Daniel Rossen - Live In Pioneertown & Santa Fe (LP)

I first heard these performances the way they were meant to be heard, on a quiet night with the lights low, that unvarnished guitar carrying all the gravity Daniel Rossen packs into a single chord change. Live In Pioneertown & Santa Fe collects recordings from his 2022 tour behind You Belong There, and arrived as a limited Record Store Day release in April 2023 on Warp. On paper that sounds like a souvenir for completists. In the groove it plays like a companion piece that throws a fresh light on his songs, stripping them down to wood and wire, voice and room, until the bones gleam.

Rossen has always written like a carpenter who loves joinery. The melodies interlock, the tunings feel slightly askew, the time shifts nudge your ear off center just enough to keep you alert. In the studio he fills the frame with woodwinds, cymbal wash, and overtones. Here, the arrangements are lean. You can hear fingertips slide, tiny hesitations as he moves through those knotty progressions, the soft creak of a chair as the crowd holds its breath. The desert air of Pioneertown seems to cling to the strings. The Santa Fe cuts carry a different stillness, a home-state hush he’s grown into since moving to New Mexico. It suits him.

The setlist pulls heavily from You Belong There, and the contrast is striking. Where the album braids reeds and percussion into intricate lattices, these live versions bring out the old folk heart beating inside his writing. A tune that felt like architecture in the studio becomes a story told around a traveling guitar. It makes you think about how Rossen came up, splitting time between the careful chamber-rock of Grizzly Bear and the more baroque pop of Department of Eagles. You can hear both impulses in his right hand, the snap of a rest stroke followed by a glassy harmonic, then a line that bends toward some half-remembered Appalachian tune. He is one of those players who can imply a rhythm section without anyone else on stage.

The audience clearly understands what they’re witnessing. You hear warm applause, then quick silence. There are no singalongs to spoil the mood, no woos stepping on the tail of a phrase. Instead, a shared focus blooms. It turns the record into a travelogue of rooms. Pioneertown has that open desert reverb, the kind you get when a stage sits a few feet from dust and stars. Santa Fe feels intimate and lived-in, the way a hometown show can make a performer exhale. If you were lucky enough to catch those dates, this will feel like a carefully framed photo. If not, it’s the next best thing.

One of the quiet thrills here is how the guitar carries melodic details the studio versions assign to other instruments. Little counter-melodies peek out from arpeggios, low drones appear under a phrase, and patterns tilt into odd meters without ever breaking flow. The confidence involved in playing this alone is its own kind of virtuosity. Not flashy, just precise and sturdy, the way a well-made chair holds you without calling attention to itself. It’s also heartening to hear Rossen’s voice set so plainly in front of the songs. He sounds grounded, a little weathered, and fully committed to the moment.

Collectors will want this for the shelf next to You Belong There, and it’s a lovely listen on black wax. If you’re hunting Daniel Rossen vinyl, Live In Pioneertown & Santa Fe vinyl is worth the search. I’ve seen copies pop up at independent shops and the occasional Melbourne record store, and there are still clean ways to buy Daniel Rossen records online if you know where to look. For anyone building a small but focused stack of modern folk records that reward repeat spins, this belongs in there. It also sits nicely among Daniel Rossen albums on vinyl from the Grizzly Bear orbit, a different angle on a songwriter who writes with the patience of a craftsman.

As live documents go, this one resists the usual trap of feeling like a merch-table afterthought. It plays more like a statement about what these songs are when all the studio choices fall away. If the studio work is a careful landscape painting, this is a field sketch in pencil, quick and exact, with just enough shading to make the shapes pop. Put it on late, let the needle ride to the locked groove, and you’ll get what the rooms in Pioneertown and Santa Fe heard. It’s the sound of a singular writer trusting the song. And that trust makes the record easy to love, whether you’re streaming it on a quiet morning or flipping through crates of vinyl records Australia-wide hoping to catch lightning in a sleeve.