Dawn Oberg will play tonight at The Rutledge and tomorrow at 12th & Porter.
On her new album, Rye, singer and songwriter Dawn Oberg sings the line, “It’s not the life one dreams of, but it must be what I chose.” In the context of the song, “The Girl Who Sleeps With Books,” it’s a reflection on past relationships, but it could just as easily apply to path her music career has followed. In an era when Nashville has become the mecca for songwriters and musicians, regardless of genre, Oberg has the distinction of being an artist who chose to leave the Music City, and in the process found her true voice.
A native of Minneapolis, and a graduate of the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Oberg headed south to Nashville in the mid-'90s. “After school, I stopped playing piano and starting writing these really fucked-up drinking songs on guitar and getting into country and folk,” Oberg says. “I was all about Bob Dylan and Hank Williams.”
She soon found herself hooked into the tiny but vibrant and eclectic Nashville indie-rock scene of the late '90s that became centered around the Springwater. Working with guitrarist Dave Lunn and other musicians, the band Honky-Tonk Happy Hour provided Oberg with an outlet for her half-serious, half-satiric tales of blotto despair like “D-U-I-V-O-R-C-E” and “Pitcher’s Worth a Thousand Words.” But after the release of the group’s first album, You Drank My Backwash, Oberg found her attention drifting in a different direction.
