The ZVEX Podcast
Join Zachary Vex of ZVEX Effects as he discusses a number of interesting topics with friends, musicians, colleagues, and creatives.
The ZVEX Podcast
Episode two: Dan Wilson
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Dan Wilson is an American musician, singer, songwriter, visual artist and record producer who has been called the songwriter's songwriter. His songwriting résumé includes "Closing Time" which he wrote for his band, Semisonic; "Not Ready To Make Nice" co-written with The Chicks; and "Someone Like You" co-written with Adele. Wilson's work earned him a Grammy nomination for "Closing Time" and garnered him Grammy wins for Song of the Year ("Not Ready to Make Nice" in 2007) and Album of the Year as a producer for Adele's 21 in 2012.
Wilson has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, including Pink, Celine Dion, Leon Bridges, Mitski, Claud, Halsey, Weezer, Panic! at the Disco, My Morning Jacket, Dierks Bentley, John Legend, Joy Oladokun, Laufey, and many others.
https://danwilsonmusic.com/
https://www.slamhammercases.com/
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Rock on!
Hi, uh this is Zach Revex of Z Vex FX, and this is the Z Vex Podcast. Alright, alright, alright.
SPEAKER_00Hey Zach, who are we talking to today?
SPEAKER_01We're talking to Dan Wilson, an old friend of mine. He's uh very, very accomplished and he's really made good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he wrote Semisonic's Smash Hit Closing Time. And he's worked with Adele, Taylor Swift, The Chicks, Chris Stapleton, Pink, John Legend, Weezer, and many others.
SPEAKER_01It's a delightful list.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, check out his bio.
SPEAKER_01And let's get right into it. We are here interviewing Dan Wilson. Hi. How you doing, Zach? Doing all right. It's good to see ya. You're part of the Star Maker Machinery now.
SPEAKER_03Wow.
SPEAKER_01Does this at long last make you the toolmaster of Brainerd?
SPEAKER_03I mean I don't know if the toolmaster of Brainerd was a I think his story was almost that he had to drop out of the star making machine, even though he was obviously a star in the making. There was just no work to be found in the twin towns, and so he had to go back to Brainerd.
SPEAKER_01I thought, you know, if instead of working at the creamery, if he'd worked at a bread place, then he could have been making bread, you know, so he'd be back there working on the star making machinery making bread. It would have been better.
SPEAKER_03But you know, these things you can't you can't decide what my brother Matt decides. You can't change what Matt decides the job of the person in the song is. That's one of his decisions, you know.
SPEAKER_01He wrote that song, huh? Okay. Was that the favorite song of Trip Shakespeare? Was that the one that everybody knew the most?
SPEAKER_03I think Toolmaster of Brainerd was Yes. Uh that was Trip Shakespeare's closing time. You'd call it out. It was like Toolmaster of Brainerd.
SPEAKER_01It was like it was kind of hard to miss.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. It was like we accidentally uh stumbled upon a hook, you know.
SPEAKER_01So uh do you basically get called in to save the day when an artist gets stuck?
SPEAKER_03Sometimes I am called in at that moment. It's not my favorite thing to do because stuckness is um heavy. Yeah. On the other hand, I like being helpful. And sometimes I've been in sessions where uh it becomes apparent to me that my job is not to like write a banger with somebody. My job is actually just to be helpful and like, you know, sometimes just talking to someone who's been through the same crap can help somebody get unstuck. Maybe that's a thing that I've done. Also, I kind of feel like um I was just in a session last week where the artist brought in a song that was very much very cool, I thought, and unfinished. And all efforts to make it feel more finished had, I guess, failed. And we just were we worked on it for like an hour and it started to seem really promising, and it started to sound cool. And um, the other producer on the session, I can't remember exactly how he phrased it. But he said something like to the artists, he said something like, Didn't I tell you Dan is the master of unstucking? So you are that guy. At that moment, I was like, Oh shit, I'm I'm here to get people unstuck. Honestly, I I mean there's worse roles to play. And personally, I don't really feel um stuck very often in my musical life. So sometimes I feel stuck in life a little bit, but I I don't uh music doesn't make me feel stuck. So maybe that's why I'm good at helping people out of that predicament.
SPEAKER_01In a completely different direction. Uh Barack Obama graduated from Harvard. Magna cum lauda laude, right? Wow. Yeah. That means something like with great honor.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But you graduated with a higher GPA than Barack Obama. And Summa come Lauda. Summa come Lauda. Yeah. That's a notable achievement. Your school days must have influenced the rest of your life.
SPEAKER_03Are you trying to tell me that I'm smarter than Barack Obama? Because I don't think so.
SPEAKER_01I'm just saying that you're more studious.
SPEAKER_03You know what else? He didn't take any design, architecture, or art classes, I bet. And I think acing those is probably easier than acing like heavy economic and political science stuff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because he was a constitutional scholar, wasn't he? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03What he's doing is a different degree of difficulty from like writing songs or making visual art. But yeah, he and I do have that in common. We are both highly lauded at Harvard.
SPEAKER_01What direct effects do you feel that your school days have had on your career, those school days, those those college days? My college days. Um I mean, they had to be worth something. What I'm trying to do is give you the chance to tell kids it's okay to go to college. Oh. Because there's a lot of kids that are thinking now, maybe not maybe it's not okay to go to college.
