D+ :: Dandelion Seeds
Anacortes, a city in Skagit County, Washington, located just an hour and a half outside of Seattle, is a coastal community that brought you the brilliant minds of Phil Elverum’s The Microphones/Mount Eerie, the KNW-YR-OWN record label family, the supergroup D +, and Harry Smith, to name a few, and has been on the melodic map for decades, with its particular paradise of sonic salvation. Established in 1879, Anacortes was discovered by journalist and railroad surveyor Amos Bowman, and was named after his wife, Anna Curtis. After heavy promotion citing the city as “New York of the West," Bowman hoped it would eventually catch on and become the western terminus for the transcontinental railroad. Sharing a similar timeline to the global grunge movement of the 1990s in the wake of Alice in Chains, Nirvana, and Green River, among countless others, the transcendental trio consisted of Bret Lunsford (Beat Happening/What The Heck Fest), multi-instrumentalist Karl Blau, who grew up across the bay on Samish Island, and Phil Elverum, and first formed in 1996, shortly before releasing their self-titled debut the following year. But their 1998 sophomore album “Dandelion Seeds” is where we draw the lyrical line in the sonic sand, get on our hands and knees, and carefully peer into the cosmic crystals and sophisticated structures of the landscape to decipher the DNA of an underground indie classic. While working at The Business, a local record store in Anacortes where Elverum was writing and recording his own music in his spare time, he eventually connected with musician, author, historian, and founder of Knw-Yr-Own Records, and legendary guitarist of the beloved Olympia-based group Beat Happening, Bret Lunsford, who was owner from 1990-2005, and later Karl Bau, who also worked at the storefront at the time; the three put their heads together, and out came this spectacular songbook of cult classics.
Anacortes and its geographic beauty have shaped its creative culture for decades, and the Samish and Swinomish people lived on Fidalgo Island for thousands of years in massive cedar longhouses until non-Indian settlers arrived in the 1860s and quickly established Ship Harbor. Eventually, the years moved on, and D+ picked up the poetic pieces where groups like Beat Happening, Galaxie 500, and Spacemen 3 left off in the prolific past. Their blistering brand of escapism into the unique unknown is a blueprint for bands casting their lyrical lines into the dark of today’s world; with tracks like “Dandelion Wine,” “Green Party,” the album’s opener “Cut It Out,” and “A Sweet Reminiscence,” D+ shock the system and leave nothing on the table. As the 30th anniversary approaches, their discography continued into the 2000s with titles such as “Mistake,” “Deception Pass,” and most recently 2018’s “Destroying Before Listening,” while the group’s legacy continues to shine through even the most complicated clouds and out the other side, lining a revolutionary rainbow that sits along the Salish Sea and Puget Sound, which connect to the Pacific Ocean.
