All Your Favorite Bands

"All Your Favorite Bands" is the title track of Dawes' fourth album. Frontman Taylor Goldsmith explained the inspiration for the record's name. "The main line of the title track is 'And may all your favorite bands stay together.' I know that my favorite bands are a really deep part of who I am," he said. "They help define me, they help represent me, they trigger certain emotional memories, and they stand for the ideals and lifestyle that I will always hope to achieve. And I don't mean rock and roll fantasies, but rather concepts like freedom and enlightenment." "I would love for someone wishing me well to put it in the terms of 'may all your favorite bands stay together.' That would be a real friend," Goldsmith continued. "That person would know what truly matters. To me, the statement of 'All Your Favorite Bands' immediately gets down to a highly personal and singular part of anybody in a way that few other concepts can. So that's why we named our record after that song."

American Songwriter magazine named this as their Song of the Year for 2015. They said: "This isn't just a song. It's a graduation speech. It's a toast at last call. It's the closing credits of a coming-of-age flick. It's the soundtrack to catching up with old friends over Facebook. It's an end-of-summer anthem. It's a compendium of yearbook quotes. It's a collaboration between Dawes and Jonny Fritz that balances the heart-on-sleeve sincerity of the former with the tongue-in-cheek humor of the latter. It's the best the band has sounded, possibly the best they ever will sound. It's stray memories and wild nights, El Caminos and 'Let's Party' hats, 'late-night drives and hot French fries.' It's an early-morning reverie, a wide-eyed and big-hearted ode to close friends grown far apart. It's the song of the year."

When Songfacts interviewed Taylor Goldsmith in 2024, he admitted if one of his favorite bands broke up now it wouldn't hit him as hard as it would have in his younger years. "I've slightly aged out of that feeling. If some of my favorite, still existing bands broke up, I would understand because most of them are older anyway," he explained. "But I can only imagine what it must have felt like for fans of The Replacements or R.E.M. when they broke up while still at very vital points in their careers. I was too young and dumb to be aware of either of these bands when they called it, but now as massive fans of both, it must have been heart wrenching for their communities of fans."