It’s almost entirely too telling that Dr. Dog’s new song is called “The Truth.” In a completely candid, hour-long conversation with Recoil last month – that started with co-founder/co-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Scott McMicken finding his shoes amidst an enormous pile of other people’s shoes and then stepping outside – he opened up about everything, discussing the spiritual nature of the Internet, his intrinsic drive to just make music, regardless of circumstances, and how the band literally built the studio where they recorded their upcoming eighth studio album, B Room (due out Oct. 1) themselves. A full circle experience – that goes all the way back to when McMicken met co-founder/songwriter Toby Leaman in middle school – the making of B Room found Dr. Dog at their most laid back and comfortable, something that’s long-suited the psychedelic indie band’s style, and made them a fan favorite at festivals across the country, including this month’s first-ever Audiotree Music Festival, taking place Aug. 31 in Kalamazoo.
Recoil: You’re going to be playing at the first-ever Audiotree Music Festival here where we’re based in West Michigan on Aug. 31. What do you guys like most about playing festivals?
Scott McMicken: Typically the festival experience on our end is far more chaos and disorganized that normally having a show, where you’re showing up and taking your time, digging around, setting up, and having all this time to just be hanging out and thinking about how you’re going to play show. Like the normal tour experience, versus like a festival where it’s just chaotic, and everything’s happening on the fly. And I like that you forego a little bit of control or something, like it can be a little bit more risky when you just have a few minutes to slap your stuff up and go. Maybe it doesn’t sound as good or maybe some amp you’re borrowing is really crappy or something… but at the same rate I feel like over all these years of us doing that we’ve definitely come to learn how to enjoy that aspect of it, kind of flying by the seat of your pants, and as long as you’re not stressed out about it, it’ll all be fine. So I kind of like the way that at festivals you’re playing for a lot of people, which is always awesome, but at the same rate it lacks the general longevity that a normal day on tour has, like you’re hanging out somewhere one minute and the next thing you know you’re on stage, and then a half hour later, get out of the way because someone else is onstage. It’s not like everyone goes home and the event is over. I just like being a part of the general energy of the festivals, and just the constant music and the constant experience that’s going on for people; it’s just one thing after another, and how it just puts everyone pretty much in the mindset of, ‘Well, we’re here and this is awesome. Doesn’t really matter what’s going on, let’s have a good time!’ And I like playing inside of that environment, while that is the very same thing that some of the more logistical drawbacks of not being able to sound check, and some of those musician-type of problems. I think what I like about it is what everybody likes about it that goes, and buys tickets.
R: Hopefully things won’t be as chaotic here for Audiotree. Being it’s first year, they just going to have two stages alternating, so there’s not so much going on, but still nonstop music.
SM: Oh, cool, yeah, those tend to be my favorite. A couple stages, where it’s the kind of thing where there’s never two [bands] playing at the same time. You’ve got one stage, and then the other and back and forth like that?
R: Yeah.
SM: Oh that’s the best.
R: On that same sort of token, given the choice, do you prefer to play outdoors or indoors?
SM: I think what I’ve come to realize is I basically like playing wherever it’s dark. I like playing outside at night the best. But I prefer in a club to playing outside in the day. I don’t know, I think you go to see music in a dark room with like lights and stuff, you know. Sunlight – I feel like about half our material feels right in the sunlight, and about half of it just doesn’t. Some of it that’s kind of more nuanced or maybe more psychedelic or maybe a little more abstract always feel a little more exposed and naked in the sunlight. It’s a fifty-fifty [split], but for sure my favorite place to be playing is outdoors at night.
R: I’m not sure how familiar you are with Audiotree, but the company is based out of Chicago and host in-studio live sessions for bands that shares its revenue back with the artists. In an age of YouTube and cell phone videos, how important do you think it is to have a solid, well-recorded document of your live show available, both to longtime fans and people discovering you for the first time?