SPEAKER_03I have nothing, despite my reputation for helpfulness, I don't have anything helpful to say about this. Going to Harvard has had a medium to small negative effect on my music career, but a very, very positive effect on my my life as a creative person and a curious person. I don't think that getting a degree from Harvard helped my music career. But the things I studied were I chose really mostly because they were interesting to me. Like I studied some history of science and some philosophy, and I studied um the arts, and I took a bunch of classes about literature and great books. I studied some poetry. Uh, for me, it was really good to be exposed to the work of other artists. And, you know, whatever your feelings are about the canon and whether it's been chosen appropriately. A lot of the people that are in one canon or another are there because they're brilliant and they do amazing things and they've run circles around their competitors, you know, in the in the arts. So I think that helped me. Since I didn't I didn't study anything practical or useful at Harvard. Okay. Unless I was going to be an architect, which I thought maybe I would be, but I probably was never going to be an architect. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01There must have been something useful in there.
unknownTrevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_03One of the most useful things was when I was a freshman, I met some guys who lived near the Boston Common, and they had a band, and I auditioned for their band. One was a Berkeley School of Music student, and the other was uh um worked in an ad agency. And I joined their band. Because of them, non-Harvard people, I ended up playing gigs up and down the Atlantic coast of Massachusetts and going to Connecticut to play and going to Rhode Island to play and going to New York for recording session possibilities. Yeah. I ended up in a setting with a bunch of non-Harvard people, and we traveled around the East Coast. So it's a great place to get experience on the East Coast. Yeah. You know, I ended up knowing a lot of the kind of piratical characters in the music business in Boston. Some, you know, dicey people, but very interesting and usually nice to meet. Is the fundamental word in piratical pirate? Yeah, the pirates of the music business on the East Coast. Yeah. Yeah, it's a whole bunch of pirates. Maybe even a few scoundrels. There were scoundrels. Oh, oh, tons of scoundrels.
SPEAKER_01And they parked the car at the bar. Yeah. They parked.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I loved the accent. They don't like it when you do the accent for them. That's annoying. And I I found out why, because when um when Fargo came out, I think Trip Shakespeare was on tour when Fargo came out, and everybody was trying out their Minnesota accents on us everywhere we went. From that movie. Oh my god. All these people were really delightedly like showing how they had learned the Minnesota accent from Fargo. So I don't know what you learned from Fargo, but I don't think it's the Minnesota accent. No, it's definitely a kind of uh it's it's an ultra cynical view of human nature at best. Yeah, people still reference the wood chipper.
SPEAKER_01Well, who or what has had the biggest influence on your craft?
SPEAKER_03Oh wow. Okay. Well, my brother Matt, probably, because he and I started trying to be in bands when we were, you know, young teens. He was always a few steps ahead of me in the how to put it together department, like musically. Like what are the elements you need to make a song? He was always really good at that. I think I learned a lot from Matt. Cool. This is not a person, but being on the road for 15 years touring with bands was an amazing way to learn. Um, and playing in front of audiences all that time in various places, and learning about the different kind of moods or vibes of the people in different cities, all that, that was like that was super instructive. And I feel really lucky that Trip Shakespeare and then Semisonic had that opportunity to just be on the road so much because I think it really did form who I am as an artist a lot. The third kind of phase of learning was once Semisonic had stopped touring for various reasons. I got introduced to uh Rick Rubin, and he became a mentor of mine for like eight years. Cool. There's only a few people from whom I have learned as much as from Rick.
SPEAKER_01That's pretty amazing. Yeah. What kind of record collection did you have access to when you were a kid? Were you able to play your parents' records?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, they had like ten LPs. They had uh I can probably name most of them. Let's see. They had um Encores by Julius Catchin, who's a pianist. It was a sort of greatest hits of classical music on the piano. They had Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road by the Beatles. Excellent. They had Tapestry by Carol King. Wow. They had a Johnny Mathis record, can't remember which one. They had a horn record by a Canadian, I think they're called the Canadian Brass or something like that. Like a instrumental horn album. Two Beethoven symphonies on disc. And that's kind of that's close to it, I think. Pretty good memory. Well, it's not that much to remember. If they had owned a hundred records, I'd never remember them all. But because it was only it was less than a dozen, I can remember them. Oh, Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel and Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay. I was gonna ask if uh you rated your brother's record collection or vice versa, because I have brothers, and so I'd, you know, the sibling brings something home, and you're like, what's this?
SPEAKER_03There was not a lot of rating, partly because all of the records that I had that weren't my parents were down in our in the basement of our St. Louis Park house in my bedroom. And my bedroom was kind of like a common space, because it was just a basement with a concrete floor. It was a common space for kid activities. And so Matt and I would kind of add records to our collection. And I don't think he really rated mine. Like he I had a lot of things that he never really would say were influential. Like I had Peter Tosh and by the time I was in high school, I had like I had Peter Tosh and Bob Marley and the Whalers and Grover Washington Jr., some jazz records, like Weather Report records. And Matt, I think, liked those, but I don't think he he loved those. Did you have any Mahavishnu Orchestra? I had Birds of Fire by Mahavishnu Orchestra, but I l I lost it in some move.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Oh. I liked that band. Yeah. Did you ever listen to Dixie Dregs?
