Tag: Crestline CA

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Dominique and the Diamonds Share Playful and Buoyant “Lovely Dream”

Led by Colombian-American frontwoman Dominque Gomez, Los Angeles-based country band Dominique and the Diamonds can trace their origins back to last year: the band came together on a whim, after Gomez was asked to perform a country set at the local summertime concert series, The Grand Ole Echo. 

Friends from cosmic country outfit Caravan 222 and rock band Triptides were asked to perform as a backing band for Gomez and over the course of the year gained buzz locally for a sound that seemingly channels Linda Ronstadt, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Townes Van Zandt and the Laurel Canyon sound — but with a contemporary feel. 

The Los Angeles-based country outfit’s Glenn Brigman-produced debut EP, For a Fool is slated for a June 13, 2025 release. Recorded using a mix of analog and digital equipment in Brigman’s Crestline, CA-based studio, For a Fool EP channels the golden age of classic country with the material touching upon tried-and-true themes of romance, lonesomeness, revenge, drunken playfulness while anchored around the old school song-as-story. And the material sees the band weaving the experiences of the contemporary world, too. 

“I write country music and love to sing country songs, but I’ve always associated myself with the Colombian half of my identity more than the white side. My Dad and his immediate family immigrated to the US from Colombia in 1966 and they’d endured so much struggle in the process,” Dominique and the Diamonds’ Dominque Gomez says. “Then, you have my Mom’s side who were small town farmers in Minnesota and Southern trailer park girls. When you look at me, you see a brown girl, and I fucking love that. And when I was younger, I felt like I was forced to fit into a category, but I was too white to be Latina and too Latina to be white. It’s a beautiful thing to have the wisdom now to embrace both and just be me.”

Last month, I wrote about “For a Fool,” a Patsy Cline-styled ballad of heartbreak, despair and uneasy acceptance anchored around some gorgeous pedal steel and Gomez’s Linda Ronstadt-like vocal. Inspired by the modern “situationship” phenomenon and Gomez’s experiences dating in Los Angeles, the song describes a bitterly common scenario: dealing with a love interest you really dig, who’s an unserious time waster that’s playing with your heart and emotions. And while the song’s narrator is heartbroken, she clearly recognizes her time and her worth, offering a bit of wisdom for anyone who encounters this sort of lover — leave that fool alone before you get played for a fool. 

For a Fool‘s second and latest single “Lovely Dream” is a playful, Hank WIlliams-like bit of honky tonk, anchored around an oompah-like groove and a gorgeous and expressive pedal steel solo that’s simultaneously lush and spacious enough for Gomez’s big, Linda Ronstadt-like delivery.

The song’s buoyant nature is deceptive, because at its core, is a narrator waxing nostalgically on the honeymoon phase of a relationship from the perspective of a heartbroken narrator looking back at the whole experience with some bittersweet — and perhaps just bitter — retrospect.

Sometimes the end of a relationship can make you feel as though you had been walking around with a mix of rose colored glasses, wool, blind hope and naiveté. The retrospect at the core of the song gives that heartache and the feeling of being a made a fool a proper sense of perspective, and hopefully the understanding that you won’t be fooled again.

“’Lovely Dream’ is a silly little love song that I had written for an ex back in 2018, so it’s been sitting in the archives for awhile [sic]. The words ‘lovely dream’ were just the best way to describe the beginning of that relationship,” Dominque and the Diamond’s Dominque Gomez explains. “Emphasis on the beginning… Ha! I was in my early to mid twenties at that time; young, naive and only saw through rose colored glasses. I tie nature into my songwriting at any chance I can get. The relationship to me, at the time, was as harmonious as a budding meadow in the springtime— full of new life, color and energy just waiting to be embraced by the sun.”

Directed by Hamilton Boyce, the accompanying video for “Lovely Dream” features Dominque Gomez in the brush and foothills, before sitting down for a makeup session to make her done up like an old-fashioned rodeo clown.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Dominque and the Diamonds Share a Patsy Cline-Styled Ballad

Led by Colombian-American frontwoman Dominque Gomez, Los Angeles-based country band Dominique and the Diamonds can trace their origins to back to last year, when the band came together on a whim after Gomez was asked to perform a country set local summertime series, The Grand Ole Echo.

Friends from cosmic country outfit Caravan 222 and rock band Triptides were asked to perform as a backing band for Gomez and over the course of the year gained buzz locally for a sound that channels Linda Ronstadt, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Townes Van Zandt and the Laurel Canyon sound — but with a contemporary feel.

