The Dandy Warhols

Hello. You’re listening to From The Archives, an original podcast series by audio.com, where we dive into our interview archive, brush off the cobwebs and edit the conversations into something more or less coherent. I’m Ilia Rogatchevski. Today we’re jumping back to the summer of 2015, when I was writing for a Manchester based music blog called Louder Than War. They asked me to interview Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the frontman and principal songwriter of the American alternative rock band The Dandy Warhols. The Dandy Warhols formed in the early nineties in Portland, Oregon. Their line-up is completed by guitarist Peter Holmström, Zia McCabe on synths [and bass] and Brent DeBoer on drums. The band shot to international fame when their song "Bohemian Like You" was featured in a Vodafone advert. In 2004, The Dandy Warhols were the subject of Ondi Timoner’s film Dig!, which documented their rise to fame and relationship with The Brian Jonestown Massacre, a psychedelic rock outfit, originally from San Francisco. This is around the time when I started paying attention to their music, seeing the band live on numerous occasions and collecting their CDs. This interview dates back to 2015, around the time the Dandys were recording their album Distortland and playing some festival dates in the UK. When I spoke to Courtney, the band had just released their single "Chauncey P vs All The Girls In London" and it wasn’t yet clear what sort of shape the new material will take. We talked about testing new songs out on the road, his feelings about Dig! and as well as his writing and production process. The interview was conducted over the phone and wasn’t originally intended for broadcast, but I think it’s pretty listenable. There is some swearing [and drug talk] along the way, so if you don’t foul language, close your ears. Final thoughts before we dive in: The Dandy Warhols have a new album out soon called ROCKMAKER. The lead single from it, "Summer of Hate" is pretty good. They're also on tour, currently, with The Black Angels in the US and Canada. Between the 13 and the 28 October, you can catch them in Ventura, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Dallas, Houston and Austin. I’ll post the details in the comments. Now, back to business. Our conversation begins with a discussion about Courtney’s production habits and how he structures the band’s albums and EPs at their Portland based Odditorium studio. – CTT: We're always working on stuff, you know, we own a studio, we don't have anything else to do. I'm at least always noodling down there. And I think it's not about a number of songs at this point as it is how much time it's been since we've put something out. I would bet by the end of summer I'll have like seven songs that are like, wow, let's put these out. Is that an EP or is that a record? IR: That really depends on your definition of what you want it to be. CTT: Yeah, so I don't know. I don't really care, frankly. But I like EP because that means we can put stuff out more often. You know, we're like three years between records. We're terribly precious about it or something. We drag it out for sure. IR: Do you think that maybe because you're looking for a narrative strand within the songs that you're writing at any given moment? CTT: That's an easier way. I kind of do like the idea of that. Like, these are just the gooey, sludgy ones. Okay, these are all the kind of jangly, garagey '60s ones. But that's definitely like playlist mentality. You're not making an epic when you do that. We make records where you need the gooey, sludgy ones here and now because you've just been grinding your teeth for the last seven minutes, to bashy, garagey ones in a row. And then you want to come down a little bit. And then you want to get up and you want to come up. And that whole hour and 20 minute experience, or as long as CDs were, however long they were, an hour and 19 or something like that? That was our only goal. IR: What sonic direction are you finding that the songs are taking this time? CTT: You know, I'm sort of steered by two things when I'm at this stage where I've really laid down a lot of instruments and you just look for the three sounds that are really immediately engaging. You go through the 38 sounds you've recorded on this song and you just go, whoa. Every time I solo that instrument by itself, it makes the hair stand up the back of my neck. When those sounds happen, it's because there is nothing currently trendy that it evokes. That is job one and two right there. Emotionally, it just grabs my gut. It gets me in the solar plexus. Every record was simply a quest to make the most emotionally powerful music. And a huge part of being emotionally powerful is avoiding goofy idiosyncrasies that are accepted because they're current trends. Maybe it started with something cool but it's been twisted out of proportion into something really dumb. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've been paying attention to trends in music forever since I was a little kid. I was just obsessive about it. So yeah, that's a huge deal to try to avoid any, you know, like in 2006 the last thing you want to do is have a Strokesy guitar. These were like huge, amazingly cool revolutions that then got imitated to death. That's the only reason to even pay attention to popular culture, if you're me, is just to go, just be aware of what makes you ill. IR: You've had the studio in Portland for a few years now. Even though it's a good opportunity to work whenever you like, do you ever feel a sense of cabin fever that you may want to step outside of yourself and go work somewhere else to see if that changes your relationship to the music that you're making? CTT: Yeah, definitely. Like, go to Barbados or something. That would be really cool. But I think I'm learning this room, you know. The mixes that I can produce out of this room are now more consistent. You know, every stereo makes every record sound very different. You have to learn what your speakers in your room are and what things need to sound like in there for them to be consistently good. Every time I hit this at any volume in my studio, it's a holy shit. But then you get it in the car and it's like, whoa, the bottom end is just mushy and it doesn't pump right. You know, and then you get it to your friend's party and everyone's drunk and listening to great music and somebody puts it on and then wah, wah, and then it's weak like, oh, no, it's so shrill and the vocals are so, I thought they were trippier than that, you know. So those things, it's happening less. So I don't think I'm going to be working outside of this studio unless I'm working with another person that's super amazing, you know, and they're amazing in their studio. Like, if I got to work with like Deadmau5 or something. We're a studio head tripper band and anyone who knows us and our music knows that we're, you know, in the classic sense, we're artists. We're more of a collection of artists than we are a band, a rock band. The bummer, the sad part is that every scene that we're in is set up, there's no dialogue between the members of my band, never us on the bus having discussion, ever, just those long hours where we're sort of working through problems. We're analyzing sort of things about what we do because there was Ondi just sitting with her camera in her lap. Like, why didn't she ever film us? And then we're somewhere and she's got some big idea. "I need you to go here, you got to go do this now. Come on, you guys, okay, okay, okay, can you say this? Okay, wait, let me get it. Okay, ready? Okay, go. Okay, go. I'm filming. Say it." You know, and it's like, man, there must have been amazing footage of us that she shot and didn't use, much less that she never actually tried to make a documentary out of. Now Anton's side of the story is, you know, he went for it. He would get wasted and put on a show for the camera. And then Joel is just, you know. Joel's the only actual genius in the movie. He is fucking amazing. Every time he's funny, he's above it all. He's really great in the movie. He and then Anton for the wild thing. I mean, that's what the movie's about. There's nothing about our band in it. IR: Does that make you feel like you could then invite another film crew to film the creative process properly to kind of do it justice? Is that something you've considered? CTT: It would be more exciting then, let's just say. We were fucking insane people. We were on fire. We were on drugs all the time. Horny, weirdo, crazy, mad artists, you know, and now we're more like monks. We're just more masterful and less insane. I just think that that movie, I wanted to see us. I really wanted to capture this time and this feeling of this people and this thing. And, you know, she did. She just went for whatever the splashiest, craziest, fucked up shit, you know. It was just like, oh, okay, yeah, it's a fun movie. Damn it, you know, like this is the only person we let film us. And she didn't use anything of us actually, our lives at that time. You know, it's like, we'll never get that footage from her. She won't like, dig through all that shit and give us our footage. Also she might, you know, she probably is just afraid that we would show her up to be, you know, such a phoney and kind of debunk her. But I wouldn't give a shit, you know, I don't need to do that. I just want to have this stuff. I want to see it. I want to, you know, hire a group of out of work 19 year old tech heads to go sort through and make me a fun edit of it. I want to smoke tons of weed and watch it, you know, every five years or something. And, you know, it's like, it's our lives, man. Gone forever. And we let this one fuckhead film it and she did that with it. Sucks, dude. IR: I guess the footage is still there and you can approach it in a sort of archival way, perhaps? CTT: We'll never get it out of her. We've tried constantly. She just will not give it to us. She's contractually bound to, it's ours. We own it, you know. We can't get it from her. We just get brushed off. Harder and harder on me. IR: Okay, so you're looking forward to coming over to the UK, I hope, in the summer? You're playing some shows in, I think, Manchester and Sheffield and Ireland as well? CTT: Yeah, I'm just so looking forward to getting back into England and playing England a lot and stuff. We just haven't for so long. We just go over and play London and that's it. The festivals used to be so miserable in the old days. They were just badly staffed by just mean, grumpy people. Think about how aggro people were in the '90s and the early 2000s. Think about the rap, metal, hate, testosterone, caveman music, the mentality of those super-hard rap-rock bands. And that was popular music. That was mainstream. That was what everybody... Being dumb was only slightly less cool than to be mean. It was awful. And it lasted well into the early 2000s too. IR: Are you planning to road test any new material this time around? I remember when I saw you in London a couple of years ago, you were trying out the new songs from This Machine and Zia was saying about how