Introducing Popster Dylan Gardner – HuffPost 5.1.14
Mike Ragogna: Dylan, you have a new album Adventures In Real Time, and you had more than 100 songs to start with. How long did it take to write those 100 songs, and how did you whittle them down for this album?
Dylan Gardner: I started writing songs in 2010, and we finally picked a selection in 2012. So I had this giant arsenal of songs because I soon discovered I was prolific, which probably stemmed from the fact that since the day I was born, I kind of had this undying energy to always do something creative before I went to sleep, otherwise I felt like I didn’t do my duty as a human that day. Which is kind of like how it is now, because I really can’t sleep at night unless I’ve done something creative that day. It’s just the way I’m wired. So I had all these ideas, and the nice thing about starting from scratch is there’s nothing to be nervous about; every idea I have is the first idea I’m having at the time. I had to start somewhere, so the songs I was first writing didn’t really sound like they are now, but they were slowly getting closer and closer. Around 2012 when I met my manager Geoffrey Weiss, we took a look what I had at that moment. We were looking at all the songs, and the funny thing is that people think that the first album is all the material you’ve had a long time to write, but most of the songs that are on it I wrote just a couple weeks before we picked the list; out of the 100 songs, “The Actor” and “With A Kiss” were a little bit old, but otherwise all the songs were right before we put out the album. The nice thing about picking out of all that material is that you get to have the best material – you don’t just write twelve songs and put the album out and find out that four of them could have been better and one’s of them terrible; it’s the nice thing of being able to have a well-rounded album, and that’s why every time I do the next batch of albums, I write 40 or 50 songs, so you always get that good selection. It’s a trick I heard about – I know Matthew Sweet did it for his album Girlfriend, and that’s always been like my secret.
MR: I imagine you had some help as far as advice from both your manager and the co-producer John Dragonetti, right?
DG: Totally, yeah. Geoffrey has a golden ear. He knows when he hears a hit, so I write the song, I record the song, I have my feelings about it, I send it to him. I could spend all day coming up with different songs I like at the moment, stuff that I just wrote, so I just say [to Geoffrey] “Send me an email and compile what you think will be good for the first album.” So he sends me a list back and I agreed with all of them; he picked “The Actor” which was a song that was about a year old that no one said anything about because it was a pretty desolate song. I said to him, “Should we go with that?” He said yes and I trusted him, and so far he hasn’t been wrong about a single thing. We took the songs over to Dragonetti while we were in the process of looking for producers, and Dragonetti kind of came in spontaneously. Geoffrey was calm all along, but this was my first album, so I was gunning for these kinds of producers that would cost millions of dollars. He introduced me to Dragonetti and immediately we took the song “I Think I’m Falling For Something” over to his house and he demoed it – did his sonic textures to it, the drums the bass and filled in all the “color” and everything on it – and I went over there the next day and he’d completely hit it out of the park and it sounds exactly like does on the record now. He got it pretty close, within about one day’s work, so I thought “Okay, this is a no-brainer, he’s obviously going to be the producer. He has that same inner-child-like spirit that I do in my music, and you can hear it, and it connects. He really helped bring out the greatness in a lot of those songs, too. He added so many little things that you only hear once in a song that really make it special, some stuff that I didn’t even hear until it was being fixed. The album definitely couldn’t have been what it is without them.
MR: What inspired you to celebrate The Beatles breakup anniversary?
DG: Well, we were all sitting around brainstorming with a marketing team about “What would be a good idea for some web content?” because we were starting this campaign of promoting the album and trying to get out there, so I told them that every day I sing about twenty Beatles songs and I like to practice albums in full length, and I can play any Beatles song, you name it. So they asked what was coming up with the Beatles, and I said “Well, they broke up in April,” so we ended up picking side two of Abbey Road because that was the last thing that they did. “Let It Be” came out last, but the last Beatles album recorded was Abbey Road, so we decided on that. I went to work on it, and someone came up with the hashtag “Dylan breaks up The Beatles” which kind of made it a no-brainer that it was really something special. Originally I wasn’t going to do it on all these different instruments, but as soon as that idea happened, I thought, “I have about ten or eleven instruments I could do it on.” Because my parents were in the process of looking for a house in Los Angeles, which is where I am now – we were still in Arizona at the time – the entire house was empty and full of boxes, so I took a camera that they had, and set up all the shots, did two takes of each song and put them all together and hopefully it turned out cool – I was really proud of it. I enjoyed it very much, and it’s not going to be the last time I do that.
MR: So introducing Dylan Gardner to the world, in the video and in the first line of the first song of the album, you’re making that Beatles connection.
DG: It’s a good thing. I love The Beatles!
MR: [laughs] How did Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco come across your “Let’s Get Started” video?
