PuckNation.com
Interview with Kevin Devine (Part Two)
Rikki Lee 08/16/2004
The Pucknation Interview
Welcome to part 2 (click here for part one) of the Pucknation Interview with Kevin Devine. Since the first interview got cut short Kevin said we could pick it up again later. And we did, this time on the last day of the tour in Chicago (the first was the first day of the tour in St. Louis).
I wish I could say it went off without a hitch, but Pucknation luck said different. When I had gotten to the venue the crowd was informed that Kevin had not arrived and therefore was not going to play his set. So I talked with the infamously snotty staff of the Metro to find out what was going on and the girl snapped that she would like to know that as well and that they didn't appreciate such things. Not surprised, but certainly taken aback somewhat, I headed back upstairs to see if he would show and catch an earful of The Rocket Summer which I had missed the last time.
About an hour later Kevin found me and had explained that he got bum directions going through Ohio and almost turned around to go home, but he couldn't do that to me so trucked on anyway. He did end up being able to play one song courtesy of Rocket Summer giving up some set time. It of course was wonderful and I do believe the crowd was a little upset that there wasn't more. You would've been to.
Anyway, when he was done, I mosied on backstage with him and got my interview. Once again, it was cut a little short but we still got a lot covered and I couldn't have asked for a better experience. I'd also like to thank Kevin for showing up anyway and talking with me. For that, I will be eternally grateful.
So read on, listen to whatever you can get your hands on by him, and wait with wishful elation for the new Miracle of 86 album like I know I will be doing.
There seem to be a lot of religious references in your songs, especially in the earlier works with Miracle of 86. Did that have to do with how you were raised?
I never thought about that. I think it's a lapsed Catholic thing. There's religious iconography that informs the songwriting still to some extent. I wrote a song on this tour that I obviously didn't get to play tonight, because I played one song, that was largely about taking stock of how differently I look at God and that stuff now. I don't believe in it anymore, but when I was 15 I was from this big Roman Catholic family. I didn't care, my parents weren't weird about it. I'm glad I had some structured religion when I was a kid just because it gave me something to get skeptical about. There's a lot of philisophical stuff you can take from a religious experience that's really great. The message of a lot of religion is really positive. It's the institutionalization of it that's messed us up. If there is something like a god, I'm sure he would want nothing to do with wars being waged in his name.
It's definitely sneaking in more as an indignant thing. Before it was more questioning and now it's more like 'this is fucking crazy'.
Like I said, I think there's some great philisophical stuff in things like the Bible and definitely Jesus to a certain point.This guy had some of the most liberally, socially progressive, wonderful ideas and then at a certain point it's like, well you also know he was God's son. I dig the philosophy but I'm all weirded out by the megalomaniacal delusion... But maybe it wasn't, maybe it was real. I don't know.
I do think as a historical figure he was one of the most brilliant, giving, important people ever, but the part where it's belief for me from that to thinking that he sitting somewhere judging over everybody ... I don't want to get shot.
Change of subject, coming from doing interviews yourself, do you find that makes you more lenient towards being asked the same questions all the time or do you seethe inwardly anyway?
It's a little weird when people ask you questions that are on your website or in your bio. The only time I don't get upset about that is, like when you're from a tiny little zine and you're at a show and you've never heard me before and you got stuck doing the interview, because then I know I'm going to get asked stuff like where are you from, what are your influences, that kind of stuff. But when people have lived with the record and got to read the materials and still ask all that shit...
But that's very minor. That's more of a pet peeve. To me that's kind of lazy, and I can understand being lazy because I'm fucking lazy most of the time. I definitely try to get into their shoes more often than not because most of the time it's younger people and you're not getting interviewed by Walter Cronkite. It would be ridiculous of me to get mad at that kind of stuff.
So what's the one question you hate getting asked most?
Probably the Dashboard shit. It's just annoying because it's like, "Just listen to the fucking record," and if you listen to the record and you're going to still ask me or tell me that you think it sounds like Dashboard Confessional then I don't really respect your ear for music.
That's so fucked up for me to say that, but there's a certain point where you can't possibly listen to this and then listen to that and think they sounds the same. And if you do then that just bums me out.
