Karen Ponzio Photo
Patrick Dalton performing at Next Door.
New Haven-based musician Patrick Dalton laughed and smiled. “I’m not really sure why I’m here,” he said. Those who know him or has worked with him would not respond similarly; as a singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, producer, and sound engineer, Dalton is one of the people who makes New Haven’s music scene tick, and is about to embark on both hosting an open mic at the State House and holding down a monthly series of solo shows at Next Door on Humphrey Street.
Dalton’s humility, kindness, and gentle strength — along with his body of work — have cast him as one of the most talented and dependable artists in New Haven both on the stage and behind the scenes. In addition to that monthly Next Door show, his plans for 2020 include a weekly gig at The State House hosting the club’s new Tuesday night open mic, running sound at both the State House and Space Ballroom, private sound engineering work including recording and mastering music for himself and others, and his ongoing work with The Proud Flesh.
Dalton grew up in Newtown though “New Haven was always on my radar,” he said, “a quick drive down Route 34 to get here.”
He became a musician in grade school. “I was one of those kids who picked it up in fifth grade along with everybody else,” said Dalton. “You get to pick an instrument, and I picked trumpet,” which he ended up playing throughout high school and college. His dad expanded his musical background. “He always had an interest. There were always instruments around, and when I was around 10, he got a guitar,” which Dalton started “seriously” learning how to play at around age 17 by “teaching myself, listening to songs I wanted to learn and picking them out.”
“I wasn’t one of those kids who were in a band in high school, aside from messing around with friends and making weird recordings in their basements,” he added. “Oddly enough I was never in a ska band in high school,” he said with a laugh.
Burritos And Burnet
Dalton ended up at Keene State in New Hampshire, majoring in music. “Certain kids go through high school and have their eye on the prize … they can foresee their career path and know what steps to take, and I was not that way,” he said. “I was just like, this place is nice. I can get a degree here and snowboard while I do it.”
Though he planted the seeds for songwriting while there. “Writing music … kind of came about from taking writing classes in college,” he said. “When I would write poetry, it would naturally find its way into a rhyme structure…. My first songs came from lyrics that I had already written, and I found ways to turn them into songs.”
After college came a job — and a friendship that would change the trajectory of Dalton’s musical life. After graduation, Dalton “was still living in Keene working at a burrito shop, and that was the first time I came across Alex.” That would be now fellow New Haven-based musician Alex Burnet. “He was going to school at a nearby college and was also living in Keene…. He started working at the same burrito restaurant, which was basically entirely staffed by indie rock kids, so we all bonded over that. They asked for your resume and it was basically, ‘What are your favorite bands?’ and I got the answer right. I was like, ‘I love Pavement, but also Tom Waits,’ and they were like, ‘perfect, you’re hired.’”
Fairly soon after they met, Burnet asked Dalton to play trumpet on a musical project Burnet was working on.
“It was interesting for me to see someone who took the songwriting aspect seriously, and that was inspiring to me and definitely pushed me to working on more songs of my own,” Dalton said. “Our musical relationship and friendship developed such that I went from being a trumpet player in a band to us being like a two piece occasionally.” They eventually became The Proud Flesh.
From New Hampshire To New Haven
Around 2010 Dalton came back to Connecticut. He bought a microphone and recording equipment, and he and Burnet began recording together. As he developed his own songwriting, he took inspiration from predecessors like Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Paul Simon, who he’d been listening to “since he was a baby.” He looked to contemporary bands like Parquet Courts and Pile. He also thought about the Beatles. “I was just marveling at the fact that these four guys … wrote these tight songs, and they were really good at it, and via that, these four guys had a megaphone to the entire world.” Even if “I could never write songs like Paul McCartney or John Lennon,” he derived a lesson: “Look how powerful of a delivery device music can be for a message.”
The Proud Flesh released Tiny Picture Frames in 2010, The Depression Sessions in 2011, and Home in 2013. The Proud Flesh — the current lineup of which includes Dalton and Burnet on vocals and guitar, Mike Skaggs on bass, and Sam Carlson on vocals and drums — remixed and remastered Home last year, and also recorded the makings of a new album.
“We did a little recording retreat to Skaggs’s place in Oxford,” said Dalton. “These songs, most of them have existed in some form or another for a couple of years now, but they just have taken a long time to take the form that they ended up taking.”
“And with this particular album we made a point of tracking the whole thing live, so basically the feel of it is locked in,” he added. “We can embellish things, but at the end of the day it’s going to have that feel of what we had playing in the room. We’re in the overdub phase now.” The band will mix and master the record themselves. “That’s how it was with the last two records and this one will probably be the same way.”
Sound Footing
Like Carlson, Dalton also does sound engineering work for others, most recently on three songs for New Haven’s own Glambat, included on a 2019 split release with Snowpiler called I Feel God in This Chili’s Tonight. Dalton has worked sound at nearly every live music venue in New Haven, though the Space Ballroom and The State House are his “main gigs” now. His gig at the State House led to owner Carlos Wells asking Dalton to do a residency as the host of the venue’s Monday night open mic for the month of November.
“I found out that I enjoyed doing it,” said Dalton. “The spotlight really isn’t on me. I’m sort of just shepherding the whole thing along.” In addition to hosting, Dalton also filled in spots or started the show off with a short set. “It keeps my chops up because I’m still up there playing on stage,” he said. Dalton will now be the host of the newly scheduled Tuesday open mic at the State House, beginning tonight.
Meanwhile, there is Dalton’s monthly happy hour set at Next Door, where he plays solo in the front bar area from 5:30 to 8:30 on the last Thursday of every month. “It’s another one where it’s good for keeping my chops up”, said Dalton, adding that he mixes in a few of his original songs with covers by some of his previously mentioned favorite songwriters. “I could play more of my own originals, but sometimes I worry that they’re not the best fit for the happy hour crowd. They want something more uplifting,” he said with a smile.
“It’s three hours, and if I stop playing its just crickets, but I’m not new to filling that amount of time,” he added. He then told a story from the early days of The Proud Flesh.
“Back in 2010, right around the time when we first started playing as a full band, we used to play this brunch gig at this little café in New Canaan every Sunday, and in a lot of ways it was very formative,” he said. “We used to joke that that was our Hamburg … like the Beatles … we were flattering ourselves, of course, with this comparison, but it really was. We signed on to this gig and we were not qualified. They were like, ‘we want a little bit of a New Orleans vibe,’ and we were like ‘we have a trumpet.’ I think we learned ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ so we could squeeze in there. It was me and Alex and Skaggs and our then-drummer Chris Dickerson. We actually had various configurations at this café, but Alex and I were the constant there.”
“That definitely honed us as a band and forced us to learn truly by the seat of our pants,” he finished. “Basically going through that sometimes uncomfortable situation, we came out the other end as better musicians, so that definitely informed what I do.”
And it still does. “I did a happy hour at Cafe Nine the other night, and someone requested a Paul Simon song that I don’t usually play because it’s hard. But I accommodated them, and it wasn’t a total train wreck,” Dalton said, always humble, ever kind.
Patrick Dalton hosts The State House weekly open mic beginning tonight. More information on that show can be found at the State House website. His monthly happy hour show at Next Door is this Thursday. More information on that show can be found at the Next Door website.