Pop visionary Debbii Dawson confronts modern dread with disco-lit wit and irresistible theatricality on “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?,” a glimmering, darkly funny song that plays with moral exhaustion, missing heroes, and the radical act of choosing goodness when the world feels overrun by villains.
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Stream: “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?” – Debbii Dawson
I wanted to write about our grim reality in a non-emo way… Good people are hard to come by these days, but if we each try to be the good we’re so desperately looking for, we just might have a chance.
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After dazzling us last year with a steady stream of disco-pop delights, Debbii Dawson has returned with a question for the ages: “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?”
Her first single of 2026 is a stunning revelry in its own right – fun, funny, insanely catchy, and beautifully ABBA-esque, a light and irresistibly buoyant pop gem that turns modern dread into a widescreen burst of melody, movement, and theatrical flair. Following last year’s “I Want You,” “Gut Feelings,” “Chemical Reaction,” and “You Killed the Music,” Dawson’s latest doesn’t just pick up where she left off; it spins her world into brighter, bolder, more cinematic color.
Picture this as I set the scene
It’s like those dreams
where you try to scream
But waking up is a
dangerous game to play
No, I’m not woke, I’m just getting tired
There’s bills to pay and a genocide
I need someone by my side
to save the day
But it feels like
Everybody’s missing their medullas
Need somebody, need somebody super
Come on, tell me
Where have all the good men gone?
(No good men,
where have all the good mеn gone?)
Released May 8 via RCA Records, “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?” also arrives as the title track to Dawson’s forthcoming EP of the same name, out June 26. A Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter and first-generation Indian-American artist raised in the rural Midwest, Dawson first captured national attention on America’s Got Talent with a standout rendition of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” then introduced her melody-forward, genre-blurring world on her 2023 debut EP Learning before expanding it with 2024’s How To Be Human. Her music pulls from deep family roots and wide-ranging influences, folding folk warmth, nostalgic disco, subtle country, and theatrical pop instincts into songs that feel lived-in and larger-than-life at once. With “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?,” she continues to refine the strange magic Atwood celebrated in last year’s “weird girl who makes weird music for weird people” feature: Dawson makes resilience sound radiant, gives loneliness a costume change, and writes as if the right melody might still help us find our way back to ourselves.
“Where Have All the Good Men Gone?” feels like Dawson flinging the doors open on her breathtaking pop universe, carrying last year’s personal reclamations into a bigger, wilder, and more urgent fight for hope.
Last year’s Dawson songs were full of personal reclamation – desire, self-trust, romantic chemistry, and the glittering triumph of getting your spark back. Here, she takes that same brilliant toolkit and points it at the wider world, asking what happens when the thing stealing your breath is not one person, but the daily spectacle of cruelty, cowardice, and collapse.
There’s a delicious irony baked into “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?”: The song is, on its surface, bubbly and buoyant, all gleaming hooks, glitzy flourishes, wandering synths, and Dawson’s layered, yearning vocals rising like a disco ball catching the first light of morning. But beneath that sparkle is a real exhaustion with the state of things – the kind of bone-deep disbelief that comes from watching the world get worse and wondering who, exactly, is supposed to help. Dawson sings, “Picture this as I set the scene / It’s like those dreams where you try to scream / But waking up is a dangerous game to play,” and suddenly the song’s shimmer sharpens into satire. This is not naïve pop escapism; it is grim reality dressed in platform boots, grinning because crying would ruin the mascara.
“Every day I watch the news and think, ‘Wow, this is terrible,’” Dawson shares. “And every day seems worse than the day before. I find myself wondering if there are any good people left on this planet, why am I seeing supervillains everywhere I turn? I was binging Smallville at the time, wishing that Superman would swoop in and save the day. That’s the headspace I was in when I met up with Joel Little at his home in Los Angeles.”
That Superman fantasy gives the song its charmingly over-the-top pulse. Dawson is not asking the title question with a straight face so much as throwing her hands into the air, looking around at bills, genocide, fear, apathy, and absurdity, and demanding somebody, anybody, show a little backbone. “Everybody’s missing their medullas / Need somebody, need somebody super,” she sings in a chorus that somehow feels both ridiculous and painfully reasonable. It is a testament to Dawson’s gift that she can make existential fatigue sound this bright – not because she is softening the feeling, but because she understands how much sharper despair can become when it is delivered with wit, style, and a hook you cannot shake.