SPEAKER_03No. Was that kind of a Southern Rock Prague band?
SPEAKER_01Steve Morse. Yeah. I never did listen. Is it good? Well, it was my first concert. It's the only reason I remember them. Did your school library have a record collection?
SPEAKER_03No. But I lived two blocks from the 17 bus route that went from St. Louis Park to uptown to downtown. In junior high, I started taking the 17 from school to uptown or all the way to downtown. And the uptown destination was the LP collection at the Walker Public Library.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_03At Hennepin and Lagoon. You took records out from there.
SPEAKER_01No, I just listened to them in the Well, they weren't able to be checked out.
SPEAKER_03They had a listening space. I see. It never occurred to me to take them home. I just I would sit for an hour and listen to records in the library listening room.
SPEAKER_01I checked out 16mm Star Trek episodes from there and projected them during parties.
SPEAKER_03Wow, you're like a DJ already at the time. That's a very DJ move. Not in high school when I was older. The second destination, if I went past the Walker Library, I'd go all the way downtown because they had a really nice seven-foot grand piano in uh a room that you could sign up for at the Minneapolis Public Library. I would go there and play the piano. You would have a half hour. So I'd go there, I'd sign up, I'd wait for an hour, and then you could play for a half hour. I wonder if they still have that. There is one, but they've had all kinds of problems with it. They built that new library downtown Minneapolis. I know this because I'm a piano nerd of longstanding. They made a piano practice room there for the first several years. The soundproofing of that practice room, which is right there on the like the third floor with a glass window, and you could watch them from the stacks, you know, and from the carols and everything else. But the soundproofing had a problem, and everyone in the whole building could hear the piano really loud. So they didn't let people use the piano for several years, and I think they might have fixed it now.
SPEAKER_01Oh no, it was pretty bad planning on their part.
SPEAKER_03I don't know. Making a building is complicated.
SPEAKER_01I guess so. Yeah, well, you would know because you are an architect uh student. I was almost an architect. What are you working on this very minute?
SPEAKER_03This very minute I have um, let's see. Sometime today, I'm gonna take a look at the draft I've written for a second deck of music aphorisms cards. Like a deck of cards with music comments or advice or prompts. I did one of these um five years ago, and now I've written another one. What's that famous thing that Eno did? Eno did a thing called the Oblique Strategies, which is amazing. I love it. Helpful in the studio. Yeah. Mine aren't like his. Mine are different than his, happily. I admire his a lot.
SPEAKER_01It's a set of cards that stirs your imagination when you're stuck in the studio.
SPEAKER_03It's like you okay, so you have the deck of cards, and you like, however, you decide you're going to use it, like everybody's everyone is feeling stuck in the studio and no one knows what to do. So they're like, okay, let's ask Eno what to do. And so you lift up the first card of the Eno deck, and it says It says repetition is a form of change. Repetition is a form of change. Leave the building. Make the unimportant things important. Sure. Left channel, center channel, right channel. And it's just one one after another, these kind of aphoristic choice, you know, nuggets of art-making wisdom that he that Eno made with a painter friend of his when they figured out that a lot of their principles of working were the same.
SPEAKER_00What would Eno do?
SPEAKER_03It's the what would Eno do Eno do thing. It's also like a way to like it's called oblique strategies. Oblique strategies, yeah. It's the best. I got it. When I was a teenager, I got a copy of the Oblique Strategies in the only way you could, because they had been reprinted in a music zine, which is was all Xerox copies.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03All the strategies, all hundred of them or whatever, were reprinted in this music zine, and so you could cut them out with the scissors and make your own. I did the same thing. So amazing to have access to that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Chuck Zawicki told me about them.
SPEAKER_03Ah, perfect.
SPEAKER_01He'd be the guy. You know, I was gonna ask you how big your record collection is now, but it doesn't really matter, does it? Because we all have access to every single song in the entire universe, so it's as big as the universe, right?
SPEAKER_03Uh maybe, but I have a non-fancy but nice-ish sounding stereo. And I have about a hundred something albums that I've managed to, you know, some some of my albums that I've owned in my life got ruined in a flood. And some of them I foolishly sold because I thought I should downsize moving from Boston to San Francisco, and some of them blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the ones that I c have kept all along are pretty good. And I've got a whole bunch of Keith Jarrett records, and I got many of the Led Zeppelin albums, and I got Joshua Redman Saxphone, and I got some Brad Mildow. And yeah, and anyway, and I make it a little bit of a practice to like put on a side of an LP and just like hang out and listen to it and not do other things, which is kind of nice. It's not what they want us to do. They want us to be five minutes into an LP or no, two minutes into an LP, and then an ad pops up and we go off and do something by shit.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's something to be said about how you'll actually just put a side on and just sit and listen to it and take it in versus having it out in the background while you're doing six other things.
SPEAKER_03And I think that there's a place for that, but I I I made this discovery. Well, everybody did. Like four years ago, I realized that the internet had destroyed my ability to read fiction. I was like, wow, how did they do this? Because obviously, like fiction books were like a competitor to the internet. So the internet needed to destroy that. And so they did destroy my ability to read fiction. And then somebody told me you get better sleep if you read a book for five minutes at night. So I just started like, you know, reading a book for five minutes at night. Now I read again. It's really, really great. And I think it's a little bit like listening to one side of an LP. It's like, I'm gonna put 18 minutes into this and it's gonna be really nice and it's gonna enrich my life, you know.
