A Conversation with Brett Dennen – HuffPost 4.21.11

Mike Ragogna: What did you think of SXSW this year?

Brett Dennen: Oh, I have one of those complicated relationships with it. I love it and I get excited about it every single year, and then I get overwhelmed within the first few minutes of being there. That’s why I was there for just a day and a half, so I could just go and be a part of it and before I got too burned out, we leave. I loved being there though, it was great.

MR: I was driving down from snow-ridden Iowa with a friend and it was such a relief when we started feeling the warm ’70s.

BD: It’s so beautiful there. It is such a great town to be in, and it’s great to have all of our buddies in one place. It’s like being at summer camp.

MR: It was great to watch you play on the roof of Whole Foods.

BD: Yeah, that was fun and nice to do something different for a change at SXSW, playing on top of grocery store.

MR: It’s a huge grocery store the size of a city block.

BD: And I think it was the global headquarters of Whole Foods. It was like a plaza, a courtyard plaza on the roof.

MR: Also, getting to see you in the convention center was nice. Did you check out any bands yourself?

BD: Nope, I wish I could have but my schedule was too tight and I didn’t really have time to do anything. The first moment I got a free time I went out to dinner and went to sleep.

MR: Okay, let’s get to your new album, Loverboy. How did you approach this album differently from the other albums?

BD: It’s a great question. The method in which I recorded…I did a lot of preproduction on this album. I actually recorded the whole album a year before we went into the studio. I did it in my house with an engineer, my friend Brad. He and I and a couple other musicians made the album in my living room and sort of comp-ed together all the song ideas and parts. We all lived with that album for a year. I gave it to the musicians that I wanted to play on it, my manager, the label, and everybody had the album. Then, when it came time to record it again in a professional studio, it was like we already knew what we needed to do. We just wanted to do it better and do it live with everybody in the room together. We wanted to keep it fresh, exciting and inspired, just make it sound like we were all having fun together in a room playing.

MR: Loverboy is the title. Where does that come from?

BD: I think the simplest way to explain it is that’s how I feel right now. I think love is the greatest inspiration and the greatest feeling, and I wanted it to be an ode to love. All sorts of love–romantic love, devotional love, friendship love, and love for the world. I wanted to put out something happy and positive from the heart. That’s why I call it Loverboy.

MR: So, you’ve got this song titled “Dancing At A Funeral”…

BD: Well, the idea for the song just came from a friend of mine who was on their way to a funeral. We had a conversation about how funerals should be a celebration of life instead of mourning a death. Funerals often bring up a lot of issues between families that come together and haven’t seen each other for a while. You might have baggage or bad history between members, and it brings out a lot of pain and emotion. I just wanted to put it out there that it should be a celebration of life. It’s a beautiful thing to get family and friends together to celebrate somebody that has meant a lot to you.

MR: When my mother passed, we had family and friends get together, it was really festive, and there was a tinge of “should we be feeling horrible or guilty?”

BD: Well, yeah, should you be conscious of your own funeral, if we pass through this dimension and we see people gathering around us for our funeral, I would want to see people having a good time. I don’t want people to be sad and, not to quote the song, but sad and mournful. I want to leave a positive impact on this world, and I want people to rejoice. I don’t want to see anybody feel bad.

MR: Right. So, “Sydney (I’ll Come Running)” is such a sublime pop single to me. It’s really cool to know that you have one of those handy pop radio records on your album.

BD: Well, you know, “pop radio” and “pop song” are ever-changing terms. There was a time when Crosby, Stills & Nash was considered pop music. It’s a term for, I guess, “popular” or a radio track. For me, it’s a feel good dance song. It’s a song about friendship and sticking up for your friends and doing what’s right. I think it deserves to have a relentless rhythm and a groove that never stops. I think it deserves to have a catchy hook to it. I think lyrically, it is such a sweet message about being there for your friends, I think it deserves that chance.

MR: Are there any songs on this record that are particularly special to you and have you any stories about them?

BD: Every song on the album is a true story. Some of them are more abstract than others. One song that is actually very literal is a song called “Must Be Losing My Mind.” It’s a song about being in Tucson, Arizona, the first line of the song is, “Burned out and alone in Tucson, Arizon”. It’s the absolute truth, it was when I was on tour for the last record and I came to Tucson, which is quite possibly one of my favorite cities in the world, and I’m always excited about being there. I was just in a real funky place in my life romantically, and I was exhausted and uninspired. I just had a whirlwind of romantic emotions, and I just found myself lost and almost as though I was in a foreign country. All kinds of things were happening. We play a theater in Tucson usually called The Rialto–it’s this big beautiful old theatre and it’s kind of spooky though. It’s right across the street from a well-known old hotel called The Congress. It’s actually haunted, and that’s where the line, “There’s ghosts in my hotel room” came from. If you go and stay there, you can definitely feel the spirit world bouncing about. I was bumming around on 4th Street–I call it 4th Avenue in the song because it rhymes better–and there was actually a shooting that happened right outside of the theater while we were soundchecking. There literally was a man shot in the street. It was all happening, and I found myself swept up in a romance at the same time. It all sort of happened at once and I thought, “This is out of control.” So, that’s where I came up with the lyric, “I must be loosing my mind,” because I don’t know what’s happening but I’m going to go with it.

