Dr. Dog had a busy 2012. The Philadelphia-based kicked things off with the release of their seventh album Be the Void in February, toured for much of the year and capped thing off with the studio EP Wild Race this fall. For both of their studio sessions, Dr. Dog brought things in house, recording at their own Meth Beach Studio after scrapping another recording session with Atlanta named Ben Allen (Gnarls Barkley, Puff Daddy, Christina Aguilera). Around the release of Wild Race, band co-frontman Scott McMicken discussed the band’s busy year, band co-founder Toby Leaman’s distinct style and how they met their new leader in the Bonnaroo campgrounds.
Let’s start by talking about Dr. Dog’s new EP, which was released this fall. Were these songs from the Be the Void sessions or part of a separate project?
All those songs were recorded and mixed at the same time as all the rest of the stuff for Be the Void. When we finished mixing that record we had the twelve songs that we put on the record, plus those five [from the new EP] and two or three more as well. We had them all mixed but the final piece of the puzzle—the last stage of the recording process – was deciding what to put on the album. Everyone sat at my house and looked at this list of songs that we all had mixed and gotten to a point where we were happy with, and then it was a matter of choosing which ones would be on record and which weren’t. That proved to be kind of hard because everybody was invested in certain songs equally as much as other ones, so we just kind of decided right off that bat, “Whatever we do here, these songs will see the light of day.” So that made the process of cutting songs from the album—that in many cases people were really sad to see go—much easier, just by committing to releasing them.
Even upon turning in the record, we were laying the ground work for its accompanying EP whenever that made sense in the grand scheme of putting the record out timing wise. So they were all just recorded at exactly the same time and for that record. They don’t really have their own story outside of just the story of making that record. It’s just kind of leftover stuff that we were all kind of pumped on and now putting them together we’ve been able to enjoy. Even the smaller scale process of when you do take a cool collection of songs, until you really decide how they’re going to be released and what order they’re going to be in, and what’s it going to be called, and what’s it going to look like, you always just kind of hear them floating around in their own little orbit. You just kind of hear them as these individual things.
I actually just listened to the EP for the first time last night, in its order, and I think they work well as one body. They really emphasize one of the threads that I think is apparent on the record, but I think the EP hammers the point home. Because, which the exception of Toby’s song in the middle, I feel like the first two songs and the last two songs are a more direct statement about the kinds of tunes we were recording and the kinds of sounds we were looking for and the kind of performances we were doing. It all feels real dirty and live and rocking, you know? Like a live show. It so happened that those four songs in particular kind of capture that essence more than a lot of the other tunes on the record, which took [a] different direction. That whole pursuit, that sort of live sound that we’ve been going for was certainly prominent in everything we recorded for the record, but I feel like the EP really sends that message home, with the exception of Toby’s song in the middle.
The body serves as this nice point of contrast, because it’s more spacious. [It’s a] gentler, more textural, sonic range there with the drum machine going on and sort of hairpin dynamics. There’s not a lot of anticipation—it’s kind of just laying the parts where they belong. One of the goals was to include Toby’s space-age soul stuff that he likes so much. It’s that kind of soul-values, but in this more techno-color, modern approach to things. I think it is a nice straight-manner anchor in the middle of that EP. It cool, I feel like it’s got a lot of folks best playing on there, you know [Erik] Slick’s grooves and stuff are really prominent in that collection of tunes. I feel like it really shows a lot of what Slick has brought to the band.
A couple points leading off of what you just said. This EP does have a live feel, something you were going for an accomplished with your most recent record, too. Have you added any of these songs to the live repertoire yet, and if so, is it an interesting process re-learning them almost a year after you originally recorded them?
Yeah, it’s always interesting to see how a song is going to wind up feeling when you get it ready for the shows and stuff. It’s been different over all with this whole record, and certainly true for the songs on this EP. This time, we put this record together with essentially the same stuff we have available to us on a stage. Even on “Exit for Sale,” all those strings and all that stuff, that was actually just done by Zach [Miller] with his Melotone. So he has all his Melotone sound; even those kind of those weirder sounds are pretty much part of a bag that we have available for us on the stage.
We made this record to set some parameters and challenge ourselves. It wasn’t like: “This sucks. We keep making all these recordings and we can’t do it live.” It was more like the band is genuinely becoming more interest with how far we can go and how much we can do with the very basic live-show palate: a couple electric guitars, the keyboard sounds that Zach currently has available to him—the piano, the organ, the Melotone sounds—, the bass and fuzz bass, and Dmitri [Manos], really broadens the live palette for sure with the sheer amount of diversity and soundscapes he has available to him in the little world that he’s built for himself.