The Los Angeles-based country outfit’s Glenn Brigman-produced debut EP, For a Fool is slated for a June 13, 2025 release. Recorded using a mix of analog and digital equipment in Brigman’s Crestline, CA-based studio, For a Fool EP channels the golden age of classic country with the material touching upon tried-and-true themes of romance, lonesomeness, revenge, drunken playfulness while anchored around the old school song-as-story. And the material sees the band weaving the experiences of the contemporary world, too.

“I write country music and love to sing country songs, but I’ve always associated myself with the Colombian half of my identity more than the white side. My Dad and his immediate family immigrated to the US from Colombia in 1966 and they’d endured so much struggle in the process,” Dominique and the Diamonds’ Dominque Gomez says. “Then, you have my Mom’s side who were small town farmers in Minnesota and Southern trailer park girls. When you look at me, you see a brown girl, and I fucking love that. And when I was younger, I felt like I was forced to fit into a category, but I was too white to be Latina and too Latina to be white. It’s a beautiful thing to have the wisdom now to embrace both and just be me.”

The EP’s first single, EP title track “For a Fool,” is a Patsy Cline-styled ballad of heartbreak, despair and uneasy acceptance anchored around some gorgeous pedal steel and Gomez’s Linda Ronstadt-like vocal. Inspired by the modern “situationship” phenomenon and Gomez’s experiences dating in Los Angeles, the song describes a bitterly common scenario: dealing with a love interest you really dig, who’s an unserious time waster that’s playing with your heart and emotions. And while the song’s narrator is heartbroken, she clearly recognizes her time and her worth, offering a bit of wisdom for anyone who encounters this sort of lover — leave that fool alone before you get played for a fool.

“I was 28, single, and could finally see through these types of guys so clearly,” Gomez says. “I actually started to feel bad for them at a certain point. You’ve got to be real sad deep down to just use a person to satisfy your own loneliness and boredom.”

Directed by the band’s Hamilton Boyce (bass), the accompanying video for “For a Fool” was shot at Bar Flores, a Latina-owned tequila/mezcal bar in Los Angeles’ Echo Park section, known for having predominantly female bartenders of color behind the bar, including them and’s Gomez. And throughout we see Gomez in a series of flashbacks, presumably falling in love — and then in the present, proudly telling off an off-screen love interest.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Over the course of his 30+ year recording career, Greg Dulli has developed and maintained a reputation as a poet laureate of the bizarre whims and cruel tangents of desire and all things dark, mysterious and brooding as the frontman and creative mastermind of The Twilight Singers and JOVM mainstays The Afghan Whigs.

Although Dulli has been involved in a number of collaborations and projects throughout his lengthy career but interestingly, enough, his official full-length solo debut Random Desire is slated for a Friday release through Royal Cream/BMG. Random Desire can trace its origins to the aftermath of The Afghan Whigs’ most recent album, 2017’s critically applauded In Spades: Patrick Keeler was about to take a short sabbatical from the band to record and tour with his other band, The Raconteurs. Dulli’s longtime collaborator and bandmate John Curley went back to school. And the band’s longtime guitarist Dave Rosser tragically died after a battle with colon cancer.

Dulli wound up returning to his teenaged bedroom roots, finding inspiration through the model of legendary, one-man, multi-instrumentalist band visionaries like Prince and Todd Rundgren, with the Hamilton, OH-born, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter writing and playing almost every part of the album — from piano and bass lines to drums. Much like he’s always done throughout his career, the music came first and the lyrics completed later. Written and recorded in several different locations including Dulli’s Silver Lake home; Crestline, CA, in the mountains above San Bernardino; and New Orleans — with the bulk of the album being done at Christopher Thorne’s Joshua Tree, CA-based studio.  While Dulli handled most of the album’s instrumental duties, he managed to collaborate with an all-star cast of musicians including his Afghan Whigs bandmates Jon Skibic (guitar) and multi-instrumentalist Rick G. Nelson, his Twilight Singers bandmate Mathias Schneeberger, Dr. Stephen Patt (pedal steel and upright bass) and Queens of the Stone Age‘s and The Mars Volta‘s Jon Theodore (drums).

