Ask A Few Questions: Dean Wareham Interview

Dean Wareham accounts for adapting under pandemic living and rebooting his songcraft upon the release of a deeply enjoyable new solo album

It’s been well documented on these pages how electronic sound makers have productively engaged with the seclusion and strangeness of stay-at-home pandemic living, to forge material that will act as both time capsule snapshots and forward-planned stockpiles. Yet when it comes to more sociable and collaborative guitar-wielding songwriters, the impact has been somewhat under-discussed. Undoubtedly, one such artist we need to highlight, who has made good creative use of an otherwise difficult situation, has been the indie veteran’s veteran, Dean Wareham.

Kept away from touring during the pandemic – either with the reunited Luna or with musical partner Britta Phillips – over the last eighteen or so months, Wareham has been pushed to adapt to new operational approaches as well as to refresh dormant older skills.

In the former respect, it meant inviting fans to virtually visit the living room Wareham shares with Phillips, for a series of pared-back live streamed performances, replete with warm renderings of extracts from each other’s solo records, the Dean & Britta duo canon, Luna’s discography and classics from Wareham’s still-much-loved Galaxie 500 catalogue, in addition to a slew of other people’s songs. So well-conceived were these literally home turf shows, that some of the polished-up finest moments were gathered inside the sublime Dean & Britta-billed Quarantine Tapes, released digitally and as a lathe-cut 7” boxset last year and out again now on CD and as a regular vinyl long player.

As to the latter, Wareham also finally rebooted his own songwriting, after seven or so years of working with covers and instrumentals across his various latter day cultural channels. This has resulted in I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A. – a wonderful new solo Wareham LP.

Recorded late last year with crucial help from the ever trusty Phillips, drummer Roger Brogan and agile multi-instrumentalist producer Jason Quever, the collection packs together eight new self-penned originals – full of equitably-balanced pacy and laidback melodicism, lushly textured ensemble arrangements, as well as wordplay richly-infused with literary inspirations, historical character studies and subtle political polemics – with takes on vintage numbers by the revered Scott Walker and the ultra-obscure Lazy Smoke. As a whole, I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A. reconfirms Wareham’s role as an artist still charmingly adept at marrying the reassuringly familiar with the shrewdly shapeshifting.

Cross-examined over email – about all of the above and more – Wareham was as thoughtfully insightful, good-humoured and generous as he’s been to this minor-league scribe on two previous occasions elsewhere…

Before we get to the creative side of what you’ve been up to during the first year and half or so of the pandemic, how have you found it on a more personal level?

On a personal level it was fine; Los Angeles of course has nice weather and we had some outdoor space. We made the best of it, we stayed safe and were fortunate not to get sick. And Britta and I were lucky to be two musicians living under one roof. Of course, the pandemic exposed how unequal America is — as if we needed reminding — but it could be seen clearly in neighbourhood maps of where Covid was spreading here in L.A. County.

How many of your plans at the start of 2020 were dropped and postponed indefinitely?

We had to reschedule that UK/Euro tour – playing Galaxie 500’s On Fire – originally scheduled for April 2020, now it’s finally going to happen in January 2022. And there were tentative plans to tour our Andy Warhol Screen Test show in 2021, hopefully we can get that going in 2022.

Once you adjusted to being grounded by Covid-19, did all the different things that yourself and Britta have worked on, between Luna originally ending and subsequently reforming, serve you well in terms of adapting your creative energies and finding alternative revenue routes? Would it have been far harder if this had all happened fifteen years earlier?

Well, again I’m lucky to have Britta here; I can do a few things in ProTools and Logic but she is much better at editing and mixing than I am, so we were able to do some recording sessions at home, which was fun. And yes, the internet makes it easier to pivot to selling t-shirts or music. And of course, we are the lucky ones who got to stay at home during the pandemic — the people actually making the t-shirts did not have that luxury.

As with some other established artists, you initially turned to paid-for live-streaming from home. How did you find the whole process, in technical and economically-viable terms in particular?

I didn’t want to do it at first, but then we were asked to do a benefit — for rent control in Los Angeles — which is a good cause. We did that, and it was a challenge but also it was fun connecting with people, so we kept doing it, and learned as we went, how to make it look and sound better (often with additional equipment purchases). By the time we did our Christmas special our drummer Roger brought his multi-track recording set up into the house, so we were a three-piece band and the mixes sounded really good.

You were obviously pleased enough with the results of the streaming shows to compile The Quarantine Tapes from the gathered recordings, firstly as a download compilation and a limited 7” lathe-cut boxset and soon as regular vinyl and CD releases. Personally, it’s one of my favourite Dean & Britta duo releases to date. It seems that you managed to capture a distinctive warmth, intimacy and stay-at-home strangeness that tapped into the somewhat otherworldly mood from the early phase of the pandemic. Would you agree?

