BR: So the current tour line-up is you, Scrap, Pete Wilhoit on drums, and … is it Dan Chen on keys?
MD: That’s right. Dan and I first played together on the Haughty Melodic tour. He’s been doing some other things since, but when he asked me about going out on this tour with us, it was like, “Hell – _yes!_” It’s great to have him back with us.
Pete Wilhoit plays in Fiction Plane – that’s his main gig. I don’t remember now who recommended him, but I just basically polled everybody on drummers. The great thing now is, you can just go to YouTube and look at people playing. Even before the actual audition process, you can winnow it down to the most awesome players.
BR: Ahhh – the anonymous audition.
MD: Exactly. (laughs)
BR: Let’s talk a bit about the new album itself. I know the move to your own label – Snack Bar – was probably one of those mixed blessing things. I think my summation in the album review was “Risks and freedom; freedom wins.” It’s got to be scary.
MD: Oh, yeah – it’s great having your own input, but it’s difficult in the sense that you have to pay for everything. I’m really scrounging favors and asking people, “Can I pay you six months after the record comes out?” Actually, I’ve never been on a label that really told me what to do; or if they did, I’d just say, “No” and they’d be fine with it.
There’s definitely some difficulty involved in running your own thing – but there’s no label that I’m going to get the kind of work out of that I really need. Labels are increasingly strapped – not strapped for cash; strapped for time. (laughs) ATO was great, but when I signed with them, there were 20 people working there – now there’s like 4 or 5. Unless you really don’t want any control, you’ve got to run your own thing.
But yeah – it was scary. I had a period in the early 2000s after I’d left Soul Coughing of being totally independent, so I knew it worked; knew it wasn’t an impossible task … but it was still frightening.
I know some people back home in Brooklyn – young singer-songwriters in their 20s – who I just look at and say, “It’s not fair … you simply don’t have the opportunities that I had. I was way stranger than what you’re doing – but you may not have the opportunity to be a full-on musician for a living.”
BR: Did you have a concentrated period of writing for Yes And Also Yes?
MD: Yeah – the bulk of the album was written at Yaddo, which is an artist’s colony in upstate NY. It’s an interesting joint: you apply and they let you in for a month, two months – put you up, give you a studio space, feed you, and give lots of time. It’s all people working in any media: writers, composers, painters, and poets. It’s been around since the early part of the last century – Truman Capote, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copeland have worked there.
I wrote 21 songs in a month. They all got chopped up, which is not unusual for me. There was one song where the chorus was good and another song where the verse was good, so I chopped out the rest and sort of jammed them together and made them one song. But the shoulder-to-the-wheel work happened at Yaddo.
BR: How about the recording for the album – that was spread out over a period of time, wasn’t it?
MD: Yeah – and again, that’s a product of not having the money to do it all at once. On one hand, it’s annoying, but in terms of working on it for five days and then having a month to think about what you’re going to do next … having that much spare time to think is great; it’s amazing for a record. If I’d had my druthers, I wouldn’t have done it that way, but I know it’s good for me.
One thing I wondered as I listened through the first few times: why live drums on some cuts and you covering the beats on others?
Well, when I started recording, my idea was that it was going to be a serious rock record. Marty Beller, who played drums on the album, is a rock guy – I don’t think I’ve ever worked with anyone who’s that much of a rock drummer. (laughter) Basically what happened was we recorded a bunch of stuff and then there were some songs that were written late in the game, like “Na Na Nothing” and “Holiday”. I started by augmenting “Day By Day By” with some electronic stuff and the album became sort of hybridized. It’s all me for the first four tracks or so and then the rest is sort of a combination of electronic beats and Marty.
I had great people all around me for this album: Marty on drums; Scrap on cello and bass; Thomas Bartlett, who has his own band Doveman – he plays with an amazing range of people: Laurie Anderson, The National, The Johnsons, Martha Wainwright, Rufus Wainwright. Thomas is like the “dude of the moment” – he’s one of the secret weapons of this album’s sound. So is Carolin Pook, who plays violin.
BR: Oh, man – I wanted to talk to you about her. I didn’t have the album credits when I did the original review – just the pre-release download to listen to. I didn’t realize that Carolin played violin on the album – I attributed things like the “spine shivers” on “Russell” to fancy bow work by Scrap. I owe Carolin an apology; her violin work is beautiful.
MD: Isn’t it? She’s my neighbor in Brooklyn, actually.
BR: Really?
MD: Yeah, Carolin lives in the apartment next door. She’s in her 20s and it’s one of those apartments that kids of that age get in Brooklyn: 5 bedrooms and there’s constantly some sax player or some painter that’s moving in or moving out. (laughter) She started putting on house parties, playing avant-garde music and improvised classical stuff – she was just great. I got her into the studio, put her in front of the mic, and said, “Make weird noises and we’ll sort them out.” (laughs)
That thing on “Russell” that you mentioned was actually a part that she wrote – three violin tracks going at once and she just kind of made this undulating bed of strings.
BR: Oh – it’s a real hair-standing-up-on-your-arms kind of moment. Well, please pass my apologies along when you see her in the hall. (laughter) Great lyrics in “Russell”, by the way. Where else is a verse going to end with “aspartame” – and have it be the perfect last word? (laughter)
MD: Well, thank you. That’s what I like. (laughs)
BR: Another song I wanted to ask you about is “Holiday”. That’s a deceptive song: it’s so easy to get wrapped up in the swirling snow and the Christmas spirit –
MD: Right, right.
BR: And then, when you really listen to the lyrics, you realize that the singer’s world is coming apart.
MD: It’s really about drunk people being unable to relate to each other. I’d gone out to Los Angeles to do some stuff and while I was out there, I wrote some songs. I scheduled some time to write with Dan Wilson: we do it just because we love doing it. And the idea was that we’d write a Christmas song that was not corny but genuinely emotional. I mean, there’s all kinds of ha-ha Christmas albums and songs out there, but I wanted to write something that was genuinely resonant – and I think we nailed it.
BR: And how did Rosanne Cash end up on that track?
MD: It actually began with a note in the chorus that I couldn’t hit. I thought, “Well, I’ll get a female vocalist and we’ll harmonize; I’ll do the low harmony and she’ll hit the high note.”
I thought we’d take a complete shot in the dark before we got serious and ask Rosanne Cash – who had, in fact, said some extremely nice things about my songwriting recently. And she said yes! (laughter) At that point, it was converted into an actual duet where we’re singing every word together … and I just love it.
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