DG: I’m not sure, actually. I have a newly acquired marketing team that’s helping me with promoting this album, and Team Coco came through with them. I was screaming around the house, I was super excited.
MR: Where’d you get your pop sensibility?
DG: I think it’s a combination of growing up listening almost completely to ’60s classic rock because my dad was in a cover band of oldies music, and mostly The Beatles. Then once I became a teenager and really got into the internet, the entire multiverse was at my fingertips and I could look anything I wanted, and I was able to completely binge on any musical genre there was. When I started writing, it was all pretty strictly ’60s music, but after a couple months, this kind of “poppiness” came into it almost naturally. I don’t remember having a certain goal of writing it, but pretty soon it started to form its own thing and become more and more unfiltered from me, and what I would do is stop trying to write songs and just let songs come to me, which is what I do now. Melodies enter my head that are unexpected, and I never know when I’m going to get them. Sometimes I bite my nails at night because I don’t know if they’re going to come again, but they always do. So the stuff that’s coming, I’m not over-thinking it, and the nice thing is that Geoffrey always knows what’s the right direction to steer in, and he has a giant record collection at his fingertips. I also don’t like to insult people’s intelligence; I don’t like the pop songs that are “guilty pleasure” listening, where you finally accept that the song exists the fifth time you listen to it. I want a celebration of great music. I guess the pop sensibility came from the combination of the music that’s coming out now that I’ve studied very hard, and respecting the music that was out before I was born.
MR: Do you have a goal on where you want to go with your music, beyond this first album?
DG: Well, I’m already working on the third album. One thing that not a lot of people know is that I’m constantly about an album-and-a-half ahead of what’s actually out. Where do I want to go? I’d say [in the direction of] more mature; every time you write new stuff it gets more mature, kind of the way that The Beatles evolved this great arc in their music that ended in Abbey Road, but they started all the way at “Please Please Me.” And it’s almost like two different bands, but not really, and it’s kind of like taking its audience on an adventure, and my main goal is to have this giant career that, at the end of my life, I can look back on this spanning discography of really great music, and hopefully we took every step the right way, and went out on a high note. If you’ve watched Breaking Bad, I’m sure everyone in that cast has a really good feeling that the show went out on a high note. So I don’t know musically where it’s going to go. I do know the next album’s more mature and in my opinion even better, I’m pretty proud of it. And the third one I’m working on is even better than that!
MR: How disappointed is your father that you took a career in music, when he wanted you be a doctor, or a lawyer?
DG: [laughs] Actually he had the same ambition that I did. He was in a band in the ’80s called The Kind, which was kind of a power-pop legend around the mid-west, but never expanded like Cheap Trick did. He had the same ambition I did; he left home when he was 18 and he wanted to do music. His problem was he started writing songs late, I don’t know how old he was, but he definitely wasn’t as young as I was. It’s too bad his band didn’t get bigger because I love his band. But he’s supported me since day one, since the first song I wrote, and so has my mom. My brother’s been playing drums for me since I first picked up a guitar.
MR: Is that your brother on the video?
DG: Yes it is.
MR: Dylan, what advice do you have for new artists?
DG: I studied like a college professor on how to make a second album. So many people put out a first album, and it has all this ambition and all this drive, and the second album is that minus the ambition and drive, and most of the time you can always hear it, and it never follows it up [the first album] in the right way. But the right way to do it is to study what made the first album special, and apply that kind of drive as if the next album is your first. You almost ignore that the first album exists – while keeping in mind that it does – and you can’t alienate everyone, so you have to work on what makes it better. For new artists, I always think if they’re really serious about an album discography and not just singles, it’d be like building your music as a story. You’ve introduced characters to people, the first time they’re meeting them, and it’s like “What are they gonna do next? Where are they gonna go?” They have to go somewhere. But the main thing is to have the same drive and focus that you had during the first album. The other thing was that I never stopped writing the entire time that the album was going on. Writing is like a muscle you have to work out, you can’t stop for a long time and then start again, because it’s going to take you a little while to get going again. I’ve been going nonstop since 2010, which is why I’m able to write so much. So my advice to artists would be just to have that energy and focus and determination, and the work will follow.
MR: So what does the immediate future look like for Dylan Gardner? Are you going to be touring and supporting the album in various ways?
DG: Hopefully I’m going to be doing everything. I’m pretty poorly-travelled – I’d like to see the entire world. Right now in a way it’s sort of a social campaign to get us off the ground, to get people pre-ordering the album, and when it comes out, I’d love to tour, and I’d love to promote the album for the rest of my life because it’s what I really want to do. Every day it seems like it’s a little bit closer to doing that.
MR: I wish you all the luck with this album and your career. You’ve got a really solid debut album, and at seventeen, what a great job you did. This is probably the strongest debut album I’ve heard this year.
DG: Thank you.
Transcribed by Emily Fotis