PuckNation.com
Interview with Kevin Devine (Part One)
Rikki Lee (with help and assistance from Steph) 06/26/2004
The Pucknation Interview
I'd be lying if I said I didn't push for this interview to have a valid excuse to sit and talk with Kevin Devine without coming off as a groupie. I'd also be deceitful if I didn't mention that this was one of my dream interviews. I must also admit that the man himself far exceeded my expectations of the whole experience. He is an incredibly nice guy with a lot of interesting stories to tell. There were a few blurbs not in the interview itself that managed to hold the interest of two ADD ridden girls which included stories of Wes Anderson, interning at Sony, a handful of notables on the music scene, and why reviewing music of bands you might play with in the future is not necessarily such a hot idea.
The interview itself will be in two parts due to the fact that my tape ran out before I got to discuss everything I wanted to. That's not even taking into play the untaped hour we all spent shooting the shit. Steph and I drove 6 hours to St. Louis for this chance and were far from disappointed. The second half will be done on the last date of his current tour which happens to be in Chicago. So look for it in about a month or so. In the meantime, catch him out with The Rocket Summer and Plain White T's while you still can.
That's a weird thing. This isn't fishing and it's not bullshit. I'm not an 18 year old kid, I'm 24. Maybe if I was 18 and women were saying these things, I'd be like, "Sweet!" But I've lived before and done the relationship stuff and when I hear strange stuff from people at shows [like girls flirting] I'm like, "Oh...," because I know that if I talked to them for twenty minutes, they wouldn't want to talk to me anymore. I guess the right answer is, the one I really want to believe is that I don't ever want to come off as sanctimonious because it's just stuff I think about and I don't think that it's right or wrong. It's just the stuff I think about. I don't know what to say about that.
...Like having your message fall on deaf ears.
You have to understand though, I'm on tour with three, sort of, really poppy bands like The Rocket Summer and they have a certain type of fan base. The thing that I've been really lucky to do at this point is play shows with like, Bob Mould from Husker Du and I played these shows that were really bizarre where I opened for Cassandra Wilson who is a classically trained jazz singer. So when I did the Brand New shows, there was 2,200 people or more at every show, but I'm friends with those guys and I like some of their songs a lot and it was said straight up, Jesse and I talked the first day, and he's like, "I hope you just know that you're going to go out there and literally a thousand people won't be paying any attention to anything you're saying at all." You can't expect to get up as an opening act on a four band bill in front of either a hundred or two-thousand people and have even half the people going, "Oh man, did you hear that line about abortion?" People aren't going to do that, but if you can get five of them from one side to go, "What?" then you really did something.
The least cynical answer I can give, and it's the hardest answer because I'm a pretty cynical person, is that that girl bought the records. Maybe she'll go home and listen to the records and maybe the songs that are more political will sneak past the songs that about breaking up with some one or having issues with whatever and then who knows? I mean, you write it down because that's what you think, but you're hopeful that if you're going to write it down that someone like that is going to hear it and it will make her read something she didn't want to think about reading before. Maybe it will make her visit Ralph Nader's website to see he's talking about as opposed to Kerry or Bush. That's the idealistic answer. The real, true answer is that I'm sure she'll probably listen to the three songs about "how a girl is cute." Which I hope doesn't happen.
So are you going to vote?
Yeah I'm gonna vote. I'm going to vote for Nader because I live in New York and because Kerry's going to run away with New York by a huge margin. Honestly I don't think that Kerry's platform is nominally different than Bush's. It's by this much {insert the very little gesture here]. Like, Kerry's advocating sending 45,000 more troops to Iraq which makes me think that he would leave the door open for an emergency draft, which makes me think that I don't want to add people to this death pit. Also, beyond that, he doesn't have a formidable plan to really change health care which is insane. There are literally tens or hundreds of thousands of people that don't have any sort of care. The only difference between Kerry and Bush is that Kerry is pro-choice and that's a huge difference, but that's a civic thing and there's so much other stuff in the world right now that's critical. If I lived in a place where that vote mattered down to the one, I'd vote for Kerry, but I don't so I'm going to vote for Nader.
