Things Happen

The opening track of Dawes' fourth album, All Your Favorite Bands, "Things Happen" could have been a very different song if not for a spark of inspiration and a persistent producer. "I wrote the words to that one to a completely different set of music," the band's lead singer-songwriter Taylor Goldsmith told Songfacts in 2024. "It was much quieter and much folkier. Meanwhile, I was messing with my delay pedal one day and I came up with that riff. I sort of jammed the two ideas together and it worked out well. It started out as having twice as many verses, two pre-choruses, and a bridge. Our producer for that song, Dave Rawlings, kept cutting sections out and having me re-sing it. It was really upsetting in the moment, but it was absolutely the right call."

The lyrics seem to be about a guy surveying the wreckage of a broken relationship and trying to piece together who was at fault, but that's not really the case according to Taylor Goldsmith. "There was really no element of what the narrator's singing about being a breakup," he told The Current in 2015. "There's references to relationships in our lives. I like that it can be perceived that way, but that song was more about a friend of mine - a guy who was getting caught up in a lot of the petty issues that we all deal with... I know sometimes I need to be reminded that this is just how it works, and it's more about how you accept that and deal with it rather than letting it get you down."

All Your Favorite Bands was Dawes' first #1 album on the Billboard Folk Albums chart. It's also their highest-charting entry on the Rock Albums tally, where it reached #4.