SM: Yeah, yeah absolutely. The more high-quality choices that exist the better. Like you said, and like you alluded to, there’s just so much unfiltered junk, as far as camera documents, or phone cameras, and phone audio. It’s crazy. So yeah, for an organization like that to kind of step it up for the presentation. Because the fact is, the whole deal is saturate the Internet. That’s the whole thing. Whether it’s companies who have a mission statement to do that well, or whether it’s some dumb kid who got something on his phone, that’s the way we live. Document and then show the world within the context of your Internet identity what it is you’ve done, and what it is you’ve captured. So that’s going on; there’s no doubt about it. So for sure it’d be nice to have a bit more of a filter on the quality, that would be really good, but I don’t know, it’s interesting because I think there’s real merits to the real crappy stuff on there because, to us as musicians, it’s like you watch and you go, ‘Oh, this sounds terrible!’ But a lot of people aren’t really thinking about it the way you’re thinking about it, you know what I mean. I mean you’ll be more picky about what’s going on with your band, or what’s going on YouTube about your band than anyone else will be. So I think even all that little junky stuff, for people who want to check things out it probably serves some kind of purpose, and probably in this day and age we’ve at least lived with the culture of YouTube long enough, like for myself, I know when I go and search stuff on YouTube you can kind of just scan them real quick and be like, ‘That looks like a phone recording, that’s a phone recording… Oh this looks like it was filmed with a real camera and maybe some real audio and stuff like that…’ kind of do your own filter. But definitely for sure, it’s awesome.
R: How do you think that new model of being a band and saturating the Internet has gone hand in hand with the way you guys have built your fan base, the old-fashioned way, by just touring and steadily playing bigger venues and larger audiences over so many years?
SM: It’s definitely helped. It’s definitely a powerful tool. It hasn’t been wielded like one of those mighty swords like it has been for some bands. Like our whole deal has just been different, and it has been built a little more slowly, one album at a time, there’s never been like a real massive spike due to like Pitchfork or something.
R: Or a viral video…
SM: Yeah, exactly, we’ve never had that Internet force behind a moment in time with our band, which is totally fine. And for sure at this point we’re all totally comfortable with the way our operation runs and what drives it and stuff, and we’re also aware enough to realize that sometimes as many people know those big ascensions have equally dramatic de-scensions for bands. Like if things come screeching out of the gates like with the enthusiasm for your band or awareness for your band before you even put your first album out, and you just have some songs from this or that. Yeah, that can become a real burden for a band, and it’s foreign, I’m sure, for some bands to complain about, because what can you complain about when it’s a lot of people throwing appreciation at something you’ve done. But at the same rate I think it’s something that’s really hard to sustain yourself at when the bar has been set so high so early. Which is to say we’re very comfortable and even proud of the way our band has evolved, and the Internet has been a very useful tool in that, of course, but in a pretty palpable way. There’s no sort of phenomenon going on. [We’re] just using the Web site, using YouTube for checking stuff out, and of course i-Tunes, and just the ease with which people can consume. And we’re out there to be consumed if you happen to hear of our band name or if you’re curious about this band you’ve heard about, or if you’ve heard something and you want to check out more, or if you’re a longtime fan and you want to really drag the nets around sift up everything little thing that’s available to have, for sure the Internet is, at this point, basically, for us, I don’t know, it’s the best possible record store that’s like down the street from your house. So any kid with any interest in music, like in the middle of North Dakota, actually stands a pretty good chance of knowing who are band is with the Internet, which for sure wasn’t true, even within the last ten years, I’d say. It’s a brand new culture , and a brand new culture of consumerism created by the Internet, and for sure our band has had a lot to gain from that. So as much as there are aspects of it to be critical of, it’s foolish to suggest there aren’t anything but really positive things that we’ve stand to gain by this shift in the culture of consumerism. But I don’t know. The more you start to pry into it, the more you start to feel weird. You start to feel like you’ve just been duped, because in a lot of ways you can see it just as a form of settling. You know, we don’t sell albums. I feel like if it was 1982, and the amount of people who knew who are band is, [if it was] 1982, there’s a good chance that we’d maybe be a platinum-selling thing. You know what I mean? Just to sell fifty thousand records at this point is a serious feat. Record labels are just going under and going under, especially the really viable ones. Like there’s a whole new niche market for that, but the only way for those companies to survive is to create a very small niche for what they do. The record industry, I guess what I’m saying, is just gone, and musicians don’t make money from – To be perfectly candid I’ve never been paid for the sale of an album, or