So yeah, it’s been interesting in that it’s been a lot easier, it’s been more direct. The mission becomes less of the practical things like “How do we even do this?” and more like “Okay, we know how to do this, how do we do it really well and get it to feel really strong?” So it’s been good. You know with every record, going through that step of learning stuff for live, you kind of go into the studio and you put songs together based on your most up to date aspirations in music. It’s really in the final step of learning them and taking them on the road that I feel you really start to live inside of those new ways of playing and those new ideas. It’s almost like way after you make the record do I feel like you become pretty competent in the values and ideas you’re exercising in making the record. I think it comes naturally and sets you up to begin your next record.
That being said, given that you have this set of songs from the EP that didn’t necessarily fit with the album conceptually, did you shy away from playing them live before the EP’s release?
We hadn’t really been playing them live; we’ve tried a couple of them. We’ve been more working on them in sound check and stuff, but it’s getting real close. Definitely now that the EP is out, it puts more enthusiasm, more of a reason to play them. We don’t like to play songs that people don’t know; we don’t do that very much. So we haven’t been really chomping at the bit to play them, plus on this tour we’ve been involved in going back and dusting off a lot of old ones. Because there’s always the old ones that you haven’t played in a long time and people are always asking to hear stuff that we could do if we took the time to run through them a couple of times. We’re getting real close. We’ve done “Wild Race” live and we’ve done “What a Fool.” We’ve never tried “Be The Void” or “Sun” or “Exit for Sale,” yet. But, they are getting really close.
You mentioned that you have been digging back into the back catalog recently. Since so many new members have come into the band since you’ve formed, I’m sure that some of these old songs are given a new twist.
Yeah totally, which is really cool for those of us who have been in the band for a really long time. Especially Slick, back there on the drums. I mean he’s the new leader in a lot of ways. His contribution is felt immensely. You feel it particularly in that older stuff, which you kind of took to be one way for so long. You know, it’s been great and I think it’s really solidified for him even more his role and his excitement about being a part of the band, to have been able to work on songs with us from the start. So it’s not just him always playing, or putting his flavor onto predetermined beats where he didn’t even have anything to do with the process of coming up with.
He’s a joy to work with as far as coming up with new stuff, but he’s definitely a breath of fresh air on some of the older things. He also, just because of the kind of guy he is and how grateful of a person he is and how gifted and talented as he is, enables things to work really fast. He pushes everybody and he
doesn’t realize it. It’s not a conscious thing. The reality is that when you say “Okay, let’s try this song we haven’t done in six years,” by the second time he’s going to have it down and nailed. If everybody else is kind of up to snuff, then it can really be just a couple run-throughs and then we’re back on track.
He has brought back a fast paced and immediate way to work into the band. That rules when you’re doing new stuff too, because it’s really exciting to jump into a song and commit to a version of it. As every musician always says, something happens there and it’s kind of hard to get back to the more you work on something. Especially when you’re looking for that feel and that live thing and that immediacy, it’s hard to maintain it take after take. So within there, and that sort of security of just knowing he’s going to kill it instantaneously, more or less, then everybody else realizes, “Well, I have to be able to do that too so that we can get this done fast.” Not just for efficiencies sake or cause we want get out of [there]. The quicker we get it done, the more promising the result in many cases. Especially with what we’ve been trying pursue through the last record, and what I most definitely see us pursuing through the next one.
Is it true you first met Slick in artist camping at Bonnaroo?
Yeah, that is the first time we actually met. He knew us, and we had a lot of mutual friends. We may have met briefly in Philly—I’d heard a lot of the groups he was playing in. But Bonnaroo was definitely the first time we really met and got to hang out. He was there with a gypsy group or whatever.
Then we hung out at his birthday that year. I remember we saw the Black Keys on his 21st birthday at the Electric Factory, and he came over to my house before that with his girlfriend. He hung out with Zach a bunch because Zach was living at the time in a house with a bunch of musicians that were more Slick’s camp—avant-garde guys. That was their world. Zach was the main tie for many of us to Slick, and it was Zach who, when Justin left the band, thought of Slick thankfully. Zach was definitely our entry point for Slick.
The band’s stage setup has definitely evolved over the years. When I saw you at New York’s Terminal 5 earlier in the year, you made the entire stage look like a house. How do you get the ball rolling on your stage designs and how involved is the band in that process?