MR: What other stories have you got?

BD: Every song on the record has some sort of personal story behind it. There is the song called “Comeback Kid.” The story behind that when I was writing and coming up with some of the ideas for the song, I got asked to have a song be put on a special for the Olympics. I was wracking my brain thinking, “I don’t really have a song that carries any sort of sports message or a competitive message.” I was thinking, “Well, I should write one,” but there was no way I was going to be able to write a song and record it in time. All I wrote was a song about a comeback and a song about an underdog. I thought if I was an athlete I would want to be the underdog or maybe the one on the road to redemption. So, I had the chorus to that song and I had it for a year. I didn’t know what to do with it and I didn’t think I was going to start writing sports imagery. I didn’t think I was going to get to into writing a Cinderella story or anything. So, then not knowing what was happening, how I was going to release the record, if I was going to sign to a label, how anybody was going to hear it when I put it out. I started just running through everything that was going on. There was loss of love in there, self-doubt, self-pity, and it really turned into a song about overcoming all of that. Overcoming all of the fear of not living up to what you’ve done in the past. Overcoming heartbreak and moving on, and it somehow all weaved its way into that song.

MR: What else you got? Keep going, Brett!

BD: I can maybe throw in a left field one. “Only Rain” is a good one. I was in the process of falling in love and finding myself getting attached to all of the negatives of being in a relationship and falling in love–not like it’s a bad thing because it’s the greatest feeling in the world. When you start getting attached to outcomes, I think you can cause yourself a lot of grief. It’s very literally about traveling all around the world to follow your heart, really. When you get there, you find yourself at the airport in the rain with just a broken heart and being let down. Some of the lyrics in that song like, “Staying with a friend when things don’t work out,” or “So far from home that the only thing that can cheer you up is your local bottle of California wine.” That’s where the song “Only Rain” came from, the big let down. You learn the lesson that love is just something that you feel and you don’t have to be attached to. So, when it rains, it’s okay.

MR: I asked you last time we spoke, but again, what advice do you have for new artists?

BD: I would say never stop writing and never stop exploring who you are as a writer. I think it’s easy to become a performer, but never stop writing. If you get inspired, try to stay in that place of inspiration as long as possible. Don’t be too critical about what you write. You have plenty of time, you have the rest of your life to criticize. When you’re inspired, stay inspired. Don’t worry about if it’s good or not, just keep it from the heart. Just keep writing even if you end up throwing it away. Just put yourself out there. Just go for it, play as many shows as you can. One show will always lead to another show, and don’t be afraid to sing your heart out. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable in a song–that’s what people are hungry for, that personalized story and that vulnerability. If you can put yourself out there and be on stage comfortable doing that, people are dying for that today. There is a lot of down stuff out there, if you can draw blood in a song, I think that is what the world is hungry for right now.

MR: Beautiful, Brett. Can you give us one last song story before we wrap it up?

BD: There is a song called “Queen Of The Westside.” Nobody really plays it because I think it’s longer. I live in Santa Monica, which is on the Westside of Los Angeles. I think in every town, there are mentalities of the Westside and the Eastside and who lives wherever. Where I live on the Westside, it’s like families and rich people and quite a creepy side of town. All of the cool kids live on the east side out in Silver Lake. When I met my girlfriend, we met at a party in Hollywood, and the first thing we talked about was living on the Westside. As I was falling in love with her, I dubbed her The Queen of the Westside.

MR: And you can’t beat the Westside for the weather.

BD: Yeah, and the clean air. And Silver Lake and Echo Park are where all the cool kids and musicians live.

MR: Yeah, because it used to be affordable.

BD: It still is.

MR: I’m actually going back to California, I miss it. I grew up in New York, but I lived in California for a long time, it’s still home.

BD: I grew up in Northern California and I still live part of the time up in the mountains and it’s so nice. There is green forest, plains, mountains, beaches, there are some beautiful cities here. It’s really a fun place to live.

MR: Thank you so much for spending time with us.

BD: Take care.

Transcribed by Theo Shier