The medulla line is funny because it is so weirdly specific. Biologically, the medulla oblongata (or simply medulla) helps regulate the most basic functions that keep a body alive – breathing, heartbeat, the automatic stuff we do without thinking. So when Dawson sings, “Everybody’s missing their medullas,” she is not just calling people stupid; she is diagnosing a world that feels brainless, senseless, morally offline, and incapable of basic human decency. It’s a punchline with a pulse, a ridiculous image that lands because the feeling behind it is so painfully recognizable: Looking around and wondering whether everyone has somehow lost the part of themselves that knows how to care.
This collision of comedy and dread only gets sharper as the song goes on.
Dawson sings, “Searched the world, I went far and wide / What I found left me terrified / Made me think Jesus came back and left me behind,” framing moral exhaustion as both cosmic joke and spiritual panic. Even the throwaway-feeling punchlines carry weight: “Did they all get lost down in Bermuda?” is funny because it is absurd, but it also speaks to the song’s central helplessness – the sense that goodness has not merely disappeared, but vanished somewhere unreachable, leaving the rest of us to make sense of the wreckage.
Searched the world, I went far and wide
What I found left me terrified
Made me think Jesus came back
and left me behind
Trying to find heaven on Earth,
Do you think it’s foolish?
Back of a hearse,
still trying to make it through
(Trying real hard
to make it through)
That mix of panic, absurdity, and theatrical lift carried into the song’s creation. “I found a spiderweb in my car, but no spider, so I took an Uber to his house just to be safe,” Dawson says, harkening back to her meet-up with producer Joel Little. “We wrote the song pretty quick because he had a flight to Middle Earth, also known as New Zealand, to catch. We bounced some production ideas back and forth over text but really dove in the next time we were together in person. A fun fact is that a large portion of the production for this song was done on the Korg RK-100S2 keytar; it’s so versatile and has been a staple in many of my recent projects. At the time, I had also just seen Toto and Men at Work in concert, and it left me walking on air – what an immensely talented group of people. They were definitely additional inspirations.”
You can hear those inspirations in the song’s elastic lift: The drums have a showman’s snap, the synths drift with a neon softness, and the whole arrangement seems to grin as it glides from crisis to chorus. The Korg keytar detail matters because it captures Dawson’s sweet spot as a creator – playful without being slight, retro without feeling trapped in costume, polished without sanding away personality. “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?” feels like the kind of song that knows exactly how theatrical it is, and trusts that theatricality to tell the truth.
Everybody’s missing their medullas
Need somebody, need somebody super
Come on, tell me
Where have all the good men gone?
(No good men,
where have all the good men gone?)
Did they all get lost down in Bermuda?
I been thinkin’, thinkin’ ’bout the future
Come on, tell me,
where have all the good men gone?
That walking-on-air feeling is all over “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?” even when the lyrics are staring directly into the fire. Dawson has always had a rare gift for making glitter feel like survival, and here, her theatricality feels more purposeful than ever: The song moves like a rescue mission staged under disco lights, with Dawson as both narrator and heroine, searching for goodness in a world that keeps handing her villains. By the time she sings, “I’ve been thinkin’, thinkin’ ’bout the future,” the question is no longer just where the good men went – it is whether goodness itself can still be chosen, practiced, protected, and made visible in a culture that so often rewards the opposite.
The same idea carries into the song’s self-directed visual, where Dawson steps fully into her own comic-book mythology.
Rather than waiting around for a savior, she plays the playful, compassionate heroine of her own universe, taking command of a story that might otherwise cast her as the damsel. It is a fitting extension of the song’s central joke and its deeper challenge: If every direction seems to lead toward another villain, maybe the answer is not waiting for a hero to arrive, but deciding what kind of courage you are willing to embody.
“I wanted to write about our grim reality in a non-emo way,” Dawson says. “I hope this song shakes listeners up a bit and causes action. Good people are hard to come by these days, but if we each try to be the good we’re so desperately looking for, we just might have a chance.”
Dawson’s voice feels especially necessary right now because she does not flatten dread into empowerment or dress pain up until it disappears; she lets contradiction stay visible, glittering at the edges but never cleaned of its weight. Her songs can be campy and cutting, sweet and strange, escapist on the surface and deeply awake underneath – proof that pop can still be playful without losing its conscience, and that humor can be more than a coping mechanism. In Dawson’s hands, laughter becomes a flare in the dark: A way to name the absurdity, survive the horror, and still believe we owe each other better.
That is the real magic of Debbii Dawson’s return: “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?” sparkles because it has to.
It laughs at the apocalypse without pretending the apocalypse is funny; it turns fear into a chorus, frustration into a wink, and helplessness into a call to action. Dawson has given us another pop song that feels fresh and timeless at once – classic in its sweep, contemporary in its bite, and lit from within by the belief that even in a world full of supervillains, we might still become the heroes we keep waiting for.
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© Aaron Sinclair
© Aaron Sinclair
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