SPEAKER_01I find I have more time to listen to audiobooks than read. Because we're on the move, too. I'll listen to 15 minutes of it before I fall asleep. Whose voice do you like? Do you do you like hearing the author or a a hired uh uh actor? I like I actually like Stephen King reading his own stuff. I uh his he's a little bit awkward and it's kind of cool. There's some really awful stuff I listen to that's uh just uh pulp um Like true crime detective not not true crime, just crazy detective stuff. Stuart Woods, and uh who's sadly passed away. And um his uh his narrator reads all of his books. It's the same guy, and he finally retired. He finally got too old. But uh his voice was really distinctive. Another person I kind of enjoy.
SPEAKER_03Do you ever listen to books by Elmore Leonard?
SPEAKER_01I'll write that down. Yeah. Can you write that down for me, Tommy? Elmore Leonardo. Elmore Leonard, yeah.
SPEAKER_03I think he wrote a book called Get Shorty that got turned into a big movie. Oh, sure. That's very pulpy. And actually, the movie Get Shorty is is more of a sort of uh John Travolta comedy than the criminal essence of the Elmore Leonard books.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay. It's the fun version. Yeah, we'll put him in the show notes. Okay, this is a little bit long. Um The Year I was born, Carol King wrote Will You Love Me Tomorrow, which was her first number one hit, at age 18. This was followed by Take Good Care of My Baby, The Locomotion, Go Away, Little Girl, Up on the Roof, Chains, One Fine Day, I Move to Something Good. You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman, which was written when she was twenty five. And we heard all these songs before we were seven years old.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01You and I are about the same age. Yeah. You experienced uh the same thing as me. What on earth was it like to work with Carol King?
SPEAKER_03Uh I think in one day writing with Carol King, sh she is still, you know, in that list we were talking about earlier. Like, who did you learn the most from, or what what has taught you the most? Literally writing for one day with Carol was you know I learned more from that than I learned from other people that that I might have worked with for years, and from whom I learned a lot, like I like and who I appreciate a lot. But somehow working with her was like um first of all, I was super nervous, and she knew it, and she it wasn't like she was putting on a show, but she showed me how to calm a person down in the studio by calming me down. But there was something sort of so obvious and uns it was wasn't surreptitious at all. She was just it was out in the open and that she was saying things that that would just uh that I recognized were things that were calming me down and getting me to be less self-conscious. And she was very encouraging, but like also very like she would cut to the chase amazingly. And also she was super flexible. Like, for example, I remember showing her a chorus that I really liked, and I wanted to turn it into a song, and she thought of a verse like right away, like she and she played it. And um I said, Oh, I don't know, I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure about that melody. I don't know if I would sing that melody. And she goes, Okay, how about this? And she played an entirely different thing. And the entirely different thing was amazing, and it also had kind of a backwards closing time ostinato in the right hand of the piano. And she said to me, with kind of a wicked look in her eye, but I did not get it. She goes, I hear the kids like this kind of thing while she was playing this sort of upside-down version of closing time. Yeah. She was teasing you about your own music. Teasing me about my own music, but I was so like, it's Carol King. You know, I took everything she took said so seriously that I I got that there was a funny tweak. I got I realized it was a funny tweak like days later. And you know, a couple things she said I did get right away, like Well, for that was first of all a huge lesson. Like, okay, Living Legend says, How about this? And you say, I'm not sure. Well, what most people would do is the tedious thing of explaining to you why you should like their idea. So tedious and useless. Like someone's gonna like it or not, but you can't tell them why they ought to like it and make them like it more. You only are gonna torture them by making them listen to you talk about how they should like this idea. So she didn't do that, she didn't advocate for the idea. She was just like, how about this? And she played another entirely different thing. And like that was like, what the fuck? That's how people do this? Is that how it's done? It was great. And there were a bunch of things like that. Like at one point, I um I don't know if you can hear this from from where you are. Uh can you still hear me talking?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Sure.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so I did this on a song that I was writing with her. Can you hear that?
SPEAKER_01Yep, sure.
SPEAKER_03So I played that uh four over the five chord. And uh Kind of to tweak her.
SPEAKER_01It's one of her chords, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Because she does that chord, you know. So I I did it kind of to tease her back, but then also I liked it. And um she kind of laughed, and I said, It does, it sounds, let's use it because it sounds great. And she goes, Yeah. I said, I love that four over the five, and and I love it when you use it on your songs. I was able to say that, you know. And she said, That's actually not called four over five. It's called C over K.
SPEAKER_01I'm I'm missing something.
SPEAKER_03It's Carol over King, C over K. She just she was joking that it had an that's not what you call it. You call that C over K. It's not four over five. So it's almost like the I had been trained in my life by Minnesotans to be modest to a fault. Like I asked her about her song I Wasn't Born to Follow, which was a birds song that she wrote. And she thought about it for a minute. She kind of like scratched her head and thought about it. She said, I think I remember that. I think I could remember that. And I said, Oh yeah. And she goes, You want me to play it for you? So she I was like, Yeah. And she so she sang the whole song at the piano that I loved for a long time before that. And uh it was just so generous. And like we weren't working on a song. Now she's just singing me one of her older songs. Like it's like we're not, yeah, we're not chopping wood the whole time, you know, we're not trying, trying, trying. She's just showing me that, you know, she's like, You like that song? I'll sing it for you.