much you value audience feedback. And I wanted to ask you a question: how do you evaluate audience feedback, the audience engagement? And has there ever been a point when alterations have been undertaken to your songs as a result of how the new material was received? CTT: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're not really a performance band. We're more like get this hum going in the room. Each song is just a group of parts that seem to repeatedly be able to get this hum building towards this emotional euphoria. And then sustain it, set it down, wind it up again and do it again. And that's what songs are to us. It's like a trance band. We're making trance music with late 60s and early 70s instruments. Simon & Garfunkel making trance music. It's kind of hyper modern in its structure and its ultimate end goal. But the journey is definitely like a rusty old pickup truck or something, you know, on the gravel road and the dusty, dirty old country road or something. But it's like the thing is euphoric. And if it doesn't get that wind up, then we keep adjusting it and slug it out slower. "Okay, can we try it a little faster? Let's try it at soundcheck tomorrow a couple of different ways." We're not having a Q&A. "What did you think of the second verse of Girls of London? You in the back. Well, I'll take your comments. We're going to take comments from two or three more of you. And then we're going to get back to you. We have some bagels and coffee for you guys while we take a break." It's not like audience feedback. It's us, the room, the sound, the PA. Every night sounds different. We're a different band every night. And anyone who plays gigs will tell you this, you know, that it is for us. It is not the same every night. IR: I assume you must rehearse before you go on tour. CTT: Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. You know, it's hard to say whether rehearsal before a tour makes you less adaptable or more adaptable, more flexible or less flexible. You know, we'd like to practice maybe three or four times. And then if we have been playing kind of the same group of 25 songs for too long, then we need to have more practice so that we can go, okay, I don't think we're playing anything off of Come Down. I don't think we're playing anything off of Monkey House anymore. We have to relearn to get these songs to work and do the thing again. So that takes more practice. IR: With respect to your new material, the cover for the last single that you've put out has an illustration by Javiera Soza. How did that materialize? CTT: Okay, that illustration story of who my friend is, what the song is about. And he's just a kind of a quirky regular guy, but kind of a quirky individual. And so I thought it'd be funny to get some kind of like little rascals, like a black and white shot of like one of the little rascals with a black eye. And so I was trying to put that in and there actually weren't any images of little rascals with a black eye. And then that came up. And I was like, Oh my God, this is not what I imagined, but this is incredibly beautiful and sexy and creepy. God, it's got something, man. IR: Yeah, it's arresting. It really has something. CTT: Yeah. We contacted, you know, the illustrator and everything. We're like, man, can we use this? This is fucking genius. IR: So it's just via the internet, like a Google search? CTT: Yeah. It's amazing. I'm so happy. I just love having good art. And once again, the thing of just doing what no one else, you know, it's just finding art that like doesn't fit into any current trend. You know, and it's just, it is powerful. It is like a euphoric experience. That one is odd because it's kind of uncomfortable in a different way than anything we've ever released. I really love a multi-layered concept. You know, if you're going to put words on art, it better be like way greater than the sum of just the parts, you know. IR: How do words come for you as a lyricist? Where do they come from? CTT: It starts with a real serious fuck up on my part, you know, in my life, just a real serious big ass fucking mistake. And then a lot of like real uncomfortable days and nights, really embarrassed of myself, making excuses and then running circles mentally around it and, you know, just neurosis of bad behavior. And then laying down with my guitar and just, which I do, you know, all day every day. But those times where it's been gnawing at me so hard and I'm finally just tired of it and I want to be rid of it so badly. But I said it or I did it or whatever it is, you know, and I can't and days have gone by. So mentally now I've been getting this shit off my chest, probably to myself out loud in the car driving alone or something, you know. And then the guitar and then the chords, the hands randomly move and they accidentally hit two or three chords in a certain order that open the floodgates. And I hope I notice what chords, that was G, D minor, A, B minor, you know. And the words come out and they can only do one way. And they are truly exactly what I'm going through. They can only come out one way. And they do and they come out and they fit into that melody and that is exactly what this feeling feels like. Exactly. And then like Bob Dylan said, if you find yourself in it, you better get out as soon as you can. So you get as much out as you can because you might never find it again. You don't put the guitar down. You don't just keep doing that one part over and over and pleased with yourself and thinking you'll finish it later. Because you might not finish it for another 15 years.