the sale of a song through i-Tunes. I don’t know if that kind of knowledge is obvious to the public at large or anything. I find it really interesting. I mean, I’m comfortable, and I’m not saying I want more money or anything like that. I’m just saying that I find it really interesting from a totally objective standpoint, not one that’s emotionally charged by my own needs for money or whatever. But it is crazy that our last record has sold over fifty thousand copies right now and we haven’t ever been paid for that. And it’s not like record label scandal or whatever, but in reality, the record business, it’s just such a small amount of sales. Like they say, I think for every ten thousand records you might sell… I don’t know where I’m going. I just set off on a tangent about understanding the role of the Internet, but also pointing out, at the same time, that because of the Internet, music is free now. And because music is free now, everyone can hear it, and that’s great, and the silver lining to that is that lots of people can know who you are. So if you’re in the position where you can get out and play shows, you stand a much better chance of there actually being people there, and you can actually make money there, and you can actually grow as a band, and you do have an incredibly creative outlet at your fingertips, and that’s all awesome. That’s definitely something that we’ve always enjoyed being a part of: touring and the live show experience. So I guess that’s kind of a give and take. People don’t have to buy our music because it’s free; but because it’s free so many more people will have access to it, therefore if you can tour, and you’re blessed enough to have the opportunity to do that, then that can be greatly enhanced, for some bands, others not. It’s still a real racket to try to tour for a lot of bands; it’s expensive and all that. So I don’t know. I guess my answer more than anything is to suggest that when you try to look at how the Internet has helped out your business, or your endeavors, or your art, it is obviously, as everyone knows, a real big can of worms. And there are most definitely many positive things, and most definitely many negative things, but all those negative seem to fall under comparing the world now to the way the world was, and I think most reasonable people know that that whole attitude towards the present moment is in itself a trap. Like the old generation gap. You’ve got to accept what’s going on around you and use it to the best of your ability. I just think in a lot of ways the world itself, and myself, haven’t really processed a lot of what this is all about. It feels like an infant stage of this new culture, and it’s very compelling. I feel like it’s an amazing time to be alive because we really are, at this point, adults experiencing this, and in particular those of us that are just old enough to have not been raised inside of this, but are now fully submerged in it, and in many ways are governing and guiding its future, do live in a truly unique period of time where serious shit is occurring. And I do think it will be a long time before that shit is settled in, and all of this kind of little bits of pieces of what this is all about has really been tried and tested through trial and error and everything for things to settle into what I’m inclined to believe will be a new level of good in the world. It’s all too easy to see this as a shit show, and this being our final unraveling, but my inclination is to believe that, despite what often feels like things being warped and manipulated, true and good values, and real things being watered down and distorted by technology, I have to believe that the fact that humans are so responsive to this thing means there’s a reason for that, and it will be very interesting to find out if reason survives long enough to find out what it is really all for. I feel like it’s almost a spiritual pursuit, in a way. Like this notion of an interconnected web, which is the Internet. You turn the angle on that a little bit, and that’s just spirituality. Just the general notion of your interconnectedness to the world around you, and it’s really fascinating to me that people haven’t needed at any point of the history of the Internet, so far, to be convinced of its merits. People soaked it right up like it’s something they’ve been needing. It’s worked right into our lives so easily, like social media, and just the general notion on the abstract plane of what the Internet is and how it puts the whole world into one shared vessel of experience that is accessible to everyone from every angle. And I think it’s really interesting, the parallels between that and just a real simple, base-level definition of what spirituality is. There are definitely a lot of things within it all that make me real curious, and I guess kind of moment to moment, you can find the negatives, you can find the positives. Very long-ass, possibly very annoying round-about answer to your original question, I see the positives in what the Internet has done for our band, and I see the negatives in what the Internet has done for our band, and the culture that we’re in the context of, and so my answer, I guess requires digging around on both sides to just sort of verify what it means to be positive and negative at the same time. I hope that wasn’t obnoxious.
R: Nah, not at all. Along those same lines, with how the Internet has allowed you to interact more directly with your fans, and as you’ve had more and more face to face experiences with so many people on tour, how do you think that’s all allowed you take more chances and more risks as you’ve developed your sound?