Well, it’s something that we just enjoy. I think early on for the band, we just kind of covered every aspect of the band in some sort of aesthetic fingerprint. That’s just something we’ve always done because it’s just one of the many fun things about being in a band. So early on when we had shows, we’d go all out because you know you weren’t going on tours you were going across town or Delaware or whatever, so we’d fill up everybody’s car with tarps and couches and TVs and all this crap and just try to make it cool.
I think that the context can very much enhance the experience of seeing a show, and within an aesthetic context it’s also a reflection of that band. It just sort of pushes it further. As the performer or musician, it feels more in your own element. That’s the most important part of performing well, is feeling like you’re in your element and that you’re there. It’s something that has always been a part of the band, and then, of course, touring so much, you have to forgo a lot of that stuff for the sheer efficiency of travelling in a van with a lot of people, and being an opening band and all that great stuff, it just doesn’t make sense to travel with everything.
As soon as it started making sense, as we started to segue into headlining our own shows and stuff, we immediately got back into it. It’s been interesting. We’ve taken a lot of routes with it, most of them have been very homemade, and things anybody could do. At this point we’ve made three or four traditional backdrops. But it’s like anything; once you get into it you know where to get the right stuff. These companies that will sell you a backdrop of whatever size you want that’s already fireproofed and pre-approved by clubs. So we just find a big place to stretch them out and paint them.
We’ve done kind of a weave, checker thing with the colors. You know, you pick one simple theme and you try to expand it has much as you can into the set. We’ve done the woven stripes, and pushed that all over the stage, and we’ve done circles, and that was more corresponding to a goal where we were trying to work with a real rock show LD, light designer and travel with big, huge ass boxes of lights and stuff. That had some coolness about it, but I think that was us seeing how far we can go, in order to come back from that. That wasn’t really our deal. That was kind of cool, and that was inspiring in some ways, but the light show wound up being a real trap. It was so choreographed, so intricate, that it almost forced the songs to sound the same every night.
I think we all found, that while it was kind of exciting to be in that majestic rock n’ roll atmosphere, it was stiffening the songs. Every night, the bridge of this song is going to turn into these pounding, blinking lights, and what if that’s not really the feel we arrive at, at that particular night, you know what I mean? If the light show is influencing the audio, it is too much for our comfort. We would never would have known that until we tried it, and since then we’ve kind of backed off it and looked more for lighting designer who are more subtle and just kind of create an atmosphere and a tone to things. It’s less about moving lights and choreographed lights and all that. It’s more about coming up with a cool set and lighting it well; more about seeing the band and what’s going on and you know, throw in some tricks here and there for dramatic effect with a much more limited palette. Sometimes just turning all the lights off can be the most dramatic move in the world, if they’ve been on for forty-five minutes or whatever. Just kind of toning down that side of the show.
When it comes time to come up with a concept for tour, it’s always a fun process. There’s never a shortage of idea and it’s always a fun challenge to figure out how you can execute them in a way that’s cheap and easy to take down and setup every day. It’s cool because it always seems to work out for us. I think we’re always surprised by how cool things end up looking when you start out with some dumb idea. Like on the tour, you saw us at Terminal 5 with the peg-board that was just wallpapered with posters that Dmitri and I painted in my kitchen.
There were definitely various steps along the way where it seems very ragtag, but you put it up there on the glory of a rock show stage, with the certain lights hitting it and with the atmosphere of what a show is, things take on a larger than life feel to them. It’s just really fun to be a part of that, and I think it’s just an extension of how we work of a band in many ways we just enjoy. Sometimes it’s harder to muster the energy or find the time for sure, when other aspects of being in a band are really at a fever pitch, but all in all we always jump at the opportunity to get involved in some aspect of the band, be it T-shirts or artwork or handmade stuff or merchandise. Whatever it is, we have a lot of fun with it.
In the article that ran in Relix earlier this year, you mention that you guys recorded you current album at your Meth Studios. Before that, you tried making a big-budget album out of town. Are any of the songs from the EP from those sessions?
Those songs haven’t seen the light of day in any way, shape or form. Initially, we went down into the studio in Atlanta and the mission wasn’t really to walk away with music but rather to put ourselves there and see what it felt like before making any big decisions. The fact that we walked out of there with two pretty much completed songs was almost secondary to “Hey, did that feel good?” And it did! It felt great! We were all real pumped and I think for like two or three months after that we all had it in our heads that we were going to go back there and do it all there. Slowly over time, the ideas shifted and the focus shifted and we end up changing our minds. Now, the songs are just floating around. Both those songs, different versions of them, wound up on the record. “Do the Trick” and “Get Away.” Initially, we were thinking we’ll get those tracks and we’ll continue to work on those same tracks.