I think it's a question of what you want out of your life. This is the reason I would vote for Kerry with a gun to my head, it's because Bush has so unchangeably ruined our reputation with the rest of the world. Kerry's a new face, he's a new person. I just think we have a waste of democracy about a lot of things because the people rose up and changed and they threw out Bush and got this guy that is 85% Bush? You know it's funny, I'll go on tour and I'll talk to people that are so engaged politically and they're like, "Yeah we know this guy's a douche bag, but we also know he's not Bush".
End of the day, I think it's much more critical to get that guy (out of office) because he's literally, the most dangerous world leader since probably Hitler; and I'm not putting on the same level, but in a certain sense he's wantonly just causing war wherever he wants to. Media manipulation. It's funny because it took three years to snap that hangover and now you finally see middle of the country people, people that are disconnected being like, "Wait a minute! What the fuck is happening? Why are we still there?" Your average Pittsburgh steel mill worker who is working through school doesn't have the extra time to listen to Democracy Now on the internet. So they get what they're given and they process it that way. It's not the people that are the problem, it's the process that's the problem.
There's a song I played tonight that's explicitly about a lot of these things that I played for my mom before I left and she was like, "Don't play that song on your tour. Especially don't play it down in Texas," but why would you write a song like that if you're only going to play it in New York and Los Angeles? People are so scared and it's so scary to say what you really think because then you're branded immediately Anti-American and despicable if you say anything that's outside the Party line of "We're doing the right thing." Thankfully, well not thankfully, with the last six months of what happened with all the torture stuff, people started asking, "What is happening in Guantanamo Bay?" when these thousands of people just disappeared and were getting tortured mercilessly. Now people are opening their eyes and realizing that this shouldn't be happening. I'm running around in a circle right now. Sorry I'll shut up. We can completely shift gears, that's fine.
I used to a lot more. It's weird. I swear to God this isn't playing ignorant, I never heard his music before I started to read things that compared me to him. The people I get compared to the most I hadn't heard them before; Elliott Smith I knew, but Bright Eyes and Dashboard. I just got back from Europe and in Germany there was a headline for the tour and it said, 'The new Elliott Smith' in German and I freaked out because he's one of my favorites. Not in a good way, I freaked out like, "Don't say that," because that's a lot of pressure.
It may have had a lot to do with his death.
Yeah, I think so because I had seen him play about...I'll do this and then I'll get back to the Dashboard thing. My dad died in September of 2003 and then I got a call in October and my friend Anna left a message on my machine with, "Rest in Peace, Elliott Smith," and I was like. "WHAT?" Elliott Smith was this huge part of this group of people who I'm really close with's musical development. He had a heartfelt but not cheesy way of expression. It seemed very mature to me and it said a lot of things that were in a lot of our heads so he was like the soundtrack to the last five years of our lives. I got to see him play, and I knew he was totally fucked up and I knew all the rumors and stuff, but during the last years of his life he'd been doing holistic medicine, and he'd stopped drinking, really trying to straighten out as much as possible. It might have been too much at one time because he was losing his voice, and he didn't even sing loud. I have these bootlegs of him playing live and his voice cuts out in every song and he's whispering. When I saw him he seemed so much cleaner and less reliant. It was a big surprise [his death]. It was surprising to me on a lot of levels, but on a super-selfish personal level I was stunned. Not to be all dramatic, but I couldn't believe how much it affected me.
When I was kid I was a huge Nirvana fan and I was about 13 when Kurt Cobain killed himself and it seemed like a breach of trust to me. I was this disillusioned little kid that had like three friends, like a lot of people were. That was the guy that you could look into pop culture and be like,"This guy who's as big as Tom Cruise is more like my friends than he is like Tom Cruise". Then he killed himself and I was like, "Oh Shit!" Whatever happened, he couldn't deal with it. With Elliott Smith, I'm an adult, I was 23 when he died. It might have been the residual stuff; having so much of a connection with his music, or the fact that I'm hypersensitive about things like that anyway, but I was really reeling about that. I couldn't talk about it because I was embarrassed about it, but it was really like someone you knew passed away, not in a creepy way. I met him one time and I couldn't even talk to him because I was so enamored with his stuff.