That's annoying to me, but I understand people, especially emo kids, generally have a... Emo is the only music that really only listens to and is influenced by itself. So if an Emo kid is doing an interview then I know going in that I'm going to get asked about Dashboard and if it's a slightly branched out Emo kid, I'll get asked about Bright Eyes.
If I could do away with one thing forever from interviews from now on it would be that whole... every interview being asked about the influence of Chris Carraba and Conor Oberst have had on me because ultimately they haven't. But also, with Conor, it's a little different because the similarities I see more. I don't mean drawn out, intelligent questions about approach and songwriting, I mean like that, "Do you think you sound like Dashboard," kind of thing is like, "Do YOU? Because I have to go..."
I think that's it. I don't really get aggrivated that much with questions. Even that (the Dash thing), I just bristle at it after the fact. I don't want to answer it, but in the interview I'm never like...
You should do that once.
I think I will. And I won't even have a microphone on me, I'll just scream, "This interview is over!", and throw nothing on the ground. Just pretend to take off all this machinery and walk out.
But also, everything's fucking relative for me to sit around and get aggrivated about how to answer questions about Dashboard Confessional while other people in the world have legitimate issues to deal with and real things and I'm spending time getting mad because some kid thinks I sound like Dashboard? That's kind of retarded and a waste of time.
It's the American Way.
It's the American Way--to make up problems.
Do you lose any money touring?
No. I do okay on the ones I do alone because I have a really small overhead. I'm only one person, I don't have a ton of equipment, and I don't have to rent a van and a huge trailer. My expenses are lower because I'm just worrying about me and whoever I'm traveling with and not 5 or 6 people. I do okay. I'm not going to put a down payment on a house or anything like that, but I can pay rent and bills and stuff. Miracle broke even on tour, but we never turned a significant profit. I don't that with this either, but I make enough money to live independently. More or less. But there's still the occasional embarassing phone call to mom. It's like, "I'm a 24 year old man and I don't want to make this call, but I have to pay a 3 month overdue phone bill," or something like that. But when I say occasionally I mean that I'm really too prideful and I get creeped out by that stuff and I don't like having to do it. I generally make enough off doing this.
Is music all you wanted to do growing up?
When I was a kid I wanted to be the second baseman for the New York Mets. Then I realized pretty quickly that I didn't have the skill or physicality for that. But ever since I was really young I always wanted to play in a band. Since I was about 8, when I heard Appetite For Destruction. Ever since then I've written little songs or played little concerts for family and stuff like that. At the risk of sounding cliche or cheesy, it is pretty much the only thing I wanted to do. When I went to college I threw around the idea of teaching or going into graduate work for Arts Journalism. I thought for a while about trying to become a film writer. I like all of things but I'm not passionate about it the way I am about music. I've done lots of work, like office work and all kinds of 9 to 5 stuff ranging from real blue collar shit like washing dishes to white collar shit like 16 bucks an hour in an air conditioned office checking my email all day. I've definitely been all around the spectrum and nothing is as fulfilling to me. I'd rather be semi-broke and doing this than what I was a year and a half ago making a lot of money in an office because I was miserable all the time. Hopefully there's a happy medium, but I'm happy enough. I'd really rather be here.
Do you think in a few years you're going to end up doing spoken word stuff like Henry Rollins and Jello Biafra?
I don't really write like that.
But do you think that's where you're going to end up?
No. No, because I like singing the words more than I like reading them. I love writing and I approach lyric writing from a very literary standpoint, but at the same time, I kind of think spoken word is weird. When I see people do very well I think it's great, but more often than not if I see a poetry slam or an open mic I get kind of pre-embarassed or something like that.
It's really hard to do well and I don't have the presentation for it. But then again, who knows? I've never tried it really.
I think someone like Henry Rollins is a little bit more of a presence. He can get away with that shit. I think I'd come off ridiculous if I tried that, but I would like to branch out and write more as I get older. I have tons of assorted writings that I don't make into songs that I'd love to find something to do with. I don't want to be pretentious and put out a book of poems or anything like that like Jewel.
I am also fearful of disassociating the lyric from the melody because there's so many lyrics that I love and when you read them on the page don't carry the way that they do when you hear them sung. I write and talk all the time. I'm a very verbal person. So I'd like to do something else with that besides just sing all the time.