SM: That’s a good question. I’m not sure. The one thing I’ve come to experience is the more you realize that you are what you just described, like the more realize you’re at shows and there’s people there, and people like looking at you, like you can see it in their eyes, like they’re looking at you like you’re something that you’ve never seen yourself as, and I’m not diminishing it – I’m a fan of a lot of music – but it is telling to be on the other side, to see some be like, ‘Ahhhh…’ And I’m not suggesting it’s like Beatlemania everywhere we go, by any means, but you come across a fan, or just the fact that there aer a lot of people there, and they paid money to be there, and in some cases people traveled far to be there, and in some cases do seem pretty overwhelmed to be talking to a member of the band, and I find that real interesting. So on the live show front we experience that, and then through the Internet you’re also exposing yourself in a lot of ways that perpetuating certain ideas about who you are, and creating certain ideas inside people’s heads about who you are and what you are even though they don’t know you or anything, which is totally natural of any performance-base art form where the person themselves is sort of in the forefront of the thing they’re making, and so when all that kind of comes together, and you reach a certain level of availability within a culture, I think that the first thing that pops up in my mind is pressure. Like, not even in a way that’s self-conscious, just the moment of feeling pressure, like you just kind of feel shitty, like you don’t feeling pressure. But analyzing it now, from a point where I’m not feeling pressure, I can look at it and be like, ‘Oh no there’s this thing that I’m supposed to be. There’s this life to the things that I’ve done, or that we’ve done, that has its own identity outside of us.’ And we have to be able to maintain whatever that is. But whatever that is has just come to be by sheer accident, really, through a whole series of random decisions that you’ve made, and random moments put together, where your band decided to make this versus that, or do this thing versus that thing, like there’s no grand design. You’re just together and just doing what feels like fulfills you the most at that moment, and lo and behold that ends up becoming something meaningful. I’m not saying it has no meaning in its design, but it becomes something meaningful in a many number of ways to a lot of people. The meaning is not within your control. You can write one song and know exactly where it came from in your life, and what it means to you, and you can’t really expect that everyone’s going to have kind of experience with it at all. It’s totally not reasonable. And other people’s meanings will come to it through their own experiences, or when they heard it, or what nostalgia they have attached to it, or what point in their life did they hear, or who showed it to them, or what does feel like to listen to it. Like sometimes when you listen to certain music you feel like a certain thing, like what kind of escape does it bring, like all of the many facets of why music rules to listen to and follow. But none of that is really within our control, and all of that leads to a certain identity of the band that was never a part of our design. And when you realize that, in moments of weakness, you can feel pressure to have to adhere to that, and it’s something that you can’t adhere to because it’s bigger than the sum of its parts. It’s just ether of variety and human experience. So, the benefit of encountering that pressure, and hopefully this is my answer about how do you think this stuff affects the growth of the band all this stuff, but when you encounter that pressure, always the best possible solution, and always the one that feels the most progressive and the one that does push you forward, is the realization that it’s very simple, and all that stuff that can creep into your head and everything is useful only in that you have to deal with it and digest it in order to understand how to get rid of it, and once you’ve gotten rid of it, you’re back to the basics. You’re just yourself again; and you’re just your buddies, and you’re just in some basement jamming out, or writing a song, and it’s just about that moment. Your responsibility is ultimately to yourself, and if you realize that, it can be very inspiring, because you’re kind of clear-headed again. You just kind of working more intuitively. You’re not worrying about what it’s all about, or what it’s all gonna become. You’re just doing what feels right in the moment, and in a weird paradoxical way, if you really do have it as a priority to serve your audience, or to serve this notion that up to this point has made people happy about your band, the best way to serve that is by completely ignoring it. And it’s the same way with the show, the best way to play a good show is to somehow figure out how not to think about the fact that anyone’s ever. It’s not like irreverence and it’s not like a lack of appreciation for the fact that they’re there, but as soon as you forget that they’re there, you can just be yourself, and you can then find some genuine connect for yourself, to the music that you’re playing, and once you do that, you’re actually doing something that’s worth seeing and worth being a part of for the audience. So it’s always that balance of being aware that you have an audience, I guess, but at that the end of the day, figuring out more and more ways to not think about that when it comes time to do something, or make something, or perform, or whatever. So I have found that all that stuff that you included in your question like meeting fans and connecting with fans either in the live context or through the Internet, all of that stuff has had a great amount of weight to it, and the most useful way that feel like it has helped push the band forward is that it pushes your mind to these weird points that you don’t understand, and when you’re in those weird points that you don’t understand you can then remember what really matters to you. Whatever it takes on a daily basis, whether it’s like your family, or your girlfriend, or your wife, or your children, or your culture, or your government, or anything, any context you can think of, whatever it takes for you to revisit and remind yourself what really matters to you, I feel like you’re living within a pretty healthy system of song and system of feeling, because it’s totally naturally to be pulled and strained and confused and convinced of something that isn’t true, or whatever, it’s totally natural for everyone to go through those things, just so long as you can regularly revisit what actually matters, you’ll more or less stay the course of what it is you are and what it is you’re supposed to be doing. And that doesn’t have to be such a lofty goal or such a new-agey concept. It can actually just be a practical strategy for living and not being unhappy. So I guess a simpler way of putting it is what you asked in your question does pose a challenge, and I find that whenever you’re posed a challenge, you’re posed an opportunity to rise above it, and so in many ways I’ve come to a point where when I sense that things are going to be hard, or can sense that things are gonna be weird, or I can sense that there’s something that’s bothering me or nagging me, I’ve more and more not to view it as this annoying thing or problem, but more almost excited. Like, ‘OK, cool, this situation sucks right now, what can I do to solve this?’ I guess just trust in the fact that there are solutions to things, and not letting yourself feel like there’s no solution to things. When you trust in the fact that there’s a solution to everything, even problems then become exciting. Obviously some problems are really serious and hard and heavy, and those ones require a longer view at a solution, but there’s also really tiny ones that can build up and feel really significant even though they’re really not. But yeah, I feel like challenge is brought up by the fact that people like us [Laughs] and then when you have that challenge you can make something cool out of it.