With Dashboard, the comparisons were right away and I was really surprised because I didn't know that was and I was like, "What is this about?" I should really say this upfront for the interviews sake, I don't really know much about this scene. Like I had never heard of The Rocket Summer before I was asked to do this tour. Before I was on Triple Crown and I started to be around the Brand New guys, I hadn't heard their music since we were kids and we were playing in bowling alleys and stuff like that. The first time I had heard of Bright Eyes was when a kid came up to me and said I had a shake in my voice that was like Bright Eyes' and I was like, "Who is that?" It's embarrassing to say, but I don't listen to this kind of music at all. With the Dashboard thing, when I heard it, it was guys with guitars that were singing loud. I think the lyrics are so different and I think the way the songs are structured are different. I'd have to say that I think he's a wonderful guy and I think he really cares about his fan base and I've done two small tours with him. He's a genuine, really cool guy and some of his songs, the more you start to play with him you're like, "Okay, I can see why people like this," but even he said straight up to me in the beginning that he didn't understand why it gets compared at all. So when the person says it themselves you think, "Alright then I'm not nuts." I haven't checked in a while but I used to get compared a lot.
The Bright Eyes thing comes particularly from the shake in the voice and the fact that we're both really wordy. We both write wordy songs that don't have discernible choruses a lot of the time. There's not a lot of repeated lyrics and they're kind of folky and kind of country-ish. Then again, the same thing, Miracle of 86 played with Deseparacidos and I actually became friends with Conor and he said something to me about the fact that we were together on this comp together in Canada. He was respecting it on a peer level and not sitting there going, "This sounds like this or this." Conor I like musically a lot more than Dashboard. I think there's a lot of depth to what he's doing and he's got a lot of heart to do what he does. He was the first person that I had met that was my age that I was blown away by and that was a big deal. I don't want to arrogant, but I just don't listen to a lot of music, so when there was this kid that was immediately accessible, that I was friends with, that was making this music I was listening to all the time and it happened to be that I was getting compared to him a lot...who knows if the chicken came before the egg.
What's going on with Miracle of 86?
We're still together.
...Well the website is down.
That's because the guy that ran the website got pinched by the FBI. It will never go back up.
We were together a long time, literally ten years. A lot of dumb, personal shit started to happen. We're doing a tour in Europe actually on the 22nd of August to the middle of September. We're also putting out an EP here and in Europe. I think here it's going to be on Immigrant Sun. When we revisit it as a hobby and a fun thing, it's a lot more manageable then when we were trying to do it all the time. Everyone's happier to just be friends and not want to kill each other and actually get to hang out.
You heard that?
Yeah. There's an mp3 of it online.
Really? That's the first version of the same song?
Yeah.
I did it with a band from Staten Island. I grew up in Brooklyn, I lived in Staten Island when I was 13-17 and I lived in Manhattan when I went to college and then I moved back to Brooklyn after that. Being that it was the formative teenage years of my life, that was where I started really playing stuff. I met a guy named Jay Miller who did college radio and was a tour manager for a band called Monty Love. There's this big Christmas show in Staten Island every year and he had asked me if I wanted to do a small CD EP and I said I would love to. We had stuff that never came out which was really nice. We did covers of like Silent Night and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and six months after that the Bright Eyes Christmas album was released, so that stuff will never come out. But that song, I wanted to write a Christmas song that you could play whenever. That was one of the first and only things that there was a bootleg made of in a friends house on his four-track and then when it was time for the new album I was like, "I really like this song a lot."
But on the mp3 you said there were two Christmas songs.
The other song is his song. I can't believe you have that. I have never heard what you're talking about except the day I played it. I was talking about Jay... I was drunk that day, and when I said 'We wrote,' I meant, "We recorded." It's really good. I remember I gave a copy to my parents and they were like, "Jay's song is really nice." It was a Harry Connick Jr. song that he did.
That's what I meant. I never wrote another Christmas song and I don't know...
I don't think I ever will.
read second part