Dave and Tim Hause

You can hear Dave Hause’s passion and dedication to his craft—as well as his determined approach to it—flowing through the veins of his latest album Blood Harmony’s ten stunning, sumptuous songs. Written with his brother Tim over a series of weekly FaceTime sessions, they began crafting songs together in January 2021. They’d been writing remotely together since 2017’s Bury Me in Philly so it wasn’t an entirely new process for them, but they modified their approach slightly by giving themselves rigid deadlines. "We decided to get together on Mondays," explains Hause, "to figure out what we wanted to work on, and by Friday we had to have something you could sing to someone who wasn’t a songwriter. It could be bad, but I didn’t want to just have vague ideas. We called it ‘Pencils-Down Fridays’. Over the course of three-and-a-half months, we ended up with 26 songs."

They traveled with ten of those songs to Nashville, where acclaimed songwriter Will Hoge took up the helm of producer. Through Hoge’s connections, what Hause calls "a staggering bunch of musicians" was assembled to flesh out the songs he and Tim had written. He’s not wrong. There was Brandi Carlile’s drummer Chris Powell, the E Street band bassist Garry Tallent, acclaimed session guitarist Tom Bukovac, Jason Isbell’s guitarist Sadler Vaden and keyboardists Billy Justineau, Mike Webb and Jen Gunderman, who have played with the likes of Eric Church, Sheryl Crow and others.

Hause is the first to admit that it was a world away from the punk rock scene he’d made his name with as frontman of The Loved Ones. "They say that when you work in any field, you’re happiest when you initially get the respect of your peers," he says. "Thankfully, I’ve had that respect for some time now. But in this situation, these people were not our peers. They’ve operated at the highest level of the music business that is even possible, so to get their respect was so gratifying. Their kindness and commitment to making the record great because they liked the songs was tremendous. I keep saying that if anybody else likes the record, that’s icing on the cake, because the way we wrote and made it was so wonderful."