Yeah, those recordings sound intimate, obviously they are more stripped down, sometimes just voices, acoustic guitar and bass guitar so the vocals are more front and centre — I really love “He Dines out on Death” by Cristina Monet Zilkha and “The Carnival is Over” by The Seekers — two songs we tried to record ten years ago but never finished, and then the titles jumped out at me as being especially relevant. Unbeknownst to us, Cristina Monet Zilkha died of Covid complications on March 31, 2020 but we only found that out after we had finished the song. Also of note, Eleanor Marx also died on March 31 (1898). More on that later.

You’ve also set-up a Patreon account – where fans can sponsor your work in exchange for unreleased recordings downloads, an ongoing audiobook reading of your Black Postcards memoir and more. Is this set-up also helping to compensate for the lack of recent touring income? Is it something that you plan to keep up indefinitely?

We have a whole lot of music — demos, unused film score, live tracks, B-sides — that is not available on streaming services, and frankly I don’t really want it on streaming services, you don’t need to clutter the Spotify page with things like that. But this seemed a good way to get it out there and also make some extra money. I don’t know how long we’ll keep it up, maybe till I have finished reading every chapter from my book.

Turning now to the gestation of your new solo-billed I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A. album… after seven or so years of not writing songs, had lyric-led material just started coming to you in the enforced domestic downtime or did you more deliberately decide to reboot that part of your skill-set?

I had a few ideas kicking around; I knew I wanted to write some political songs, songs that weren’t just about my life — which isn’t really so eventful after all. And I did read a lot of books during the pandemic, and frankly it is reading that often gets me writing.

Did coming back to that discipline after such a long time rewire your writing processes to a degree or did you essentially pick up off where you left off from?

Every time I start a new record, I have this fear that I will no longer know how to do it. But once I started, these songs came quickly, I surprised myself by being there in the studio with eight songs I was really happy with, even had the lyrics 95% finished before we started. And then added a couple more when we got back home.

You recorded the LP late last year, largely in a proper studio with a small ensemble featuring Britta, Roger Brogan and producer Jason Quever. Aesthetically, it feels like more of a continuation of your Emancipated Hearts mini-album from 2013, rather than 2014’s self-titled full-length album, in the sense that it’s melodic and lush but subtly experimental around the edges. Would you agree and if so, how much would you attribute it to having Jason back behind the desk? Did you have any strong ideas about how you wanted to it sound?

I didn’t have strong ideas but collaborating with Jason has been fruitful every time. Jason worked on the early Cass McCombs records and did some of the last Beach House album too. He usually brings a good idea to each song, whether it’s a guitar or keyboard part — if you check out his lead guitar on “As Much as It Was Worth”, that’s really beautiful.

The opening “The Past is Our Plaything” is a strong scene-setter. Sonically, it makes me think of a slowed-down Byrds mixed with a late-60s/early-70s Elektra singer-songwriter and lyrically there seems to be some covert Covid-life observations. What went into the melting pot there?

We tried that song a few ways, initially it was slower, a bit like Mazzy Star, but in the studio we played it fast and then it felt like an early Stones pop song as played by Galaxie 500. But the chorus “the past is our plaything, she cannot talk back” was an idea expressed by Julian Barnes in his book The Man in the Red Coat. He observed that when writing historical accounts, you can’t really ever know the whole truth, the past cannot talk to you, so you have to invent it.

The similarly arranged but more sped-up “Cashing In” unfurls like a wry micro-autobiographical reflection on your career in the music industry to date. Is that correct or is there more to it than that?

It certainly reads that way to me, maybe not how I feel every day, but how I feel some days. Someone said to me, must be at least ten years ago, “he’s not selling out, he’s cashing in!” And it took a while but I finally wrote a song around that line. My favourite line, and I don’t usually like to curse in song — “every fuck was a flying fuck.”

“The Last Word” is a story song about the life of Eleanor Marx, Karl’s youngest daughter, who was also a pioneering thinker like her father and who tragically took her own life. It’s remarkably affecting and underpinned by some gorgeous layering of guitar lines. Is this newer mode of historical biographical miniatures – repeated elsewhere on the album – one that you found notably fulfilling?

Yeah, I have never really sung in someone else’s voice like that; I sang most of the song from her perspective, at the moment she finds out that her long-time partner, Edward Aveling, has secretly married someone else, and she decides to take her own life, and leaves him a short suicide note: “my last word to you is the same I’ve said during all these long sad years — love.” So many people in her life disapproved of him, but she was very forgiving of this cad that she was involved with. They believed in free love, but it seems the freedom was all his while she worked to pay their bills. The other fascinating part of the story is that Eleanor Marx had translated Madame Bovary into English (that translation is still in print). The fictional Emma Bovary kills herself by poisoning also, which surely gave her the idea.

