Exactly How We Planned by Dakota Floyd

Even though he thinks I have a British accent, Dakota Floyd is one of the best things I know about Georgia. Maybe tied with his dog, Soda. Both are better than Waffle House. Dakota’s 2016 album Localities spent a few months in my Caravan’s cd player, so I pretty much knew what to expect. Exactly How We Planned has only 3 songs and two of them are really short. Maybe there’s also a 7” version somewhere. I didn’t do any research. Exactly How We Planned makes you feel at home even when being at home makes you sad. It is a sadness you are comfortable with.

You might call it acoustic pop punk or emotional folk punk, never without that special bit of sass that colored everything in the mid 2000s. The overdriven guitar and back-up vocals add an air of rowdiness and whimsy that never feels stilted. Rosa Song features a super talented tambourine player that doesn’t get any credit on the cd sleeve. I could definitely imagine this song being played in the background on Dawson’s Creek, especially if they move the show to a different streaming service and have to change all the music.

Dakota sings “This house smells like a Rosa Song” and I try imagine what a Rosa song does smell like: hand-rolled cigarettes wafting in from the front porch, a box of half-rotten dumpstered food, a bagless trash bin filled with the drippings of a thousand crushed beer cans, a mixture of patchouli and body odor, a toilet that hasn’t been scrubbed since the lease began, a family of cats that all live behind an occasionally cracked door in the back of the house. Am I getting warm? I wonder if the day of the punk “punk house” has passed.

The title track has one of those lo-fi/phone singing intros before the song kicks in, like it’s 2003 all over again. I’m so glad Dakota remembered to do one of those intros. I always forget. Maybe right after I schedule this post, I’ll go ahead and fix one of my mixes. We’ll call it a shout back. Lyrically, it hits you just right. I love the anti-solo, delayed guitar in the second half. Maybe it’s for the best that life never goes as planned. Sometimes people surprise you in the best ways, like with the lo-fi/phone singing intro. Thanks Dakota. You're better than Waffle House.