Long Beach, California-based songwriter Dillon Vanders weaves together Laurel Canyon folk rock and country on the laidback groover "Healing Touch," from his forthcoming album Wildfires (out April 8).
Vanders said the love song was inspired by a day spent with his significant other in Topanga, California.
"This song is probably the most personal on the record for me, because it's the first real love song I've written," Vanders tells Wide Open Country. "I wrote the lyrics in Topanga Canyon a few days after we'd cut the guitars and pedal steel with Greg Leisz, who is a powerhouse of a musician. He's in Jackson Browne's band, and has played on so many great records! This song is about that day in Topanga. I was with my significant other at what was basically a hippie compound in the woods, and was just sort of describing our surroundings. We had taken LSD, which definitely helped with the inspiration! I guess you could call it a psychedelic love song."
Listen to "Healing Touch" below.
Wildfires was fecorded at Robby Krieger's (The Doors) studio in LA and produced by Michael Dumas and Shayna Adler. The album features an accomplished group of studio musicians, including guitarist and pedal steel player Greg Leisz, who plays with Jackson Browne and has worked with Beck, Lana Del Ray and Bruce Springsteen, drummer Mario Calire (the original drummer for The Wallflowers) and guitarist Al Bonhomme, who's played with Dwight Yoakam and Pete Anderson.
Vanders is a self-described "cannabis enthusiast" who has worked in the industry for 13 years and, while he wouldn't classify his music as stoner rock, it is reflected throughoug his music.
"I've always tried to be a little less direct," Vanders says in a press release. "If I want to write about the pot industry and how it's changed, I'll try to write it in a way where it can be about something like getting your heart broken, seeing things change, and dealing with it."
