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Premiere Singles

Premiere: All The Real Girls’s “Your Favorite Songs”

Release date: November 29, 2019

Dan Ray November 29, 2019
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Premiere: All The Real Girls’s “Your Favorite Songs” November 29, 2019

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Photo courtesy of All The Real Girls / Photo by Nikki Barron

Next Friday, local indie-Americana quartet All The Real Girls debuts the live version of their new single, “Your Favorite Songs,” at High Dive with The Mondegreens, The Hasslers, and Everson Pines. Today, a week before the show, Dan’s Tunes is excited to premiere the track, the second single from the band’s forthcoming album, Movie Star Handsome, due out in spring of 2020.

Inspired by a Greek myth about the beginning of the universe, the track spins the yarn of a love story between the Sky and the Earth. According to the myth, there was nothing, and then, all of a sudden, the Sky and Earth emerged, embarking on a whirlwind love affair that created the world as we know it.

“I tried to picture what that romance would have been like,” said frontman and songwriter Peter Donovan. “When you first fall in love with someone, it can feel like you’re the only two people in the world.

“At first, it must have been magical,” Donovan continued. “[But,] I bet they have their ups and downs like any other relationship does over time.”

The track starts at the beginning of the love story, with Donovan — presumably playing the part of the Earth — cooing to the Sky, “if you want to be / the captain of a ship / I’ll carve you out an ocean / and build a boat in it.” Singing over top humming, spacious strums from a single electric guitar, Donovan’s voice quite literally feels like it’s carving out a place for the Sky within the already-formed Earth, gently rollicking along its own edges, smoothing out a space to build ships and “play [the Sky’s] favorite songs.”

Halfway through the first verse, featured backup vocalist Shenandoah Davis’s voice edges in with soft “oohs,” playing the part of the Sky, slowly being wooed by the space created in and by the Earth. The Sky crawls into a warm embrace, rife with security and hopeful lust.

After the first chorus, though, the instrumentation picks up, signaling the start of relationship issues between our two universal forces. Joining the electric guitar, drummer Matt Millen kicks up a beat evocative of the folk movement in 1960s Greenwich Village, and guest keyboardist Bill Nordwall, of The Ramblin’ Years, switches from lightly twinkling wonder to strong, sure, harmonious notes that fill out the top end of the tune. Twanging guitars keep “Your Favorite Songs” rooted in our main character, the Earth, as the relationship turns: “if you want to live / a thousand years or more / I’ll put you in the ground / I’ll start another war.”

An impeccably written, masterfully layered indie-Americana tune (produced by Eric Corson of The Long Winters), “Your Favorite Songs” sits perfectly between sky and earth. Spacious and awe-inspiring, the song reminds me of childhood days spent staring out the window, looking past the horizon, wondering aloud where the sky began and if I’d ever be able to touch a cloud. “It begins right here” and “of course; you just have to reach high enough” All The Real Girls seems to answer in this track, positing that we can still have our minds and bodies in the sky, even as our feet grow out of the earth.

Take a listen to the track below, and don’t forget to catch All The Real Girls at High Dive on December 6.

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Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).