Questions with Dan Deacon

For me, Dan Deacon's Spiderman of the Rings has been one of this year's most unexpected musical pleasures. When I first heard the Woody Woodpecker sample on the album's opening track, I initially though "jesus, this is really annoying." But as I continued to listen to that and all the other songs on the record, I began to realize how impressive and unique the record really is. It's noise, it's pop, it's loud, it's funny, it's emotional. Basically, it's a wild ride. And if the rumors about Deacon's intense live shows are even half true, his performance this evening (Wednesday) at The Cavern will probably end up being one of those "man, I was THERE" kind of shows. We were fortunate enough to catch up with Dan Deacon while he was hanging out in Austin, and he had some intereseting things to say about his music, his audience, and his city:

So you're down in Austin right now, right?

Yeah.

How do you like it?

It's cool. We had the day off yesterday, and I spent the day walking around enjoying the heat.

Yeah, you came at the beginning of our long miserable summer. It was nice until about a week or two ago.

Perfect. We really know how to book a summer tour.

Yeah. So I read that you have a masters degree in electronic music composition, is that right?

Well the degree was technically in composition, but the focus was on electro-acoustics.

Could you explain a bit about that field of study?

Sure. It's just the study of electronically manipulated acoustic sound. You know, beeps and whistles and shit.

What was your musical background before you started formal study?

I played in some bands in high school and wrote a lot of MIDI compositions on my PC with a program called Midisoft, which was just like straight graph paper where you would click in the notes, and that was my main theory background prior to school. When I went to college I didn't originally study music, I was just studying whatever, and I was in a lot of improv bands and weird sort of noise bands, and then I found a signal generator in the garbage and started getting into processed sine waves, and I guess this was about 8 years ago, I started doing drone sine wave pieces, and then I got bored with that and started experimenting with rhythm and experimental pop and stuff like that.

Did your formal training have a profound impact on the manner in which you were inspired by music, or the way you conceived music?

Well the best part was just being able to focus on music. I went to conservatory so the only classes I took were music classes, and it was nice to do nothing but music and be constantly exposed to other composers and performers. It was a pretty small program, so most of the classes were like me and two or three other people, or just me and the teacher. I think if I hadn't gone there, I wouldn't have as much knowledge of counterpoint or nontraditional harmony and stuff like that.

Did it change the kind of music that you were interested in making?

I don't know, it's difficult to say since I don't know what the outcome would have been if I hadn't gone there. I'm sure it did change it, and I don't know if it dramatically changed the style of music that I like, but I'm sure it had some impact if that's what you're asking.

Have you read the Wikipedia entry on you?

Not recently.

Well it says that your music can be classified as part of the "future shock" genre, which I had never heard of before. What is that?

It's not really a real genre. A bunch of Baltimore bands just tried to come up with a name to describe the Baltimore sound, and I guess it was mostly just Wham City bands. Future Shock was just sort of an idea. A lot of the bands are not necessarily evolving, but they're constantly changing their own styles and sort of lapping themselves and what they do. Are you familiar with the book Future Shock?

Yes, I am. So I guess the genre's name does have something to do with the ideas of the book Future Shock and singularity theory in general?

Very vaguely, I think we just thought it sounded sort of stupid and somewhat sneaky.

Well I could just be reaching here, but it seems like the idea of Future Shock, losing control of technology, is something that I can almost hear in some of your music. It seems like a lot of your songs are sort of bursting with noise and energy and sound like they're about to spiral out of control, even though they never really do.

Yeah, I would say it's more coincidental than anything, but I would agree.

I wanted to ask you about Wham City and Baltimore because I've come across a lot of really great music coming out of Baltimore lately, and I was wondering what you thought about that. Is there something about the city that makes it so fruitful these days, or is it just a fortuitous coincidence?

I don't know. The city is pretty awesome, just the way it's laid out and how vacant it is. It's so underpopulated that people who are doing stuff there are constantly interacting with one another, and i think that also has to do with the people who are currently there. I think it's a mixture of environment and population, and the timing was just perfect for it.

For the East Coast, it's a pretty cheap place to live.

Yeah, it's definitely one of the cheapest places on the east cost, especially the north east coast. Something like 90 square blocks are uninhabited or abandoned and boarded up, so I think it will be pretty cheap for a while.

And I guess a lot of it does have to do with getting lucky with the people who happen to be there, because a place like Dallas, for example, has a music scene that seems to just now be waking up, even though Dallas has a lot of advantages as a city, low cost of living being one of them.

I think a lot of smaller cities and, for lack of a better term, non-notable cities like Dallas and Baltimore are starting to see a new revival as larger cities just become too expensive and flooded with bullshit.

That's true. Could you tell me a bit about Wham City?

The best way to find out is this article in Baltimore City Paper that describes it in massive detail, but the short story is that me and several other people that graduated from Purchase moved down to Baltimore three or four years ago and moved into a warehouse and started booking shows there, and more of our friends moved down, we met more people in Baltimore, and the shows seemed to be ridiculous and big and crazy, and we developed a reputation for being a wild dirty show space, and it sort of took off until we got evicted.

Our first lease wasn't renewed so we just moved upstairs, and after the landlord found out we were there, he terminated that lease and evicted some of us, and eventually evicted all of us.

Did he accuse you guys of doing damage to the place, or did he just not want shows there?

Damage to the place, he didn't want shows happening, the fire marshals knew that every other weekend there were like 400 people in the apartment, so basically it was a combination of all those things you don't want the landlord and fire marshal to say. But we've got a new space opening in September.