R: I know you and Toby have been playing together since eighth grade. If you were able to go back and talk to your eighth grade self, what would that conversation be like?
SM: Oh it wouldn’t make any sense. I’d have nothing to say to that guy, and he’d have nothing to say to me. Not because I’ve changed; in fact that’s the weird thing about life. I feel like, I’m thirty-four now, and at some point I started… Like life is just interesting that way. Like I feel like you’re a kid, you’re a little kid and you don’t think about much, and you exist on this pretty pure level, and I can remember what that felt, and I can remember getting a little bit older, a little bit through middle school, and certainly through high school, and feeling like all of a sudden the game changed, and it’s not about existing on some pure level, but it’s about existing on some super impure level. Like you feel like being cool, or being real, or being useful to people around you, or being interesting to people around you involved some craft, almost, like it’s not merely something that’s inside yourself, it’s something you have to cultivate or get good at or be conscious. And then you go through that, and you keep through that for a while. I can’t speak generally for people, everyone goes through a different life. I went through that, and then I continued to go through that, and then in my adulthood even, but the whole notions were so volatile, that they were not sitting well inside myself, so I was suffering for that. I just hadn’t realized what it was I was doing exactly, and to this day I’m not saying I’m fully in touch with who I am. I am intend to be involved with that pursuit for as long as I live, and I’m excited to make steps towards that, and I will also accept the pace with which those things need to go down. I’ve gotten impatient about that before, and that only slows you down, unfortunately. But the point is, for me, when I stopped being so self-conscious about what I thought I needed to be and started to focus more on who I actually was, I very much felt, much more than I ever imagined, reconnected with my like four-year-old version of myself. Not that I was bouncing around acting like a little kid, or not being responsible, or being impulsive, just like in my head, when you’re thinking about it emotionally, like just remembering what it felt like when you were that young, before you started manipulating who you were, and I’ve found that an interesting kind of cycle. So how that pertains to the question, at that point when Toby and I met, the guy that I was right then was so disconnected. There were basic things that I knew I needed, and music was one of them, and that’s why our friendship was so easy, and effortless, and why music was literally the first thing we did when we hung out for the first time after school. It was never like a decision. It was just there, and it made perfect sense, and it’s just stayed that way forever, and it was just never in question, but to talk to that guy, I don’t even know what we’d say. So I guess implicit in all of that is go back and talk to this eighth grade kid and be like, ‘Hey can you believe that when you get older you’re going to be in a band and that’s going to be like your job? And you’re going to have the albums that people can buy, and you’re gonna have like T-shirts and stuff, and you’re gonna have been on television shows, like can you believe this kind of thing?’ Like that guy would have like no reaction to that, because that was never… Even now, sometimes I feel guilty like I’m not appreciating the success that we’ve had enough, because in all honesty, I don’t want to say I don’t care, because I do care, I put a lot of care in everything that comes up as an opportunity due to the success of the band, but it doesn’t actually matter that much, you know. It just doesn’t ever feel like it’s necessary. It’s awesome that it’s going on, but if it wasn’t going, everything would definitely be OK. I wouldn’t just be like, ‘Well, I tried music in college and it didn’t work out. Now I’ll get a job and have some kids now. You know, like I’m one hundred percent certain that I would still be invested in the idea of making music right now as I am right now even if I was just still washing dishes or painting houses, just because I genuinely love it, and Toby’s been a big part of fostering that in my life. And maybe I could say that if I never had met Toby, that to me is an almost more interesting question. If you could go back and somehow split time and you never met Toby, I suddenly don’t have as much confidence to say all the things I just said about the true nature of my love of music. I do think it exists between us. I think he has brought a lot of that to my life, and the responsibility that we have towards one another, and the healthy competition, just bounce-back. To have two songwriters in one band, two very private songwriters, like we don’t write together, it’s something that’s a part of our private lives that then comes together as this one source in this band, and I feel like that dynamic was definitely readily available and just quickly absorbed when we were little kids, and I think it meant enough in that moment, and it only came to me more, and continues to grow in what it means. When I say this stuff doesn’t matter, like it doesn’t matter that we’re successful and we don’t have to have [day] jobs; it’s a sticky point to try to make, but I am definitely very grateful for the fact that all that’s going on. But as kids, it’s not what I thought in my future and it’s not what I dreamed about or anything like that. So why I say it’s so funny to think about talking to that kid, because he’d just be like… I don’t think he’d get real excited; I don’t think he’d go, ‘Oh wow, awesome!’ Because it doesn’t mean anything, and at the end of the day, the things that are going to bring you satisfaction are the things that you actually do, and no amount of success is going to make it so you don’t have to do those things anymore. Like you still have to put yourself on the line in terms of writing and performing and experimenting, and all of the anxieties that come with being obsessed or passionate about something. Like no amount of money is going to make that easier or make that less or more fulfilling. No amount of recognition. In fact those things, as far as I can tell, often just muddy up that purity of that. Like I was saying before, the more that you recognize that you mean something to people, the more of a distraction that becomes. I was actually thinking about something in a weird way similarly to what you were saying, yesterday, when I was down at the beach with girlfriend and my family, and we have this yearly trip for a week and it’s awesome, and everyone’s together. And I went in from the beach and checked my phone to see what was going on, and there was a text message from our manager and he was like something to the effect of how Urban Outfitters is gonna sell this one T-shirt we have called the Touring Band Shirt, because it just says “Dr. Dog” and it has this drawing of an old school tour bus that Dimitri [Manos], one of the members of the band did, and underneath it just says “Touring Band.” So it’s real simple. So I guess that Urban Outfitters decided that they’re going to start selling it in their stores, and they’re going to start in particular markets and if it goes well, they’ll just be selling Dr. Dog shirts just as like an item in Urban Outfitters, which is awesome. And our manager was like, ‘If this works, this could be really cool.’ And I was like, ‘Oh wow this is awesome.’ And more than my own excitement, my family, like when they hear stuff, like, ‘You’re gonna be on TV, that’s cool!’ So I was going back down to the beach ready to drop this news, and then like in the moment of walking down to the beach and thinking about how I was gonna tell my girlfriend and my mom and stuff, I realized just like, ‘What if this news that I had was actually huge. Like what if it actually was huge. Like what if in some parallel universe I was like, ‘Everyone, I’m gonna have a billion dollars forever!’ Like something crazy. Something that really pushed your life into something that was forever. Like I inflated it, and then I realized in that moment, and I was just playing this playful game in my head while I was walking down to the beach with good news, and it was like, ‘What if this news was even better?!’ Just playing that game, but what I realized, which ties in with this question, and the reason why I even remembered it and brought it up now, is why do I not care about that stuff? Like not so much like what’s wrong with me, but more curiosity of why do other people care about this stuff? What does it feel like this kind of stuff? I just want to know what it feels like to care about that kind of stuff. I want to know what it feels like to think that having a million dollars is a good idea for your life or necessary. I understand the ease and opportunity that comes from it, and if it were all of a sudden present a great many things would come from it, but in the absence of it doesn’t seem at all worth thinking about, or at all worth wanting for. Maybe I think about that stuff a lot, because you’re kind of forced to when you’re in a band and success comes in incremental steps. Something we as a band have had an ongoing dialogue with our manager about, because like every time you get somewhere, you always have to say where’s the next place. Like once you sold out the bar in the city that has four hundred tickets, the next time you have to sell out the small theatre that has a thousand tickets. And once you can sell out a thousand tickets in a theatre you can start looking to the small sheds or amphitheatres, and it’s like, ‘Hold on, what if we just play this theatre that holds a thousand people and every time we place there’s a thousand people there for as long as we want to do this? Is that not still an incredible working level of success? Rather than keep setting yourself up for that vulnerability of thinking you’ve failed if you can’t get to that shed where nine thousand people buy tickets or whatever. You involve yourself in this game where success keeps this carrot dangling on a rope in front of you, and every time you get a little bite, you’ve got to keep chasing it for another bite, and all along you keep forgetting that you’ve succeeded so much to even be chasing the carrot in the first place. Maybe that’s the reason that I think about all that stuff, but I can say that as a kid, back to your question, I never really thought about that kind of stuff. I never really thought about wanting what you call traditional success as a musician. I never really had the chance to stop or the interest in thinking about that. Toby and I just thought more about ourselves and what we were doing and being very critical. Even as kids, like we never played our entire time in high school, like Toby used to call me when we were thirteen crying, saying, ‘We weren’t good enough musicians.’ And I said, ‘What do we got to do? Do we have to play jazz or something?’ Because people who are good at music, they play jazz. Like we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, but we knew we sucked, and it took a long time to even begin to think like we didn’t suck, and even still there’s a strong degree of self-deprecation going on, which at this point in our more mature adult lenses is now useful. It drives you to be better, because now we know what makes good music good. We’re evolved enough as listeners and experienced enough as players to know what works when it works. So that whole like, ‘We stink at music attitude’ is useful because it pushes us to be better, and try new things.