SPEAKER_01You stopped chopping wood and had a peanut butter sandwich.
SPEAKER_03We're just chilling, yeah. Like I'm having a very delicious uh treat. And then we we were talking about other songs. I told her that I loved um uh I'm into something good, and a bunch of her um covers that people are less familiar with, and uh I said, Oh, and and like what was it like to to have one of your songs, chains, covered by the Beatles? You know, artists that all of us have been so deeply influenced by. And Carol said, actually, to set the record straight, uh the Beatles thought of me as one of their influences.
SPEAKER_01And it's pretty special.
SPEAKER_03I loved that because it went against the kind of Midwestern false humility. Yeah, uh it was it was so ballsy, but completely correct. Like it she wasn't overstating it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, she was she was making hits at the same time as them, and those hits were uh just as spectacular.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, even that, like even to have somebody I don't know, it's really hard when uh maybe for most people it's hard. It was hard for me when people started liking my music, and they'd say, you know, oh Dan Wilson, I'm sorry to interrupt you while you're having coffee. I love your song, you know, whatever, uh One True Love or Free Life or whatever, so much. And I just love the recording. And I would say, like, oh man, I've always been dissatisfied with the drum sound of that, of that recording. Or yeah, I I you know, in the end, I feel like it's I just I I should have made it a little bit shorter. Like I would say that to people who were trying to praise me, and then I realized over time, like I was making it weird by doing that. Like I was just being a Norwegian American, but by saying, You're wrong, that song you like of mine actually has a lot of problems. I I was literally was just making it weird, you know. So I have tried to learn to stop doing that. And I think that Carol was an influence on me in that way because she was like, Oh yeah, well, actually, the Beatles think of me as one of their influences. That was like she she was not falsely humble. She was like telling it like it is, you know.
SPEAKER_01Oh, it was sweet of her to expose you to that side of her.
SPEAKER_00Compliments are hard for Midwesterners for sure.
SPEAKER_03I totally agree. So, anyway, that's what it was like to work with her. She she was very funny, and she was very spicy. So it was good.
SPEAKER_01Spicy. Her language was spicy? She was salty?
SPEAKER_03She was she was a little bit salty, but she was also just like a tough New York chick. You know, she was like she was the earth mother of Los Angeles, but also a sharp elbow is of New York City, you know.
SPEAKER_01Have you heard uh the Aretha Franklin uh version of You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman that she sang for the Obamas? Yes. That was absolutely spectacular. It's something everybody should see.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, she's a giant.
SPEAKER_01That was just insane. Is that who Carol King originally wrote it for?
SPEAKER_03Was it?
SPEAKER_01It's hard to believe that song was, you know, mid-sixties, sixty-seven.
SPEAKER_03The Aretha version might have been the first one. Because I'm pretty sure it came before Tapestry.
SPEAKER_01Aretha was quite young when she got started, wasn't she?
SPEAKER_03Well, yeah, she's like a sort of a prodigy of gospel piano at first, I think.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, she played the piano for that version for the Obamas, too. Mm-hmm. God, it was just so unbelievable to see her. Just belt it. And just yeah.
SPEAKER_03There's there's a thing about certain artists that just feels like they're just like they're channeling God, you know, or they're they're they're doing a thing that's different than most people do when they, you know, sing a song. It's just something else is happening. And Aretha's totally like that.
SPEAKER_01So when you're working with somebody, I can't remember if you told me this or if I heard it in an interview or read it somewhere. I seem to remember you saying that, especially when you worked with the de with Dixie chicks, or Dixie. Well with chicks, I'm sorry. With the chicks, yeah. You're not supposed to say the chicks. Don't don't leave the bad thing in it. Um that you asked how they were feeling and what they were thinking about, uh what they've been going through lately, um as a sort of an opener to finding out how you should progress. And um how much uh of your work when you weigh it is is doing that kind of stuff uh versus just the nuts and bolts of having to put it into some kind of a framework or make it sort of fit into your style, uh, way you approach stuff.
SPEAKER_03You could almost say that it's those two things in the in kind of conversation with each other because uh I mean what's going on with you these days is a nice way to start any conversation. So it's like kind of natural that the first part of a session is is simply a conversation. Either it's with someone you haven't seen for a while and you love, or it's with a brand new person and you want to get to know them. So I think starting with like what's up with you, or like what's the what's the you know, what what's the headline these days is is um just interpersonally much better than yo, I have a drumbeat I'd like you to sing to. Boom, boom. Like, you know, the pe there are people who just like launch right into like okay, jump on the mic, just see what let's see what this, let's see what you can do. Like, I I just don't find that as interesting as like finding out about the person and hearing what they're up to. And then sometimes what they say has a song title in it or something like that, which it can also be kind of interesting to try to say, hey, rem remember what you said two hours ago?
SPEAKER_01That seems like specifically talking about uh not ready to make nice?