Really? Will it be a similar space?

It'll be the same size, but it's going to be a legal space. We'll have a maximum occupancy and have a full liquor license. It will still be all ages, but it will be more a, I don't know, non-illegal type place.

I thought the Pitchfork review of your new album was cool because it talked about the experience of seeing you live in the Wham City space. Do you find that the live experience of your music is more important than the album, or are they too hard to compare?

Most of the tracks on the album are written for live performance, but I don't know if it's more important. I would say that they're both important, but the live performance is definitely more intense.

Yeah, and the review was talking about how cool it was that there were so many different people at your shows, like punk rock kids and techno people, and to me that's the most exciting kind of atmosphere.

Yeah, I totally agree.

I read that most of the lyrics you write are based on phonetics rather than any kind of concrete meaning. Is that correct?

Yeah most of the lyrics are written like that except for the song "Wham City," which is sort of an absurdist fantasy tale about Wham City.

I'm interested in how you go about developing lyrics phonetically, which is such a different approach than that taken by most rock bands, for example. Could you describe how you go about creating the lyrics?

For the most part, I write the beats and structure of the song first, and then I'll rehearse it with the gear and sing over it, and whatever comes intuitively while I'm playing that song, normally the hook and the verse, I'll just listen to that and see how the vocal sounds connect with the music. Sorry this is such a dry interview, I don't think I've ever done a more dry interview, and I'm sorry if this is endlessly boring for you.

(laughs) Not at all. You're just answering my questions, so it's probably my fault. Anyway, another thing I was interested in was your transition to pop music from more free form experimental stuff. What is it that interests you about pop?

I grew up listening to the Beatles and Kinks and Led Zeppelin and stuff like that. I think pop is the music of our century and I think it would be foolish to shy away from it. It's just the most fun, and my last couple albums were a much more diverse mix of arrhythmic noise pieces mixed with strange pop pieces, and after I started touring I began enjoying the more rhythmic stuff and I sort of went into it head first and that's what I've been focusing on for a while. I mean, a band like Arab on the Radar is like a pop band but they're extremely musically violent and dissonant, even though the root of their stuff is pop, same thing as Lightning Bolt. I think that is the most innovative music can be, taking something that isn't very accessible and making it accessible, I think that's really important.

It's interesting that you say that because if you compare a Lightning Bolt show to a Shins show, for example, people move and react at a Lightning Bolt show in a way that is both more utilitarian and primal, and it's as if people have a much stronger and more important reaction and connection to stuff like Lightning Bolt, even though it's much more strange and unpredictable than a Shins show, where people don't seem to care as much.

Yeah, I also think there are obviously many different backgrounds in the audience of the independent music scene these days, and mostly it comes out of punk, ska and indie. And I think the hardcore punk and ska crowd got used to going to shows when they were kids in high school and freaking out, and I think that generation is now in this realm of discovering a new type of pop. That's the scene I came up in. I grew up on Long Island and all that was there were shows in Churches and VFW halls and kids would go just to go as crazy as they could, and then those kids went to college and saw kids just standing around at shows and it was boring as fuck. Why would anyone want to go to shows like this? Then you started seeing more weird rock bands that came through and had that dance element incorporated into them, like early Rapture back when they were much more weird and a lot less slick. Then you see a band like the Locust and Lightning Bolt, and for the live atmosphere, audience is such an important part of the show. If the audience sucks, then the show sucks.

Have you encountered audiences that were much too calm or overly tame on this tour, and were you able to change them?

Yeah, especially in the cities I've never played before there's been some weird kind of tension at first, but it's easy to cast some spells on people to get them to dance.

And I wonder if it's a generational thing, because the first waves of punk and post punk and hardcore emerged as a very underground thing that was sort of a reaction against mainstream pop music, and when people our age (mid 20's) started listening to punk, it was a much bigger and more acceptable cultural phenomenon. I wonder if because it was a more acceptable mainstream experience for our generation, people who listened to that kind of music when we were growing up now find it acceptable to draw from both pop and underground music, whereas the older generations wouldn't have dreamed of it.

I totally agree, I think you're absolutely right. And underground music has become so large that now it rivals the mainstream. Even the large indie labels have been bought out by major labels, and the definition of "underground" doesn't really exist anymore. I don't even know what it means at this point.

And you can see that manifest itself on the business side too, because while the major labels continue to struggle with stagnant mainstream pop, other kinds of music continue to thrive.

Yeah, the Internet has made the scene so big and so small at the same time. All these networks have become a hit because of bands working together, and it's so easy to discover new bands. It just completely cuts out the middle man that you used to need in order to "make it" in the music business, and now bands book their own shows, burn their own CDRs, start their own venues, and advertise it all for free on the Internet.

Yeah, five years ago, there's no way you and I would be talking right now.

Yeah, I totally agree. My album leaked two or three months ago, and if it hadn't, I don't think it would have been nearly as big as it is. Before the Pitchfork review, it got downloaded on Oink and Indietorrent tens of thousands of times, and it's just crazy how this shit works.

Is there anything else you wanted to mention before we finish?

Well I'm working on the next album, it should be done pretty soon. It won't come out until next year because the entire album will come with handwritten notations for each song so that people can learn all the parts, and on the next tour, we'll meet up with a new musician in each city and play it exactly how it is on the notation. And we're going to do another Wham City tour and open up the new Wham City soon. We're also working on a Wham City tv show as well. And on this tour, we're handing out lyric sheets for people to participate in the show, so if you know anyone who wants to do it tomorrow, tell them to come on down.