Dilemma Season is a studio project by Vancouver musician Scott Hardy. Scott grew up playing very lo-tech music. As a self-taught musician with a voracious appetite for most genres and epochs of music history, he got an old nylon-string classical guitar at the age of 12 and, as Bruce Springsteen once put it, he “learned how to make it talk”. For many years as he studied the masters, the classical guitar had to accommodate finger-picked folk tunes by Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen as well as lead guitar solos by Jimmy Page and David Gilmour. No electrics, no amps, no effects pedals, no computers, and no bandmates meant that his songwriting had to rely fully on instinct and the strength of the one guitar and vocals.
Despite this minimalist approach, Scott kept hearing other instruments and sounds in his head and decided to pursue a fuller “band sound” in the studio. At the end of 2016, he enlisted the help of local producer/engineer Andy Schichter and session drummer Jarrett Plett to set that project in motion. Dilemma Season is the result of that transformation.
Scott hopes the project succeeds in synthesizing his range of influences – old and new – into a coherent whole: modern alternative rock that draws from pre-commercial folk field recordings all the way through blues, jazz, country, classic rock, world music, shoegaze, indie rock, to the harder-to-define new forms of electronic-driven indie and pop rock.
In the near future, Scott hopes Dilemma Season will become more inclusive of different genres, instruments, guest musicians, and at last, more open to electronic music tools.
With professional interests in literary fiction and film-making as well as music, Scott is an unbridled cinephile, audiophile, bibliophile, gastronome, compulsive traveller, and stumbling polyglot. He remains as committed as ever to a Renaissance Man lifestyle in a hyper-specialized world. He is currently polishing songs for a second album, redrafting his first fiction book, and making strides on two feature screenplays.
Today Dilemma Season surprises us with new track ‘Tamed’. This is a great song and performance. The melody is strong and tuneful. Dilemma has an attractive vocal tone, and puts real feeling into the lyrics. The lyrics are interesting and meaningful.
