Steve Dawson, courtesy Laura E. Partain.

Steve Dawson was on tour playing guitar with Birds of Chicago with Allison Russell when the pandemic hit. “We got sent home, and I figured that we’d take maybe a month off at that point. Little did we know!” he said during a recent video call. Even while producing other artists remotely, Dawson ended up writing and recording three albums’ worth of material. The seven-time Juno-Award-winning musician has also been keeping busy with his podcast, “Music Makers and Soul Shakers.”

Dawson moved from Vancouver to Nashville nearly a decade ago.

“I thought it would be nice at some point in my life to live somewhere where music was the thing,” he said.

He found a wealth of friends and collaborators in Music City, some of which appear on Gone, Long Gone (out now).

RIFF: Tell us how your new album came about.

Steve Dawson: It’s really the result of having a fairly tight group of friends who kind of banded together and embraced the process of recording remotely. We got a system down where we were able to offer our services to artists as a remote band. We’d record all the elements of a song, and then I could mix the song within a week. I felt really good about the way that things were sounding, and opportunities were coming up to work with people that I wasn’t in the same city as. Meanwhile, I was writing for myself, too. All this material was coming out, and now I had the means to record it relatively cheaply and quickly. There’s no reason not to put out music these days if you’re happy with it and the quality is good. …

[Collaborator Matt Patershuk is] a friend of mine up in northern Alberta. He’s just a great writer that I’ve always liked, but we were never in the same room at the same time. I had this idea on the guitar, and I had a melody, but the lyrics just weren’t coming. I contacted Matt and said, “Hey, do you have any lyrics? Got any kicking around?” He sent me some and I found one that kind of matched the flow of that song. I loved doing that, so I said, “Hey, why don’t you send me more?” And he did. He had the opposite problem from me. He had no music, and I had no problem with musical ideas, but lyrical ideas can be a real stumbling block for me. Sometimes, he would just send me lyrics, and I would write a song for those lyrics by what was inspired by the words, and other times I would send him a full song with the melody, and I would just say, “Can you write some words for this?” We probably wrote 15 songs that way, and maybe more. And it was really fun, and that to me was successful co-writing.

That’s different from the traditional Nashville co-write.

Steve Dawson: The big thing that’s different about the way Matt and I did it and the way it usually happens here is that there was no time constraint for us. The assumption here is that you’re gonna sit down with somebody for two and a half hours, and have a song at the end of it, and to me, that feels like so much pressure. Matt and I were doing it on our own time. I might work on a melody for like five or six hours. The reference I had in my head was the Grateful Dead; all of those guys had co-writing partners. I’m not the biggest Deadhead, but their songwriting has some cool, evocative lyrics, and they always had these co-writers that were pushing them forward with lyrical ideas. That’s what I was modeling this collaboration after, in a way.

How did Allison Russell come to sing on the album?

Steve Dawson: I had some songs that I wanted some vocals on, and I knew she’d be perfect for them, so I asked her. She’s such a creative backup singer, and she doesn’t necessarily get to do that much anymore because now she’s the featured performer. She’s so good at coming up with creative and unusual harmonies! I’ve actually known Allison for over 20 years. I met her in Vancouver in the early 2000s when we were traveling in the same circles on the musical scene there. I would call her to do the odd project now and then because I knew she was a great singer. We were both off playing a lot, and I didn’t really see her for a few years. Then we reconnected at the Folk Alliance annual conference. …

I went and saw her band, Birds of Chicago, and I thought they were great, and I met her husband, J.T. Eventually, they needed a guitar player, and I started playing with them, and we did quite a lot of touring. Then Allison and J.T. moved to Nashville, and now they live about three houses down from me, so I see her a lot these days. Of course, now everyone wants her to sing on their records, so since I have a setup, she usually records here at my place. I still work with her in the studio all the time, even though I don’t play with her in her band anymore.

Fats Kaplin, who worked on this album, has also worked with John Prine, Jack White and Paul Burch. How did you hook up with him?

Steve Dawson: I met him when I moved to Nashville. I went to the Americana Fest, and Fats was the multi-instrumentalist in the house band there. Everyone in that band was killer, and I just thought, “Oh, those are the people that I want to work with!” I was producing three records at the time that weren’t finished, and so I got in touch with him to see if he would play on them. He was super nice and thrilled to work with someone new. … To me, that was one of the huge advantages of moving to a place like Nashville—having this pool of musicians and singers that’s the best in the world at what they do. It’s just nice having them as friends now; they’re people that I can always call upon for a project. I may not see them for a year here and there, but they’re always up to play on something.

You’ve now recorded more than 100 episodes of your podcast, Music Makers and Soul Shakers. How did it begin in the first place?

Steve Dawson: It’s a long-form conversational musician podcast. I started it because I myself am an avid podcast listener. I’d heard a bunch of conversational podcasts, and some had musicians on, but they didn’t go as deep as I would have liked. So I wanted to start one that was focused on musicians that would go deeply into the recording process and the actual art of making records. The first season was pretty much all people that I’d worked with before. I had immediate access to quite a few people because I’ve been around a long time and worked with a lot of people. My advantage is that I’m coming at it as somebody who makes records, so I can get right into the weeds and talk about the things that they like talking about. …

I was only going to do it for one year, and then it turned into two years, and then there were a few episodes where I said, “This is the last episode ever,” but that was, like, 85 episodes ago. I just kept doing it because I like the interaction with people, and I’ve gotten some interesting opportunities out of it. I’m now looking forward to keeping it going, even if it’s a bit of a grind getting all the guests lined up. I want it to be a good cross-section of different kinds of music and instruments and a diversity of guests. I’m trying to make it as well-rounded as I can. During the pandemic, it was really easy getting people to talk because everyone had all the time in the world. But now people are getting busy again, and the scheduling stuff is getting tricky.

Follow Rachel Alm at Twitter.com/thouzenfold and Instagram.com/thousandfold.