That proved more complicated. It was just easier to set-up and re-record them then to have to call Ben Allen and ask for the files. He’s a pretty legit producer so we were worried it would be complicated with crediting him and maybe open a can or worms, because it was just as easy for us to set up the mics and bang it out again. In the end, just to keep it simple, we ended up not even getting those tracks back and just starting over. Both of those songs are recorded in about a day. Those two in particular went really fast because we had already done those versions of them where we had already put the thought into the parts and all. They went particularly fast. I doubt that those first versions of them were really…maybe some fan or something would find it interesting to hear.
I don’t really see the point in putting them out or making them available: (A) They are kind of incomplete, (B) They were never really mixed, (C) We weren’t totally stoked on the sound we got with Ben. We were there for such a short period of time and we didn’t mix the songs, so we weren’t too wrapped up in that. The fact of the matter is that those mixes, as they stand, we weren’t like “Oh! This is the sound we want, so we have to go back here.” The way the songs sounded was the least satisfying part of the experience. What we were more enthralled by was the challenges he brought to the table and the ways in which he was able to push everybody. We’ve been working together for so long, we were very much settled into these roles as friends, as musicians, just psychologically and everything, like every good producer, he had a way of shaking that up, and in a way that didn’t make anyone feel threatened or volatile or vulnerable or anything like that. We were able to recognize that and see the difference in our collaborative efforts with one another while working with him, and that was the part that felt the best.
The songs themselves, they didn’t sound like us at all, we would have never put those on a record. Like I said, it was all happening so fast. We did so much in such a short period of time there was a lot of leniency given to the sound knowing that, “Well, if we were actually going to make a record with you we’d sort out all these issues with the sound of it. We’d develop a language together.” Really, it was with him capturing the sound, more or less going on the Ben Allen autopilot, ways in which he’s accustomed to getting sound, which weren’t horrible, but not what we were looking for. I think we always thought we would work that out hypothetically down the road if we decided to work with him. It is kind of funny though, because his sound is more compressed and a radio friendly type of thing, and it is funny to hear us sound like that. Those two versions are real, traditional sounding hi-fi things. We sort of stray away from that, straddle that line as much as possible, and these two songs in particular way, way on the other side of that. It’s kind of funny to hear, but I don’t think we’ll be doing anything with those.
Earlier you said that as soon as you’re done with an album your sort of already thinking about how that goes into the next one. At this point, are you writing some songs for the next project?
Yeah, yeah for sure. I think that the whole kind of notion of the next record has really been escalated into the forefront of people’s minds because we’re going to move our studio. That kind of gets the fire under everybody for thinking about the next record pretty early, because we want to get out of our studio and get somewhere remote, somewhere basically in the country. We’ve been sort of in industrial ghetto zone for so long, and it’s an awesome place, but just looking for a different feel and somewhere where you can just stay there over
night, have a fire at night and cook food, and enjoy a kind of peaceful lifestyle for a while, while making a record. There are so many places around Philly—you can drive twenty minutes or something and be in the middle of nowhere real easy. There are a lot of spots, so we’re trying to do that. Since that’s going on there’s been a lot of talk about the next album. I’ve been writing a lot and Toby has too. There’s also a bunch more songs just from the past that are still very much contenders. I think there’s a strong desire to maybe go into the record with less emphasis on the songs that are already written and allow us as a band to come up with songs together rather than just Toby and I showing up with songs.
That’s just all born out of the fact that the band is definitely at an all time high in its cohesiveness as a group of musicians and also in our ability to collaborate together and the joy that we all get from that. It seems like a good and very logical thing to see what this band, as one entity, would come up, groove wise and musically. Just kind of start out by saying “What does this band want to sound like?” As opposed to just saying, “Here’s all the songs we’re going to do.” I’m sure that the next record will be a healthy mix, as always, of brand new songs and older songs and hopefully a reflection of a new direction in that process as well. There are two songs on Be the Void that were written by the band together in the studio, and there is one song that was written in the demo process as a complete improvisation. Those two methods are new as far as turning up on a record. Those two methods are really exciting now days for us, so I think there will be more of that kind of thing too.
