades, and the following year, he began to think about putting out another collection of his own.
“I always figured all those singles I’d been releasing might turn into an album or something down the line,” he reflects, “but I could never get excited about the idea of sweeping up a bunch of odds and ends and calling it a record. Plus, the world had changed so much in the last year or two alone that my writing had naturally changed with it, and I felt like anything I put out needed to reflect that.”
So Wilson did what’s always come most naturally to him: he wrote. Working both on his own and with a pool of longtime friends and collaborators including John Mark Nelson and Sara Mulford, the new songs he found himself penning relied on a unique mixture of pop accessibility and psychedelic experimentation, pairing infectious melodies and immediately memorable hooks with an unusual new guitar technique he’d stumbled onto during COVID-19 lockdowns.
“When I sat down to play, I tried not to concern myself with much beyond simply making beautiful sounds,” he explains. “As a result, I landed on this fairly odd way of creating noise. It didn’t really sound like a guitar—it was more like an atmospheric environment—but I found a lot of comfort in it.”
It proved to be the perfect complement to the raw, contemplative lyrics Wilson was writing at the time, which grappled with isolation and intimacy, hope and despair, disappointment and consolation. Opening track “Island” sets the stage, with a narrator offering himself up as a source of safety and shelter even as the turbulent winds of change swirl all around. “If you need an island / I’ll be your island,” Wilson sings with gentle reassurance. “Far away from struggling and striving / I’ll be your island.”
“I was on a plane back from visiting my family in Minneapolis when those lines came to me,” he recalls. “I wanted to write something loving and, again, comforting, because it just felt like we all needed more of that in our lives.”
The effervescent “Can’t Think Straight” revels in the ecstasy of infatuation, while an urgent take on Perfume Genius’s “On The Floor” searches for refuge in a lover’s arms, and the dreamy title track imagines a couple marooned on some distant moon, lost to all but each other as they dance beneath a lonely sea of stars. It’s not all romance and escapism, of course, but even moments of conflict (“Under The Circumstances”) and loss (“Red Light”) seem to find comforting resolutions here.
“I wrote ‘Red Light’ with my friends Jenny Owen Youngs and Ethan Gruska,” Wilson recalls, “and at the time I’d been thinking a lot about the recent news that most of Semisonic’s master tapes had burned up in a Universal Records warehouse fire. I was shocked and saddened, but it also made me reexamine my relationship with the past and my broader sense of purpose. Are we meant to go through life leaving a trail of artifacts behind? Or are we meant to live fully in the present and just focus on making vibrations in the moment?”
It can be difficult, scary even, to let go of the objects and totems that feel like they define us. But as Dancing On The Moon demonstrates time and again, it’s not what we have, but who we have that truly matters. In the end, everything else just fades away.