R: I’ve read that you guys have already worked on a new album, B-Room. How’s that going so far, and how much do you plan to maybe play some of the new songs live?
SM: Yeah, we’ll be playing our new songs before our album comes out. Basically the way things have been running there schedule-wise is like we started recording in June, and then because that was such a long time that we devoted to that, there was an emphasis on kind of letting everyone get away from the band for at least a month or so. So for June, we all went home, but we ended up being on the phone almost every day working out the final kinks of the album, and mixing, and artwork and all that. So then, I guess long story short, we’ve been playing every weekend pretty much, since the beginning of July, and we’ve been playing a lot and travelling for festivals and stuff, and what we’re gonna do in early September because we have a tour that starts about a week or two into September, and get together for like a week or two before that tour, and finally figure out how these songs are going to go down live. Many of them were recorded live, but oftentimes in ways that we can’t pull off live still. It was just five people playing, but it was like me on a piano, two drum sets with Dimitri and [Eric] Slick on drums, maybe no bass, and Zach [Miller] playing bass on a keyboard, and Toby and Frank [McElroy] playing guitar, like in essence live, but not practical to perform that way. So we do a have a lot of little adjustments to figure out. So point being, everything starting with our September tour, which will be all of September, opening for The Lumineers, into October, and then in October, we’ll go on our own headlining tour when the album is actually out [on Oct. 1]. And by that time we’ll be hopefully playing every song off the album by that second headlining tour. The nice thing about doing that opening tour is the vast majority of the people at those shows are going to have no idea who we are, so we can really try out the new songs and get ourselves comfortable, get ourselves confident playing them, so by the time we’re actually headlining and the people coming are there to see us, we’ll be pretty good at the new songs. It’ll be a luxury we haven’t had for a few records. Usually the first like couple weeks of a headlining tour after you put a new record out you feel pretty vulnerable because the songs haven’t reached that point of ease and comfort that the older ones have about them. They’re kind of nerve-racking and they make everybody so much better. So by September we’ll be able to play all those songs.
R: Not to let out too much about what [B-Room] is going to be like, but what can you say about how you approached this new record, coming out of Be The Void? Did you want to do this the same way, or was this something of a departure musically?
