Okay is 5 years old today (4/29/2021)

I can’t believe this album exists. It really shouldn’t. How could it? It should have been a new band. Dowsing was in a strange place. I was in a strange place. It felt like everything I was doing was wrong or hurting someone I cared about. Yet I still made it. 

I don’t regret creating this album, but it’s a time capsule to me that takes me far from where I am today. One could say that about anything they create. The truth is this may have been the hardest and most rewarding time I was ever in a band. We were well practiced and doing everything we could to make this our time. We learned a lot. We hurt a lot. We grew a lot. Okay would not have been what it was without Mikey, Mike P and Will and the bands, friends and support we had during the years of it’s creation (2014-2016). We got to work and have continued to work with Mike Park (Asian Man Records), had international help through Darren Harvey (Dog Knights Productions) and had tremendous help from our talented friends Hania Bigo and McKenna Hynes. During this time we also met Ian, who now plays drums in Dowsing, who embodies and shares so much of the same joy and love for DIY as us. If anything it all led to Ian.
 
To celebrate the release of Okay we wanted to give back to Chicago and give you all something. As we’ve done in the past we dug through our old hard drives and found recordings from this time period and will be putting them all on bandcamp next Friday, May 7th (Bandcamp Friday). 
We are still completing the track listing for next week but we wanted to share this unreleased song with you today titled ‘Okay’. It was a song Mikey wrote while we tracked the album at our home at the time, Gnarnia.

Last month when I realized Okay was turning 5 years old I reached out to Mikey remembering we had this song unfinished. I wrote lyrics the next day and tracked them as a reflection on the time and the album themes of Okay. We then had Ian write and re-record the drums. Honestly, it’s a nice way to come full circle and have Ian included in this chapter of the band. He was there and saw it all from an outsiders perspective and now he is our bandmate. On another note, a lot of those songs on Okay are not nice, in fact, some are straight up mean and for good reason. When it came to it it felt like I was burning every bridge while begging for forgiveness. The most tender moments are the odes to the past members of Dowsing, but even some of those moments are smeared. This song ‘Okay’ is a statement that nothing was fine, nothing is fine, and maybe that’s okay but I sure am sorry. 

We wanted to commemorate the moment by raffling off some artwork created by Hania Bigo that coincided with the albums release. The Boy & Girl drawings were made for our video for Red Legs Kicking directed by McKenna Hynes. In addition to that we had /50 prints made by Bri Weadock reimagining the album artwork with an outline of a hand, get it? We will be putting those prints/LP combos online next week with the release of the full B-sides compilation. All proceeds from digital and the records will go to the Brave Space Alliance (www.bravespacealliance.org). All purchases will go into a drawing and at the end of May we will pick the winners and mail them the framed drawings. Every different purchase will count as a new entry (example: buy the LP/Print, and buy the compilation it would be 2 chances to win). 

This was long. Email me if you have questions. dowsingband@gmail.com. 
We love you, enjoy the music and thank you for supporting a good cause.

xoxo
Rik