I’ve written about two of the album’s previous singles — the swaggering “Pantomina,” which delved into the psyche and emotions of a deeply fucked up, dysfunctional narrator, who has a series of fucked-up dysfunctional relationships, and the atmospheric and brooding “It Falls Apart,” a sinuous track that seems to evoke the swooning, rug-has-been-pulled-out-from-under-you sensation of the end of a relationship and the things left unsaid.

Random Desire‘s latest single is the cinematic and Ennio Morricone-like “A Ghost.” Centered around strummed acoustic guitar, shimmering blasts of pedal steel, an expressive and gorgeous string arrangement a gypsy-like shuffle and Latin percussion, “A Ghost” can trace its origins back to when Afghan Whigs were working on In Spades. “It did not work then, so I just put it back in the ‘working on’ folder and then pulled it out last year and recut it…,” Dulli says in press notes. “It started to come together when I went down to New Orleans. The song just reminded me of a journey across the Sahara or something, like a gypsy version of Ennio Morricone.”

Dulli will be embarking on a tour to support his long-anticipated solo debut. The tour begins with a Ireland, UK and European tour throughout March and early April. The Stateside leg of the tour begins in Minneapolis on April 24, 2020 and it includes a May 6, 2020 stop at Webster Hall. Check out the tour dates below.

2020 Tour Dates

March 19 – Róisín Dubh – Galway, IRELAND

March 20 – Whelans – Dublin, IRELAND

March 22 – SWG3 Warehouse – Glasgow, UK

March 23 – Gorilla – Manchester, UK

March 24 – Islington Assembly Hall – London, UK

March 26 – Paradiso Noord – Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS

March 27 – Muziekodroom – Hasselt, BELGIUM

March 28 – Trix – Antwerp, BELGIUM

March 30 – Luxor – Cologne, GERMANY

March 31 – Lido – Berlin, GERMANY

April 02 – Hotel Cecil – Copenhagen, DENMARK

April 03 – Debaser Strand – Stockholm, SWEDEN

April 04 – Parkteatret – Oslo, NORWAY

April 24 – 7th Street Entry – Minneapolis, MN

April 25 – Metro – Chicago, IL

April 26 – St. Andrew’s Hall – Detroit, MI

April 28 – Beachland Ballroom – Cleveland, OH

April 29 – Woodward Theater – Cincinnati. OH

April 30 – Mr. Smalls – Pittsburgh, PA

May 01 – The Great Hall – Toronto, ON CANADA

May 03 – Paradise Rock Club – Boston, MA

May 05 – 9:30 Club – Washington, DC –

May 06 – Webster Hall – New York, NY –

May 07 – Union Transfer – Philadelphia, PA

May 09 – The Grey Eagle – Asheville, NC

May 10 – Cat’s Cradle – Carrboro, NC

May 12 – The Loft – Atlanta, GA

May 15 – One Eyed Jacks – New Orleans, LA

May 16 – 3Ten @ ACL Live – Austin, TX

May 17 – Granada Theater – Dallas, TX

May 19 – Bluebird Theatre – Denver, CO

May 22 – Doug Fir Lounge – Portland, OR

May 23 – The Showbox – Seattle, WA

May 26 – August Hall – San Francisco, CA

May 28 – Palace Theater – Los Angeles, CA

 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: The Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli Releases a Shimmering and Brooding New Single

Best known as the founding member, frontman and creative mastermind behind JOVM mainstays The Afghan Whigs and The Twilight Singers, Greg Dulli has a well-established reputation as a poet laureate of the bizarre whims and cruel tangents of desire and all things dark and brooding.

Although Dulli has been involved in a number of projects during his 30+ year recording career, his first solo full-length album under his own name Random Desire is slated for a February 21, 2020 release through Royal Cream/BMG. Random Desire can trace its origins to the aftermath of The Afghan Whigs’ most recent album, 2017’s critically applauded In Spades: Patrick Keeler was about to take a short sabbatical from the band to record and tour with his other band, The Raconteurs. Dulli’s longtime collaborator and bandmate John Curley went back to school. And the band’s longtime guitarist Dave Rosser tragically died after a battle with colon cancer.