SPEAKER_03Not that one, but like it's um like easy silence with the chicks, for example. I'm sure that came out of a conversation. Yeah, so uh but then how to give it structure and how to give it you know enough structure, but not too much. I always have to be cautious because I'm I'm an Apollonian, I look for s symmetry and clean architectural structure, you know. I look for that in in in in art, and I always have to remember that there's that can be too much of a good thing, and like not being structured is a thing that I have to allow to happen without blocking it. That's my you know, that's one thing I work on for myself. But still, you could have a conversation that has a lot of good pithy lines, and then if you have a sense of like how it could be structured together, you then you get the best of both worlds. You have just put together a a verse of bars, you know.
SPEAKER_01In the fall of 1990, I was 30 years old and I found myself flying on the double Ferris wheel at the state fair, listening to Free Falling being blasted at absolute top volume by the Carney who was operating this rickety contraption.
SPEAKER_03So mean.
SPEAKER_01And it totally gave me chills. It was crazy.
SPEAKER_03So mean. I love that.
SPEAKER_01I love that free bomb. I was coming over the top of the double Ferris wheel, you know, where you're just launched, you know, or you're just in mid-air. But you're on your way down. Yeah, you're on your way down, and it's and it's just it's so distorted. He had that the speakers pointed straight up in the air, you know, those boxes that the small PA. And there, you know, a 50-watt PA being run at 120 watts, you know, just going incredible. The song was only a year old, and it was just sh, you know, it was just stunning. I was falling, I was go, I went to pieces. I wrote it a second time. He played the song again.
SPEAKER_03Oh, that's so cool. I find that I I find that song to be endlessly beautiful and mysterious. There's all kinds of things in it. It goes from one kind of glorious thing to another, you know.
SPEAKER_01Without ever changing the chords.
SPEAKER_03Never changes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's the same chords all the way through.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's very much like a studied thing. Like a hypnotic experience listening to it. But it but it has so much variety. And I think it that mes mesmerizing quality of the music of Free Falling allows you to register the words more easily. So you're because you're not taking your there's no bandwidth because you already know the chord progression and you know the the general vibe of the guitars, and it's just gonna be that way the whole time. And so you can really hear when the lyrics you know, there's a lot of dark turns in those lyrics. It's like a very romantic song on the surface, and it's very nihilistic and sad. Yeah, it is. She's a bad boy.
SPEAKER_00The Land About Vampires really stands out to you because it's such a pretty it's such a pretty song.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. And then but it's if you live in LA, you've seen that late at night. Yeah. Uh in the western suburbs that he's talking about. You've seen like there's nobody, nobody, nobody on the street, and then there's like four guys standing there, and you're like, what the fuck is going on? Like, you know. And it's dark, no street lights, you're way out in the suburbs, you know.
SPEAKER_01Well, about that song and the way that it touches you, to some degree, aren't most spectacular hit songs driven by a chorus that soars to unexpected highs? Mmm.
SPEAKER_03Free fall, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Some many, I would say. I feel like sometimes the key to making a song work is to find the highest note that the singer can sing and put it either into the chorus or the bridge. I mean, look at Minnie Ripperton and Loving You, you know. Okay. I mean, that's if that's an extreme note. That's an extreme.
SPEAKER_03Also, you could trust her to do this. Like you could give her any song you wrote, she'd figure out how to put her highest note in there. So that might be after the fact, you know. That might be something that happens long after the song is is written, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, she just put it, shift everything up in octave or two.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and just really squeal it out. Yeah. I yeah, I mean, I don't know. Sometimes I think about like which songs which songs go up and which songs go down in the chorus. And which songs like modulate up and which songs modulate down. Like Feed the Birds, one of my favorite songs ever, from Mary Poppins. The chorus is all lower. Feed the birds. It's all like it goes like way down to the bottom of Julie Andrew's range, and it's very, very beautiful and very moving. And I think about some things like um Penny Lane by the Beatles and how Which soars. Which soars melodically, but the but for the chorus, the whole song goes down a whole step, it moduli is down. So it's got this like it's like this diving down and the voices going up at the same time. There's something very powerful about that.
SPEAKER_01Bowie was master of that sort of thing too. Bowie is endlessly admirable. Back to Patty for a second. He's extremely plain spoken. Is this characteristic one of the most important elements of successful lyric writing?
SPEAKER_03You mean his lyrics are plain spoken.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Well, all the vampires down in Rosita, that's pretty metaphorical. I'm free. This word play like crazy in that song. Like, I'm free. Yay! Free falling. Ah, like it's like it's like what? You know, it's it was so hopeful for one bar, you know? And there's others like um it's plain spoken, but to say she's a good girl, crazy about Elvis loves horses in America too. Is that what it is? Something like that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, in America too. Like you couldn't normally it wouldn't happen.
SPEAKER_03I just love that. So that's plain spoken in a way, but it's like the most concise poetry. It's like Robert Frost level poetry. And Robert Frost is like really concise and plain spoken to a fault, I think.
