Every album in Charlie Kaplan’s solo discography seems to entertain a theme. Sunday (2020) has a loose, electric guitar-based feel. Country Life in America (2023) brings a lighter, Beatlesque, indie-folk touch. Eternal Repeater (2024) applies open-ended, psychedelic gestures. A Hat Upon the Bed (2025), arguably his magnum opus, is a sprawling double album about life and death, inspired by his father’s passing and the birth of his son. So, what to make of his latest album, Dobro?
It might be too easy to refer to Dobro as a default Kaplan record. In other words, it seems to take everything great about Kaplan—the vocalist, musician, songwriter, and bandleader—and condense it into nine songs over 28 minutes. The album actually grew out of community. Kaplan attended songwriting workshops hosted by his Office Culture bandmate Winston Cook-Wilson, where, every month, as many as 25 artists would huddle in Cook-Wilson’s Brooklyn studio apartment and share songs they’d all been working on. Fellow musician and recording engineer Nate Mendelsohn suggested that the songs Kaplan brought to the sessions should be recorded as simply and directly as possible, making Dobro perhaps Kaplan’s least fussy and most uncomplicatedly enjoyable record.
Those Dobro recording sessions, engineered by Mendelsohn at Figure Eight Studios in Brooklyn, also embrace community, with longtime conspirators Cook-Wilson on keyboards, Andrew Daly Frank on guitar, Julian Cubillos on bass, Jason Burger on drums, and Ivy Meissner on backing vocals (Kaplan sings lead and plays guitar). These musicians have been in Kaplan’s orbit for ages, and they truly get his music.
Like most of Charlie Kaplan’s music, Dobro explores a variety of subject matter, moods, and vibes. Opening with the musically downbeat “Why Not Try L.A.”, Kaplan presents Los Angeles in a completely uncynical light, a place where dreams come true. “Sunset after dark,” he sings. “And Griffith Park / That’s where you’ll find the spark / To make a life from a lark.”
However, he seems to wake from his dreamy reverie on the driving “On Sunday”, a kinetic rocker partly inspired by Chuck Berry featuring a driving bass line from Cubillos. By the third track, “Sleepwalking”, Kaplan splits the difference with a winsome rocker that sounds like Jeff Tweedy at his most confident, as Cook-Wilson—typically the secret sauce wherever he shows up—brings in some truly startling piano work.
While Kaplan always seems to be a calming presence, a good friend coming off your turntable with words of warmth and empathy, he also shares your frustration and anger. Written a few months after the second Trump term started, the single “Failed” is a terrific snapshot resulting from resentment of “late-stage capitalism, deregulation, institutional inertia, and ‘modernity has failed us’, so to speak” (quoting Kaplan’s press notes), sung by an unreliable narrator who can’t help “mixing in grand, unspecific grievances with peccadillos.” Thus, we get lines like “Failed by the New York Yankees / Failed by Dave Chappelle / Failed by the well-wishers by the wishing well,” plus digs at everything from the Geico gecko to savings and loans to Peyton Manning.
Despite the goal of keeping Dobro a simple, straightforward album, it has plenty of musical variety, not surprising given the firepower of the assembled musicians. “Sick of You” uses a funk template reminiscent of 1990s indie rock—think Mike Doughty with breakbeats—while “Laura” is a sincere country ballad of love and loss. The album closes beautifully with “Let’s Play a Show Together”, a rugged, campfire-like partnership with former Office Culture bandmate Pat Kelly, who duets with Kaplan on this celebration of the art of collaboration. In Kaplan’s words, it’s “a love song; the romance and intimacy of planning and playing a gig”.
While Dobro doesn’t include any actual playing of a dobro, the legendary stringed instrument was something Kaplan always admired hanging on the wall of his local Guitar Center, and its appearance among more contemporary electric guitars was an absurdity he didn’t miss. This plays into Kaplan’s impression that life is filled with surreal juxtapositions, accenting life’s peculiarities. As always, he’s drawn to absurdity and how it lives among regular, relatable, everyday life. Dobro is about observation and community, and it translates eloquently into every song on Charlie Kaplan’s newest record. It’s the perfect gateway into a truly marvelous and ever-expanding discography.