Doby Watson

back to profile

Doby Watson could easily boast over the inordinate amount of bands, genres, and permutations he has undergone through his musical career, but the inescapable remains. He is perhaps foremost a musician of the natural world. His pace is not that of a city dweller, caught inextricably within the steady rush of automata continuously moving headlong. His music instead revels in the surety of the tides, between passivity and kinetics, the periods of rest playing as much a part as the periods of movement. Watson’s voice especially carries with it a balance between the essentially instinctive motifs of existence and the rational way we humans contain and control them.

His latest, Twenty Two, ends with this revelation. The juxtaposition, an apt title, between rational and instinctive, nature and humanity, is a beautiful harmony. The padding of feet, grass flattened, water gushing quietly. It is the human element within the natural world. Compare this to the repeatedly contained messages of disillusionment and confusion for the people in Watson’s world, those within the womb of society.

She cradles her belly and talks of a baby
but he wants it out and out of his life
it’s not that he wants her pain to keep
it’s just not the way he thought he would go.

They seem to continually mourn for a loss; maybe that of a stilted lover finding little solace in the bottom of a glass or the fear of a child and the loss of freedom. What does this mean then? Do we say their source of despair is a disconnection somewhere along the way? Or is it something that just happens because we are what we are - not completely instinctual or rational but pieced together by both.

- Orchid Collective