Piet Dalmolen has spent the past fifteen years gigging with other bands and playing covers. Sure, it was good to have the work, but these gigs did not feed a necessary creative fire and it’s been a long dry spell since he made his own music. That has now changed. Feeling inspired to dive back in, and with a wealth of new material, he picked his local dream team of musicians and watched it all fall into place. “I love my band for their talent, aesthetic, and easygoing personalities,” says Piet. “The older I get the more I appreciate having the right people that I can rely on and have fun with, and thankfully, they believe in my musical vision.”
Piet is joined on this record by Matt Engel on keyboards, Tommy Fitzmaurice on drums, and Ian Taylor on bass. Together, these musicians from Humboldt County, that storied Emerald Triangle, have made a record that fits squarely in the California musical canon of introspection in a sometimes breezy, sometimes darker collection of songs and a couple of instrumentals that ruminate on the mysterious intricacies of love, fatherhood, mortality, new beginnings, and surfing.
Piet’s debut solo LP, Time Stands Still, is the result of a lot of life experience spanning from the difficulty of living through the pandemic to escaping the devastating Lahaina fires, afoot, with nothing but a guitar on his back, to the adventure of becoming a new surfer. It would make sense then that, among other themes, this record is packed with musings on nature and the magic and difficulty of human interaction. It took a year’s worth of focused tracking sessions at Odyssey Studios. This rustic barn sits atop prairie overlooking the vast Pacific Ocean to bring this cohesive and sonically rich record to fruition. It is impressive and worth noting that Piet wrote, produced, engineered, and mastered the entire project.
One of the great things about music is that musicians like Dalmolen stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. They digest what they like and spit out what they don’t. Time Stands Still is no exception. Piet and his cohorts have taken the the sounds of bands like Circles Around The Sun (just listen to Engle’s keyboard work here and you’ll understand), Phish, The Samples (Piet’s vocals are instantly familiar if you have spent any time listening to Sean Kelly), and a dash of Talking Heads. A guitar lead here might make you think you heard Garcia, and some dank instrumentals there will have you connecting to Pink Floyd. Dalmolen took it all in, flavored it, blended it in his brain and poured it all back out into grooves that beckon to us to dive in like a solid right we gaze upon from the beach. The cuts are slinky and soulful; the lyrics are uplifting and thought-provoking. There is room on this record as well, room that allows us to sit and absorb it all.
With a debut such as this, we can’t help but look forward to what this multifaceted and inimitably talented player will bring us in the future.