SM: No, I wouldn’t call it a departure at all. I would definitely put it in like the one step further down the path of Be The Void, which was one step further down the path of [2010’s] Shame, Shame. It’s very much a proportional step forward. The unique thing about it… It was awesome to make. We’re all really happy and very proud of it, and that’s not because we found some new departure, but because we found a real solid notion of taking one step forward with the principles and the aesthetics that we’ve been studying, in a way, for so long with the albums that we’ve made. We just got better. So much of it has to do with, our drummer, and Dimitri, who joined about a year before we made Be The Void. Be The Void was the first album we made with them, and so there’s was just so much newness on the table that Be The Void happened, and it was with those guys, and it was awesome, but now we’ve just had more time to grow and understand everyone’s strengths in this very new band for us, on account of those guys. So it’s felt more focused than Be The Void, as far as what we wanted. It felt more focused in terms of how to get what we wanted. So it was really rewarding and it was kept very simple. We also built the studio that we recorded it in, right before we recorded, which I feel like was a really cool thing to do. To all be together, working on something that wasn’t music, and to be collaborating in that way and relegating tasks. Assessing and qualifying people’s skill sets, and all the meat and potatoes that is collaboration was going down in a none musical context between the band members , and that was just like a real good gear up for it. And then the satisfaction that came from building the studio and how incredible it turned out, and we did it all ourselves. It was so self-affirming, that by the time we turned on the tape machine and got to record, it felt so good. And nothing beats that. Whatever you can do as a musician to feel really connected to the situation, like the context is your own, like you own it. That just always works for us, and we’ve never felt comfortable in other people’s studios . I don’t know; there’s something abstract about it that I can’t quite put my finger on. But when it’s your place, and you’ve made it, and in this case we literally framed and hung, like we built it. Twelve-foot-high ceilings and totally sound room and big tracking room, did the wiring, put in a kitchen, put in a shower, hung new lights. It was a massive project, and the satisfaction we gained from it was immense. So to answer your question there was a real feeling of confidence, and coming back to what I was saying before, the more energy you put into what’s immediately around, the friends that you have, your band mates, the walls around you, and the equipment you have to work with, the more you put yourself into that as much as possible, the more you’re able to not think about things that don’t really have to do with anything that’s going on around you. The more you connect yourself with what’s right around, the less likely you are to wander off into things that are not around you and aren’t within your control, and basically create pressure. So the whole vibe, for lack of a better word, was no pressure. So to be creating from a point where you feel no pressure was very liberating and free. And as far as what I’m drawn to, it’s always the kind of stuff where the process of making it was very insular and driven by its own engine, like it has no agenda outside of being what it is, and that’s just what happens when these people, or this person, got into doing it. And also, the whole other, which I would be a fool to even get into, which is the technological side, the tools that you use to record music with. Analog equipment and digital equipment and the worlds where they overlap and all that, which was a definite leap for us on this record. Technologically this studio was wired and set up and designed to allow forms of workability that we’ve never experienced before, which was basically you’re in there and you feel like you’re home recording. And we’ve all been home recording forever, and we’re very comfortable in that very lo-fi kind of scenario. We’ve always kind of been tagged a lo-fi band, and it’s not because we jumped on some bandwagon of that’s what cool is, or if you hear something that’s lo-fi that means it’s cool, even if the music sucks. It’s not like that. These are the tools that we’ve had access to, and as we’ve tried to take in more tools sonically to expand the sound and learn more about what’s going on there. But the rest we kind of feel alienated being in an iso-booth with headphones on and some guy’s in another room hitting stop and play while you’re singing than it is just to be standing there in front some dumb little machine and hitting play, and holding the mic in your hand and smoking a cigarette at the same time when no one’s around – that’s way more fun. So we finally figured how to give ourselves that kind of environment without having to sacrifice hi-fidelity. And a lot of that goes to our buddy, , who engineered the record and the way that he figured out how to blend those two worlds together. So basically we had an environment that felt very comfortable and low-key, but sonically and technologically we were working at a completely state of the art level, so that as well created a great atmosphere, as well as the other things that I mentioned. Long story short, once again the album is not a departure. It’s very much a further evolving and honing in on the sensibilities and aesthetics that we’ve interested in since the very beginning. In many ways this record is the full circle because that total irreverent idea of recording was the whole idea this time. Like how do we make it so that’s what we’re doing without sacrificing good sound. Basically how can be like we were fifteen years ago, but be it now with awesome sound. So, it’s kind of a full circle, and an affirmation in many ways of the basic things that we’re in place when we first started. It feels cool to be a part of a process that’s that long, that has that much of a tie between it’s present state and its original state. There’s not a lot of things in life for me that have that kind of longevity or commitment. So just on the most basic level it feels cool to see that starts somewhere and evolve, but it doesn’t actually really change. It’s kind of like being a person, I guess. You don’t ever really change; nothing really ever goes away, you never really forget, you just accept and you take new things on within all of the other things. That’s what I like most about what this album did for us, and for me personally, it was an affirmation of bigger values, and in the end that affirmation felt like nothing more than this stupid and laughable thing, and that feels good, rather than feeling overwhelmed or underwhelmed.
Dr. Dog will play the Audiotree Music Festival Aug. 31. B Room will be in stores and online Oct. 1. For more click over to drdogmusic.com or audiotreemusicfestival.com.-Eric Mitts
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