SPEAKER_01Do you ever find yourself writing two different bridges and keeping them both?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I've done that. Yeah. But you know, you can't do it out of greed. You can't be like, I have these two ideas and I need everyone to hear my two ideas. You gotta be, you can't be greedy in that way. You have to be like, well, do I really need these two bridges? I have a song called All Kinds that has two bridges, very different from one another. They're both really bridged, bridgy bridges, but they're in totally different styles. You know, when I was writing the song, I was like, I did the first bridge and I was like, yeah. And then when I wrote the second bridge, I was really excited because I'd never done that before. So there was like, I'm breaking the law, you know. But also it worked dramatically because it was such a different bridge, it was like such a different bridge.
SPEAKER_01Overall, do you experiment with song structure like the Beatles? I try to. Do you feel like you ever do? I tried to um so many of their songs meandered. You know, they start off one way and just end up like somewhere completely different. Like, how did we all how do we end up here? And it's across the water, you know.
SPEAKER_03Oh my god, yeah. Yeah, especially the the McCartney collage songs that are one thing after another. Yeah. Collage. Yeah, that would be a good word for it. I really try to use that, but it's hard to do. I try to write a song that's one good thing after another. I think McCartney did it because he had these great songs that were all 30 seconds long, and then he just put them all together.
SPEAKER_01You just strung them together. Yeah. Didn't matter. Didn't matter if they had anything in common. What they had in common was his voice and his ability to find the keys that would bring them all together, make them all sound sweet and beautiful.
SPEAKER_03And to weave it, yeah, to make it seem inevitable.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I agree. It's like a patchwork quilt, yeah. Do you ever encounter songs where you have to admit the song is just not in my wheelhouse? I have to pass.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah, totally. Adele brought me the first three or four lines of Someone Like You and the whole scenario and a a verse and a chorus of rumor has it. And I said, I really love this, but I'm not good at writing a funny song, and that song has to be witty and funny, and and so I can't I I love it, but I I'm not gonna make it better. So let's work on the sad song instead.
SPEAKER_01Because I'm a a very sad man, deep, deeply, deeply sad.
SPEAKER_03Well, all the songs I've liked ever since I was little were really sad. So for some reason, I'm most moved by really sad music.
SPEAKER_01Which is why you love free falling so much. Yeah, free falling and Brahms. So there's been artists that you simply could not help at all. Has that happened multiple times?
SPEAKER_03I recently had a session with somebody very prominent, and they brought me a song, and I listened. I believe that what I did, I might be wrong, but I think what I did was mostly tell them the song is done. There's just too many verses. That's all it is. You get just have to choose the verses that sound the greatest to you. And then we tried for a while, like you know, for most of an afternoon, to come up with different things for the song and see what we could do. But eventually at the end, I was just like, okay, this has been a great day. Thank you so much. And then they left. And then later, uh this the song came out and it's great. And it literally is exactly what came in at the beginning of the day, but with less verses. So if I had any contribution whatsoever, which I may not have, it was the idea that removing some of the verses might actually complete the song.
SPEAKER_01Pruning. And um you just came in and pruned. But you know, that's what a hairdresser does, right? They just keep them away.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So well, how come the hairdresser doesn't get royalties on your daily on your daily wage? Well, they do if they charge enough. I think if they add, you know, if they put a weave in there, maybe they can charge you more. Oh, yeah. They're adding.
SPEAKER_01Who is the greatest living songwriter today, right now?
SPEAKER_03Uh Paul Simon? Oh, McCartney? No, Joni Mitchell.
SPEAKER_01Couldn't make up your mind. Couldn't make up my mind. Uh, I can't think of who would be better than those three. You were the first person to use one of my products on a on a hit record. Actually, two Fuzz Factories in stereo, right?
SPEAKER_03Two Fuzz Factories in Stereo, yes.
SPEAKER_01I've tried to find the exact spot where you use them in closing time. And is it the da-da-da-da-da-da? Okay.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Our engineer, producer Nick Lawnay, was baffled by a lot of my sonic choices. And he didn't know how initially to like, for example, this is a little more intense, but he hated this phase 90 phaser pedal I had so much. Strange. And because it made things sound very to him like thin. And he wanted everything to be fat. And he wanted everything to be like he could make a flute sound like it had low end. He just was a really brilliant engineer who made things feel like substantial. And uh in our initial efforts to get the fuzz factory tone on closing time, we were we were in the kind of thinner part of the tonal palette of that pedal. And also he just hadn't really recorded a lot of things that were quite that clipped in that way. And but then he figured it out. I think I was going through a Soldano amp and maybe a plexi of cookers.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_03I think once he figured it out, it was like it seemed to him like an impossible challenge because it was just wasn't in his sonic repertoire. And in a way, it sounded different than any pedal that I'd ever heard. So it wasn't in mine either. I just knew that I loved the crazy sound of it. And but I think it was Nick's putting it through Nick's filter, just wanting everything to be really fat and whatever. Like it's somehow it it it it it helped us figure out how how to use that pedal, which I already knew that I loved, but it was really very transformative to hear it going back through the speakers and to feel like, oh shit, this is so unique sounding.
SPEAKER_01This is kind of a weird question. Um Are you familiar with the song In the Meantime? Oh, Helmet. No, no. There's a meantime of helmets that I know. In the meantime by Space Hog. Oh, yeah, great band. So they had that one big hit. Is that the song? Was that their hit? In the meantime? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, I like that. I can't do it because it's too high, but ooh.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That song's still catchy. No, no, no, no. It sounds like Bowie. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. But with distortion. If you had a time machine, could you go back and save Space Hog?