Dulli wound up returning to his teenaged bedroom roots, finding inspiration through the model of legendary, one-man, multi-instrumentalist band visionaries like Prince and Todd Rundgren, with the Hamilton, OH-born, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter writing and playing almost every part of the album — from piano and bass lines to drums. Much like he’s always done throughout his career, the music came first and the lyrics completed later. Written and recorded in several different locations including Dulli’s Silver Lake home; Crestline, CA, in the mountains above San Bernardino; and New Orleans — with the bulk of the album being done at Christopher Thorne’s Joshua Tree, CA-based studio.  While Dulli handled most of the album’s instrumental duties, he managed to collaborate with an all-star cast of musicians including his Afghan Whigs bandmates Jon Skibic (guitar) and multi-instrumentalist Rick G. Nelson, his Twilight Singers bandmate Mathias Schneeberger, Dr. Stephen Patt (pedal steel and upright bass) and Queens of the Stone Age‘s and The Mars Volta‘s Jon Theodore (drums).

Now, as you may recall, late last year, I wrote about “Pantomina,” Random Desire’s swaggering first single, which delved into the psyche and emotions of a deeply fucked up, dysfunctional narrator, who has a series of fucked up, dysfunctional relationships — but at its core, there’s a hard-fought, world-weary wisdom. The album’s second and latest single is the atmospheric and brooding “It Falls Apart.” Centered around shimmering guitars. twinkling and tumbling keys, atmospheric synths, a propulsive rhythm section, and Dulli’s husky delivery, “It Falls Apart” is a sinuous track that seems to evokes the swooning, the- rug-has-been-pulled-out-from-under-you sensation of the end of relationship and the things left unsaid and unexplained. 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Greg Dulli Pays Homage to Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” in Cinematically Shot Visual for “Pantomina”

Best known as the founding member, frontman and creative mastermind behind JOVM mainstays The Afghan Whigs and The Twilight Singers, Greg Dulli has a well-established reputation as a poet laureate of the bizarre whims and cruel tangents of desire and all things dark and brooding.

Although Dulli has been involved in a number of projects during his 30+ year recording career, his first solo full-length album under his own name Random Desire is slated for a February 21, 2020 release through Royal Cream/BMG. Random Desire can trace its origins to the aftermath of The Afghan Whigs’ most recent album, 2017’s critically applauded In Spades: Patrick Keeler was about to take a short sabbatical from the band to record and tour with his other band, The Raconteurs. Dulli’s longtime collaborator and bandmate John Curley went back to school. And the band’s longtime guitarist Dave Rosser tragically died after a battle with colon cancer.

So Dulli returned to his teenaged bedroom roots, finding inspiration through the model of legendary, one-man, multi-instrumentalist band visionaries like Prince and Todd Rundgren with the Hamilton, OH-born, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter writing and playing almost every part of the album — from piano and bass lines to drums. Much like he’s always done throughout his career, the music came first and the lyrics completed later. Written and recorded in several different locations including Dulli’s Silver Lake home; Crestline, CA, in the mountains above San Bernardino; and New Orleans — with the bulk of the album being done at Christopher Thorne’s Joshua Tree, CA-based studio.  While Dulli handled most of the album’s instrumental duties, he managed to collaborate with an all-star cast of musicians including his Afghan Whigs bandmates Jon Skibic (guitar) and multi-instrumentalist Rick G. Nelson, his Twilight Singers bandmate Mathias Schneeberger, Dr. Stephen Patt (pedal steel and upright bass) and Queens of the Stone Age‘s and The Mars Volta‘s Jon Theodore (drums).

“Pantomina,” Random Desire‘s swaggering and self-assured first single is centered around layers of buzzing power chords, a handclap-led hook and lyrics that alternate between sardonic, desperately lonely, and triumphant — often within a turn of a phrase.  Much like his acclaimed work with The Afghan Whigs and The Twilight Singers, the new single delves into the psyche and emotions of a deeply fucked up, dysfunctional narrator with fucked up, dysfunctional relationships — but there’s also a hard fought, world-weary wisdom at its core.

Directed by longtime Afghan Whigs visual collaborator Philip Harder, who stars as Bob Fosse, along with dancers, Paula Vasquez Alzate, Desare Cox, Elayana Waxse, Maggie Zepp, LaTanya Cannaday, Karen Yang, Mia Bird and Reyona Elkins, the recently released and gorgeously shot video for “Pantomina” captures the life behind-the-scenes and on-stage with an intimacy and familiarity of  performer, before going to the frenetically shot performance and the collapse, then death of its hard-living, harder working choreographer protagonist. As Greg Dulli says in press notes. the video “is a homage to the movie All That Jazz. ‘Pantomina’ feels like a show tune to me.”