Dallas Good & Richard Reed Parry - Were The Watchtowers (2026) [Hi-Res]

It was not easy to finish this album without him.

We met in Dawson City in 2009 and started writing songs together soon afterwards. We worked slowly. A lot of life occurred between then and now, but somehow In the winter of 2022 Dallas was suddenly gone.

Most of these songs had already been recorded but there were a couple that were only half finished and still needed words. We never made demo versions of anything, except for one guitar part that Dallas had come up with and recorded a rough version of at home - he sent it to me and I sang some freeform words over it; Dallas picked out the phrase “Not In This World” from what I sang, and that was all we had for that song.

Laurel Sprengelmeyer helped me write the rest of the words, and Travis, Bruce and Margaret Good sang them with me in Dallas’ absence. Neko Case wrote and sang lyrics for “The Hole in the Wall” - an old instrumental folk tune that my late father’s band The Friends of Fiddler’s Green used to play, that Dallas had insisted we record. Margaret Atwood and Buffy Sainte-Marie lent their voices to a couple of empty spots.Pietro Amato kept me on the rails and added a lot of finishing touches.Hundreds of Dallas’ friends, bandmates, family and fans sang on the final choruses of the final song.

The morning after Dallas died there was a cloud in the sky over my mom’s house in the shape of an exclamation mark, I’m fairly sure that it was his doing.

- Richard Reed Parry, December 2025