Mike Dawes

Few guitarists make a single instrument sound like an ensemble, yet Mike Dawes does it as a matter of routine. The English fingerstyle player composes, arranges and performs several parts at once, and his playing rewards close listening. He came to the acoustic guitar by a roundabout route: he dabbled with keyboards before taking up an electric guitar at twelve, and only in 2008 did he switch to steel-string acoustic. Folk, pop and rock shape his writing, alongside the fingerstyle work of Michael Hedges, Pierre Bensusan and Eric Roche.

A self-released EP, Reflections, arrived in 2009 after years of gigs across the United Kingdom. In 2012 he signed with Wisconsin's CandyRat Records and released a virtuosic take on Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know", which won praise from Gotye himself. His What Just Happened? tour reached more than thirty countries, from the Great Wall of China to the Troubadour in Los Angeles. ERA, his second album, followed in 2017 with a one-man cover of Metallica's "One". Dawes was named Best Acoustic Guitarist in the World Right Now in 2017 and again in 2018.