Music legend Dean Wareham’s career has spanned the dawning of the indie scene through to the present. Originally lead singer for Galaxie 500, Wareham transitioned to fronting Luna for the 90s boom years of the recording industry. His 2008 book, Black Postcards, is a great document of the period and a fun read.
Wareham’s brand new solo album That’s the Price of Loving Me is as good as anything he’s put out to date, and he’ll be playing a don’t-miss show with a full band right here at Bearsville Theater on Wednesday, June 4th at 8pm.
The following is excerpted from a longer interview:
Adam Snyder: That’s the Price of Loving Me is a great album. When you take the lyrics as a whole, you hear maybe a reckoning with the past and present, is that fair to say?
Dean Wareham: Thank you, yeah, that’s what happens when you get older, right? You start looking back over your life, thinking about the choices you’ve made. Where the world is going. I guess there are also political notes that kind of stand out, now even more than when I was writing the songs last year.
AS: This is the first full album you’ve done with Kramer [producer] since Galaxie 500?
DW: Yes. He did some Luna demos in about 1992, but nothing that came out.
AS: A lot has changed since then, the industry, the recording technology, the culture of the country. When you reunited with Kramer, was there a kind of gravity to the experience, considering all the changes that have happened?
DW: Well, certainly, it’s kinda heavy in a way that’s hard to define. To look out and see him sitting there thirty-four years later. In a way, despite all the changes in technology, the record was made pretty similarly to how we would have made a Galaxie 500 record back in the day. Live band, laying down the drums, bass, and a rhythm guitar, doing just one or two takes, and doing that quickly. I mean, recorded to ProTools instead of to tape.
AS: Just the same, hi fidelity definitely did exist in 1988, but when Today came out it was very lo-fi and it kind of defined your sound.
DW: Yeah it did. It’s not like records that were made on a cassette player at home, like some people were doing, but it wasn’t a fancy studio. Kramer had, like, one reverb unit, and it was a 16-track one inch machine.
Listening to that Galaxie 500 record, okay, it’s made in 1988, but it doesn’t sound like the 1980s, and it doesn’t sound like the 90s. It just sounds like Kramer’s studio. Obviously, equipment is equipment, you know, but it’s the person twiddling the knobs, and their ears that are more important than anything else.
AS: Let’s jump to ’92 when Luna emerges. You have Stanley Demeski from The Feelies on drums and Justin Harwood from The Chills on bass. At the time I thought, this is almost, like, an indie super group. Was that your intention, or is that just kind of how it happened?
DW: I guess that’s just kind of how it happened [laughing]. I didn’t know a lot of people, I didn’t place ads. I’d met Justin in London when he was in The Chills. I really only knew a couple of bass players, so I called him and he jumped on a plane to New York. We auditioned a few drummers, and then when The Feelies broke up, I was, like, ooh, we can call Stanley Demeski.
AS: Then Sean Eden came onboard.
DW: Sean joined right after we made the Lunapark record. That’s really when it felt like Luna.
AS: Luna sounded like a logical progression from Galaxie but reached a wider audience. Was that because the production was tighter and crisper, or was it the new label, or that the times had changed?
DW: If we reached a wider audience, maybe in the United States, probably yeah, maybe it is down to the label, that they were able to push. But I feel like it took a little while, took a few years.
You don’t realize when you quit a band and start a new one, you think you’re gonna start at the same point, but actually you kinda take a step backwards. Nobody knows who the band is. But we did have a bigger radio department and everything. Also, we toured. With Galaxie 500, we didn’t really tour the United States much.
AS: You’ve worked in more configurations than I’ll be able to mention in one article, but would you mind saying a few things about Dean & Britta, you’re married to Britta Phillips…
DW: Yeah, Britta joined Luna in the year 2000. And then we became romantically involved. And still are, we’re married. When Luna broke up in 2005, we kept going as Dean & Britta. And now Luna’s back playing shows, sometimes.
Even with my solo thing, Britta’s always very involved, helping me with the songs, helping me arrange the songs. We’ve done several albums and we’ve scored films together, it works well. We’ve done quite a bit of recording at home, and she’s the one who engineers and mixes. She’s a lot better at that, she’s a lot better at software than I am.
When we came to score this movie The Squid and the Whale, she just sat down and learned Garageband and then Logic. She’s just more patient to sit and learn things than I am [laughing]. I’m lucky to have that. She’s an excellent bass player as well.
AS: I want to talk about your writing. Your lyrics have had a consistent poetic quality, so it wasn’t a surprise that you emerged as a writer. Black Postcards is a great read. Is it strictly based on recollections, or had you been keeping a journal that you were able to refer to to get all those details?
DW: I had kept a journal, otherwise there’s no way I would’ve remembered that stuff. I’m sure there’s things I got wrong. As time goes on, things just start disappearing. There’s also a website run by a big fan of Galaxie 500 and Luna, he had a list of all the tour dates, that was helpful too, you see a club’s name and it triggers something about it.
But, yes, I wrote tour diaries, some of which I published on the website, some of which I kept to myself. But when I came to write the book, I said, I’m not going to worry about what’s embarrassing and what isn’t, I’m just gonna put it all there on the page. And that’s maybe a strength of the book, that I talk about the moments of humiliation as well as the moments of triumph.
AS: I also find it very interesting in a generational kind of way. It’s your life, it’s the music industry, but it kind of speaks to the generation that we’re both part of.
DW: Yeah, I think I didn’t realize at the time that I was writing it, that I was sort of writing about a music industry that was disappearing, that no longer existed, by 2008 even it no longer existed. The world of compact disc sales, and tour support. The 1990s was an age of super profits for the record companies. That all went away. Maybe it’s kinda come back again, the big record companies seem to be making money again. Or the tech companies are.
AS: What are your thoughts on the state of indie music today? Where are we at, and where are we possibly going?
DW: I think people who say “there’s nobody good anymore” are not listening. I don’t know, it’s different. I feel for young bands. I feel like it’s gotta be hard for a rock-n-roll band to get money to make a record like it used to be, but I do think there’s so much great music still being made.
Dean Wareham at the Bearsville Theater. Wednesday, June 4th, doors 7pm, tickets still available. Be sure to get there early to see opening act ESCAPE-ISM, the latest project by singer Ian Svenonius.
For tickets, visit bearsvilletheater.com.
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