SPEAKER_03Well, okay. Does Space Hog want me to save them? I don't know. I don't I they might think that they had a good life, you know, that it's been great.
SPEAKER_01They're coming to the Parkway Theater in September. They're actually going to be playing here.
SPEAKER_03Okay, see, maybe this has worked out really well for them. I don't know if they need me to run back and change things.
SPEAKER_01Like Boy saved Matahoopol, you know. Although Matha Hoople is on the verge of breaking up. He offered them Suffrage City and they said no. And then he gave them all the young dudes.
SPEAKER_03So did they hold out for the better? Did they actually get come out better? Maybe. I like I like all the young dudes better than Suffraget City, so I think they won. Sure.
SPEAKER_01Well, you have to be Bowie to do Suffraget City. You have to be Bowie or Iggy Pop, you know. Right, it could have been Iggy Pop. Somebody like that, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Because Suffraget City was probably the first punk song on the radio, if you think about it. That's interesting. You know?
SPEAKER_03Wow. Wham bam take it, ma'am. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00I grew up on punk rock. I always like to ask a guest that you might not think of as a quote unquote punk rocker. Is there a punk record that you just love?
SPEAKER_03Punk rock record that I love. Does um London Calling by the Clash count? Of course. Does uh stiff little fingers count? Absolutely. Alternative Ulster? Yeah. I love that. Are the Ramones punk rock? Oh yeah. Yeah, I'd love a whole bunch of Ramon songs a lot. I could see that because the Ramones at their core. They're like a good pop band. So hooky and so like it sort of makes weird sense that they worked with Phil Spector eventually.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Because they had such a sense of it's like cave paintings, you know. They they're like Ramones records is beautiful music, but they didn't use paintbrushes. They took a tree branch and chewed it till the end was soft and then used that as a paintbrush. Yeah. I like some punk rock. But what about you? What do you guys think about what's your favorite punk rock record?
SPEAKER_00We discussed with I don't want to get too derailed too much, but I know um Zach and uh Kai talked about the first Sex Pistols record. Oh yeah. It's pretty into. There's a modern band I'm super into called Ceremony. They just put out a new record that uh hasn't left my player. Okay, amazing. Ceremony.
SPEAKER_03I'll write that down. I don't enjoy the sex pistols. Pistols.
SPEAKER_00So I don't know if that knocks me off the punk rock lovers list, but no, it means they probably did something right, because if everybody likes it, how punks could it be?
SPEAKER_03Uh when semi-sonic went to a Grammy Awards, we were interviewed by Johnny Rotten. Oh, God. John Leiden, I guess. Why? And we we walked in and he had his mic in his hand and he was like, Who are you, Lot? And he held up the mic and we're like, we're semi-sonic, and he's like, never heard of ya.
SPEAKER_01That was the extent of your interview. We had no idea.
SPEAKER_03We just walked away. We just walked away with our tail between our legs. We had gotten outgunned by this British asshole in 10 seconds. Oh, are you lost?
SPEAKER_01Anyway, it was nuts. Have you ever been approached to write jingles or work on TV theme songs? No. Never at all. Nothing.
SPEAKER_03No. I don't think anybody who works with me or me would really perk up if someone said, Oh, we want Dan to write a theme song for a TV show. All right. I don't enjoy that kind of um commission. Sometimes somebody has a movie and they're they're like, this movie is about blah, blah, blah, and there's a scene where blah, blah, blah. Do you want to write a song? And I've written some songs with that in mind, like trying to write a song for a scene in a movie. Okay. But I don't think anyone thinks that I'm the one that's going to like I was laughing with my manager, Jim, about closing time long ago, and we were, and I was like, is it he was talking about songs that get licensed for various uses, and and I'm like, is closing time gonna do that? And he's like, well, it's just so melancholy and sad. It sounds kind of like, you know, anything you what what product is gonna want to be associated with, like, well, it's all over, you know, like some some kind of like wistful, like, well, I'm you know, I know who I want to take me home. I don't know. He just felt like it wasn't a natural kind of uh hucksters uh shill. I'm happy at how things worked out.
SPEAKER_01Well, it could be used in a movie for the exit, you know, for the exit music. Oh, it's been you've been using a bunch of movies. Do you think you'll ever work on a James Bond theme song? Well I I would that I would love to do. I'd love to try to muster up that minor key kind of I'm on one. Are you? Yeah, not me, but uh one of my pedals. Which one? Jack White and Alicia Keys, uh Another Way to Die. Oh, yeah, that's a great one. Quantum of Solace. It's the first sound you hear. Yes, yes, yeah. Oh, that's awesome. It's a woolly, isn't it? Yeah, it's a woolly. It's a woolly, I love it. If you could write a song with anybody right now, who would it be?
SPEAKER_03Uh McCartney.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Well, you still can. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Definitely.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's uh that's pretty obvious to me.
SPEAKER_00You gotta make it happen and then we can see. He talked about it with us.
SPEAKER_01We'll do a follow-up interview then. Well, thanks so much. It's just been really wonderful. It's good to see you too.
SPEAKER_03What a fun um conversation, and I like your questions a lot. That was enjoyable.
SPEAKER_01Thanks so much for the same X podcast. Be sure to join in again.