After first meeting in 2012 at DePaul University, Libby Weitnauer, Eli Broxham, and Owen Burton became fast friends and began writing music together with every free moment. After years apart, the three reunited around the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. With gigs dried up and a few years of life to catch up on, they made the decision to move to Nashville. No longer the project of their adolescence, the music had come of age with its members. From those locked down days–similar to their intensely collaborative sessions as college students in Chicago–Dallas Ugly was born.
Themes of nostalgia, forgiveness, and regret are all wound together in the latest harmony-laden country-folk single, “Part of a Time”, from Nashville’s Dallas Ugly. Restrained harmonies sung by old friends talk about past relationships they’ve since learned from instead of getting hung up on. No one is trying to change the past, or live in it for that matter, but rather acknowledge it for what it made them now. “Part of a Time” is off of Dallas Ugly’s debut album Watch Me Learn, due out April 8.
“I wrote this song about the people and places we hold in our heads and turn into something else to keep ourselves entertained in a slump. We attach certain people and experiences to phases of our lives and blow them up into this thing they never were or never will be to romanticize times that were actually probably kind of shitty,” says the band.
