On June 30, 2010, Dawes published a short announcement directing listeners to a recent Yours Truly session recorded with the Morning Benders. The surviving notice offers no critical commentary, but it securely dates the collaboration and identifies the participants. Dawes’ official archive
Contemporary reports supply the missing particulars. Two days later, The Line of Best Fit described the bands joining for two numbers from Dawes’ 2009 debut, North Hills. Glide subsequently named those performances as “When My Time Comes” and “If You Let Me Be Your Anchor.” Together, those accounts establish a compact, two-song encounter rather than an ordinary Dawes promotional appearance. The Line of Best Fit, Glide Magazine
The pairing was especially apt for “When My Time Comes.” Taylor Goldsmith’s song begins in private uncertainty but repeatedly opens into a refrain made for answering voices. Bringing another California band into the performance did not require changing its argument. It made the social dimension already embedded in the arrangement easier to hear.
A song working at two different scales
“When My Time Comes” occupies the fifth position on North Hills, between the restrained “Give Me Time” and the darker “God Rest My Soul.” Its placement helps it function as a release point: the album’s acoustic textures and reflective writing suddenly gather into something broader and more forceful. AllMusic characterizes the track as a rapid account of personal maturation that breaks into a soaring chorus. AllMusic’s album entry
That movement is central to the song. The verses are crowded with judgments, second thoughts and images of a mind testing its own conclusions. They travel with an urgency that suggests the singer is trying to reason faster than doubt can catch him. The chorus does the opposite. It reduces the language, stretches the melody and leaves room for a wordless response.
The contrast prevents the song from becoming a simple declaration of confidence. Its title might refer to artistic opportunity, mortality, recognition or a final reckoning, but Goldsmith never forces those meanings into a single answer. The song earns its anthem-sized refrain by preserving the uncertainty that precedes it. Listeners are not asked to accept a slogan; they are invited to enter a question.
The recording method strengthened that tension between intimacy and scale. AllMusic reports that North Hills was made almost entirely live in the studio on two-inch analog tape and credits Jonathan Wilson as producer, engineer and mixer. In a contemporary interview, Goldsmith similarly explained that the basic performances were recorded live to tape, with only such elements as organ, additional guitar and background vocals added afterward. He valued the resulting imperfections because they kept the record from feeling overly polished. AllMusic, The Bluegrass Special
That process matters to “When My Time Comes.” Its power does not depend on a studio-built illusion of unlimited size. The rhythm section, guitar movement, organ and voices sound like musicians creating momentum together. A collaborative session could therefore enlarge the vocal field without contradicting the debut’s underlying aesthetic.
The doubt inside the anthem
Goldsmith was unusually direct about the song’s subject before North Hills had received its wider release. Speaking with The Bluegrass Special in 2009, he connected “When My Time Comes” to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and described the song as an attempt to confront an artist’s dilemma: when doubt is useful, when ambition becomes ego and whether pursuing the work is worth its demands. The Bluegrass Special
That account guards against hearing the chorus as uncomplicated triumph. The verses continually challenge the singer’s authority. He distrusts borrowed wisdom, subjects his own conclusions to further scrutiny and recognizes how easily dissatisfaction with oneself can become judgment of everything else. The refrain offers motion and temporary release, not a solved philosophy.
The song was already producing a collective response before the Yours Truly collaboration. Reporting from Dawes’ February 2009 New York shows, The Bluegrass Special described the then-unsigned quartet as far more muscular onstage than its subdued recording suggested and singled out “When My Time Comes” as an especially forceful audience moment. That early report shows that the song’s communal quality was not invented after it became a recognizable part of the catalogue. It emerged while Dawes were still establishing themselves outside Los Angeles. The Bluegrass Special
Goldsmith later offered a concise explanation for that accessibility. In a 2011 interview, he called the song a coming-of-age piece that deliberately leaves enough unspecified for listeners to connect it to their own experience. He also pointed to its brisker pace and wordless chorus as reasons people could join it so readily. Utne
Those observations describe a careful balance. The writing is personal enough to feel inhabited, but the title and chorus are not locked to one biography. Different listeners can hear anticipation, fear, ambition or mortality in the same refrain. The song becomes communal without becoming generic.
Why the Morning Benders collaboration fit
The Yours Truly session placed that openness in the foreground. Contemporary coverage called the performances duets or collaborations, not Morning Benders covers of Dawes songs. The distinction matters: the event was based on participation within Dawes’ material, with “When My Time Comes” paired with the gentler “If You Let Me Be Your Anchor.” The Line of Best Fit, Glide Magazine
The selections present complementary sides of North Hills. “When My Time Comes” presses outward through a driving refrain, while “If You Let Me Be Your Anchor,” the album’s tenth track, turns toward reassurance and dependence. One converts doubt into momentum; the other makes vulnerability its point of address. AllMusic’s track listing confirms their places on the album and the four-piece lineup of Taylor Goldsmith, Griffin Goldsmith, Wylie Gelber and Tay Strathairn. AllMusic
The collaboration also sits naturally beside the record’s emphasis on harmony. AllMusic heard North Hills in relation to the Band, Neil Young, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash, but the practical value of those comparisons lies in arrangement rather than nostalgia. Dawes used acoustic foundations, organ, flexible dynamics and blended voices to move songs between close reflection and full-band lift.
Goldsmith told The Bluegrass Special that Dawes intentionally distinguished its quieter records from its louder concerts. He admired how artists such as Neil Young and the Band could allow a studio version to serve the song while making the live experience substantially more forceful. The Yours Truly performance occupied useful middle ground: a documented session with the immediacy of musicians sharing a room, yet focused tightly enough to expose the songs’ construction. The Bluegrass Special
In that setting, additional singers are not ornamental. They complete the structural invitation made by the chorus. “When My Time Comes” begins with one songwriter examining his motives, but it is designed to reach a point where other people can enter without pretending to resolve his doubts for him.
The song that helped Dawes move forward
A later recollection from Goldsmith makes the song’s assured shape seem even less inevitable. He told Guitar Player that he initially possessed only the guitar riff and chorus, completed the song after a friend urged him to include it on North Hills, and did not finish the second verse until he was in the studio. He also remembered unfamiliar audiences joining the final chorus almost immediately. Guitar Player
Goldsmith went further, crediting the song’s response during Dawes’ opening dates with helping the group find management and representation. That retrospective should not turn the Yours Truly session into a predetermined milestone. In June 2010, the more revealing fact was that a song assembled under doubt had already become portable: it worked on an analog-rooted album, in louder concerts and in collaboration with another band.
The session captured “When My Time Comes” at exactly that productive stage. Dawes had a recognizable song but not a closed monument. Its questions still felt exposed, and its refrain still depended on whoever was willing to answer. Adding the Morning Benders demonstrated the song’s essential design: individual uncertainty moving, for a few minutes, toward collective release.