I actually read a lot of your music reviews, etc.
Did you really?
Yeah. The most notable one being the review for Choke.
That was fun. I got to do an interview with that guy (Chuck Palahniuk) and he was a really interesting dude. He was really weird, but not aggresively weird. He's not putting it on. At least that's the vibe I got from him at all. He just seems more eccentric than weird, like he's fascinated by things that I would never even think about, let alone become fascinated by and I think that's the kind of intellectual curiousity you have to have to be a novelist. I wouldn't do that kind of writing where you have to sit down with six months of research on some arcaine physiological fact and the write a book about it. That's what he does.
Actually my friend Mike told me that they found that with artful directors... like Kubrick had sheds full of research material for every movie he did. They found 350 boxes of discarded research materials for a Napolean movie that he just decided not to make after a year into the research. That's for what he didn't do. So like for Full Metal Jacket there's literally a shed of Vietnam War stuff. I just don't have that kind of discipline. It's for anybody doing anything creative to try to branch that stuff out. Maybe short stories are a good place to start.
Are you reading anything at the moment?
I just started reading a book called The Culture Of Fear. It's about why America is perpetually scared of random, misdirected things like statistically speaking you're more likely to die of a lightning bolt than cancer by the time you're 40 years old. That's legitimately real. I don't know, it's really hard to explain but it all ties in with the Bush thing. Not just Bush, but the whole empire making mindset of the way this whole country is set up. It's as if the more you keep people terrified, the easier it is to get your stuff pushed through. So it's just kind of examining that and how much of it is legislatively imposed and how much of it is just part of our psychological makeup now. I'm only 20 pages into that though.
I didn't read much on this tour only because my brother was with me for the first three weeks and we hung out a lot. I read a lot the week and a half I was alone. I wrote a lot, and then when I was in New York, I didn't do either because I was around friends and family for those five days.
I read a book called Mansion On The Hill that was about the genesis of Rock 'N Roll as a business, the transformation from a subculture into billion dollar marketing plans for like Born In The USA. It definitely pulled the curtain back on the idealogical dream of Rock 'N Roll as an idealistic culture-- which it's not. It's as much a business as anything else, if not more. So it was interesting to read.
So how was the tour?
It was a lot different than I thought it would be in the beginning. I know idealistically this isn't a tour and not in any way to disparage any of the other bands because they all turned out to be super nice people. All of them were a nice support structure and everybody got along really easily. Of all the touring I've done in the last two years, this was the sweetest. Nothing happened that was terrible. Except for today. Today was the last day of the tour. But the rest was just so easy that it doesn't feel like it's been six weeks. When I think back to the night we did the first interview, it feels like a really long time, but it hasn't been greuling in any way.
There's some tours that you're on and there's so much downtime. People think it's a really glamourized, awesome thing to do and compared to the office job I had, I would definitely rather be playing every night because I love it, but there's a lot of time that you're just doing nothing and you're afraid to spend the money to do anything. You wind up just sitting around or walking. This tour I had a great time doing that, I found a lot of really great stuff. This really is the best tour I've had in terms of extra-curricular stuff. It was interesting. This tour was much younger. I'd say 80 percent of the crowds were under 16 years old every night and that's very foreign to me. It's all ages and I like all ages shows because if you don't have all ages shows, you're boxing kids out. Maybe this is idealistic and early 90's of me, but I feel that if they're ever going to get exposed early on to things like DIY and some sort of... I mean, I know a lot of bands now couldn't fucking care less, but it's like the way I found out about any of the political stuff I've been becoming interested in or just cultural stuff that I became attracted to that was under the radar was through punk rock bands at all ages shows. But who knows what people receive on a tour like this.
It was good but I'm definitely looking forward to going home for a while. It was great to see the country. I've never seen California before this and I'd say seventy percent of the cities we'd gone through on this tour I had never been to before. I'm not a well traveled person at all so that was fucking great, it was my favorite part of the tour.
I definitely feel like this has been better than I thought. I got along well with the people, it was really easy to navigate, and it was encouraging. That's my little bowtie at the end of the thought.