“Robin & Richard” is another narrative tale, about your Italian tour manager and driver, fused to a mid-to-late phase Velvet Underground chug. Were you consciously resummoning that influence or is it something which just comes to the fore involuntarily?

Oh, that’s the kind of song that just grows out of a guitar riff, as you say, it just floats down. Unfortunately, the lyrics do not magically float onto the page, that takes some work, but I assembled this song half from an English nursery rhyme and then half from real life, not my life entirely but that of a friend.

“Red Hollywood” is the third overtly real-life character study, about actor John Garfield, who fell foul of McCarthyism in the early-1950s and died aged only 39. Where do you learn about his tragic tale?

I read a book about the Hollywood blacklist last year, and also watched the excellent documentary Red Hollywood. It seems ludicrous today, the idea that communist screenwriters (and yes, they did have a presence in Hollywood) were sneaking propaganda into films — when every script had to be vetted by studios and by the right-wing Production Code Administration. In fact, there was one script that mentioned a character reading Madame Bovary — the censors ordered that this “pornographic” book should be expunged. That’s how absurd things were in Hollywood. They had censors in the Soviet Union but we had them too.

“The Corridors of Power” and “Why Are We in Vietnam?” feel like the most politically-laced songs you’ve ever written. Was it hard to not let any politics seep into your songwriting, given the discourse that that is currently churning in the US right now?

I am a somewhat political person anyway, I was a teenage Trotskyist you know, and yes of course we went through an incredible four years of Trump, every day it was some new insanity in the newspapers, and the insanity wasn’t all from the Trump camp either, there was hysteria all around. So, in my own small way, I have tried to tell a few stories and ask a few questions, like why do we have military bases in eighty countries around the world? Why are we addicted to this bloated military?

“Why Are We in Vietnam?” also feels like the most Galaxie 500-like recording you’ve cut in some time – would you share that view?

Jason Quever thought that too; it’s his favourite song on the record. That was one take in the studio, live guitars, a slightly drunk post-dinner vocal and it starts off fragile and builds to a crescendo where I go into a bit of a high wail — so maybe all that evokes Galaxie 500.

Despite your return to songwriting, you still tackle “Under Skys” by Lazy Smoke and “Duchess” by Scott Walker back-to-back on the album. What made you choose such an obscurity in terms of the former and quite a well-known one from the latter?

Matt Fishbeck (who did the LP package design), sent me “Under Skys” a couple of years ago, saying “this guitar solo sounds like you played it!” Of course, I would have been five years old if that were true. Anyway, I put it on a list of songs to cover. Scott Walker’s “Duchess” — we played during a livestream show last year and our drummer Roger insisted we should try it in studio. I figured it would be a B-Side but it turned out so nicely, I kept it on the album. You never know what’s gonna happen in the studio; good songs can turn out lifeless, but songs you thought were pretty slight can turn out to be your favourites.

What hopes and anxieties about returning to roads, airports and stages to support this album do you have?

I have already dealt with airports and flights this year, that’s okay. It’s a bit odd playing small indoor venues while the virus is still out there. I’m vaccinated of course — it is our duty to each other to do that — but the concern is just that someone gets sick and dates have to be cancelled. So, I am planning on doing this UK/Euro tour in January 2022, but we’ll be taking precautions, we have to operate in a bit of a bubble, no more taking selfies and shaking hands at the t-shirt table, at least for a while…

What else have you been up to since you finished the new solo album and since lockdown life has eased? Have you also been planning any more activities with and also writing new material for Luna?

We have some live Luna recordings we are gonna release soon, and a couple weeks of U.S. shows in November, starting in Texas and again, hoping to get through it without any cancellations.

You’re a pretty big record collector of new and archival releases, what have you been acquiring and listening to lately?

My favourite records this year were Magic Touch by Jack Name and Two Years by Whitney K, also the Karen Black album that Cass McCombs put together. And I really like what I’ve heard from the new Rose City Band album.

At this stage in your vocation, do you have any significant ambitions left to fulfill or are you pretty content staying within the small but diverse bubble of your current existence? Could you ever really see yourself retiring?

Well, it’s odd, you make a record, and feel really good about it, and then the question is — how and when can I do that again? Which is a self-imposed pressure — I should be writing songs all the time, right? Unfortunately, I’m not that disciplined. Bob Dylan said somewhere recently that there is no reason for anyone to write a new song, they are all written already. But then he goes and releases some great new songs that only he could have written. Retiring sounds okay to me, but I feel I may have a few more songs to write and covers to record. And we have to keep working so we can buy health insurance.

Main feature photo credit: Matt Fishbeck

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