Night Dawn: The Unpublished Poetry of Townes Van Zandt

Night Dawn: The Unpublished Poetry of Townes Van Zandt features ten previously unreleased lyrics and poems written by the late Townes Van Zandt - one cover of the last song Van Zandt wrote for Davis and one instrumental Broza wrote for Van Zandt. David Broza met Townes when the pair played a show in Houston in 1994. It was the only time the two played together and they did not remain in touch afterwards. On New Years Day, 1997, Van Zandt tragically passed away and shortly after, Broza was alerted that Townes had endowed him a shoebox full of unpublished poetry and lyrics. "I was dumbstruck," Broza recalls. "Why me? I never really talked to Townes. We played together one night. That was it." After Van Zandt's death, his widow, Jeanene Van Zandt, requested Broza to not take the poems, but let her present them instead to Townes' fans like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and others. Eight years later, after nothing surfaced, Broza asked for them and started a four year process writing music for ten of the unseen works. Broza then finished an eleventh, "Harms Swift Way," from a Van Zandt demo. He then composed an original instrumental, "Too Old to Die Young," as a tribute to Van Zandt that closes the album. More than a decade after initially being given to Broza, Van Zandt's unpublished poems and lyrics will now be heard for the first time.