Dumpstaphunk’s Ivan Neville Talks New Album ‘Where Do We Go From Here,’ Making a Statement with Funk Music & Family Legacy (INTERVIEW)

When the members of New Orleans group Dumpstaphunk started recording their first new album in seven years, they weren’t anticipating that the world would go to shit. Throughout their career, the group, led by the venerable Ivan Neville on keys, was focused on bringing the party with raucous concerts that were about getting people dancing to down and dirty funk music. But faced with a worldwide pandemic – of which the effects were especially harsh in their hometown – alongside a despicable president trying to cheat an election and a summer of protests aimed at racial injustice, the group chose to make a statement with their latest studio offering Where Do We Go From Here.

Blending traditional funk, R&B, rock and roll, soul, and prog, the album takes the high caliber of musicianship that has made Dumpstaphunk such a draw the past 17 years and mixes it with lyrics that speak directly to our current times. Well-oiled musicianship comes together with thoughtful and hard-hitting lyrics to make for an album that Glide’s Shawn Donohue described as “chock full of funky beats while also radiating positive energy, pointing towards a brighter future.” Indeed, it is that rare album with something to say that also sounds like one hell of a party.

Recently, the legendary Ivan Neville took some time to chat about the new album, the band’s choice of unexpected cover tunes, the history of making statements through funk music, his own family history, and more.

The album’s title is Where Do We Go From Here, which seems to speak to many different things in society right now. What inspired the title?

It’s pretty ironic that we didn’t know that we were going to be putting this record out in this time that we’re living in right now. The [title track] kind of comes from an idea of just trying to be prepared for life in general, because sometimes you try to live in the moment, you try to take where you’ve been and where you are to determine where you’re going to go to some degree. It’s usually a little bit of fear of the unknown. That’s just human nature. It comes from a place of wondering, where do we go from here, and let’s just try to take the right steps, and do what we think is the right thing to do.

Hopefully, we go somewhere in a positive direction, take some right steps. We might spend too much time in fear of what we don’t know, instead of just being open and remaining teachable. When we finished this song, we were mixing it during the pandemic and all this shit, and it [took] on a new meaning, like where do we go from here? When we come out of this thing, on the other side, it’s going to mean a whole lot more. Every day forward, it means a little bit more to us.

Funk music is often associated with a good-time party vibe. What made you want to use your music to make a statement, politically and socially?

It’s not an absolute intention, it’s just that sometimes you’re living in times where things that you go through and things that you see make you feel a certain way. And sometimes if you have a chance to talk about it, you just do so. It’s not like we try to preach any particular message to anyone or anything like that. It’s evident what’s going on around us, so we feel if we have a chance to say a little something, why not? If you can say something positive, or if you can bring more enlightenment to a certain subject or whatever, we want to do all of that as best we can. But generally, we just want to make some music. We want to make some music that makes you feel good. And if it happens to make you think a little bit, all the better. We definitely want you to shake your booty, we want to make some music you can move around to a little bit.

Were there any albums specifically in the funk, soul genres, and rock genres that had been done that kind of make statements kind of like yours and kind of touch on some of these themes that inspired you here? I know you open with a cover with that Buddy Miles Express’s “United Nations Stomp.”

Every now and again, we want to find a cover that we feel is appropriate for this group. Sometimes [you] find an obscure one that not a lot of people know about, that’s not a song that was very popular, so it was a cool one to pick out. Tony Hall presented it to the group and it was like, this is fucking badass, a Buddy Miles tune that a lot of people weren’t familiar with.

When we started playing it, a lot of people assumed that maybe it was our song, so we kind of made it ours in a way that was great to present on this record. There’s a positive message about some of the changes that we go through in this world and a lot of social injustices and things of that nature, and to try to present a message of hope in that song, it was a very cool thing. It brings me back to the music or like maybe the late 60s and 70s, like Sly and the Family Stone [where] they would talk about a bunch of stuff like that. The album Stand! had some music that meant a lot and it still means a lot. And maybe “Everyday People,” some of those songs that were talking about racial issues and social issues.

There’s a lot of records that you can go back to and be inspired by when people were saying things. Like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, that’s like a fucking landmark album, as well as Sly and the Family Stone’s Stand!, those are records that are timeless. When you see what they were talking about, and then you look at where we’re at now and how much we thought had changed in life and how much really had changed, it’s kind of eye-opening, you know? So when you do have a chance to say something, we say, well, why not? If you have a platform, like a song, a piece of music, that you can make a statement with, it’s not a bad thing. We’re fortunate that we get to do that.

It’s interesting that the album closes with “Justice 2020,” which to me feels like a proper bookend to that opening track. Where did the idea come from both for the song and to kind of sequence it like that? And also, how’d you get Charli 2na and Trombone Shorty to play on the track?

Actually, we had written that song four years ago, and this version is a reboot. We had a remix and we added the Charli 2na verse in there. Then Trombone Shorty, I’ve been knowing [him] since he was a kid coming around and sitting and playing with the Neville Brothers and stuff like that. He’s like New Orleans royalty and we got him to play on it, which is kind of an unspoken rule amongst musicians like you play on my stuff, I play on your stuff kind of thing and that’s kind of the way that works sometimes. If I’ve got a project, hey, come do a little something here and I’ll return the favor. I’ve been doing that kind of shit for years with different friends of mine. [Trombone Shorty] happens to have a studio literally a five-minute walk from my house.

The song was written four years ago and it was written in light of a lot of things that were going on at the time with some of the young black men that were getting fucking killed by police policemen and things of that nature. Here we are fucking four years later and during this past summer and all the shit that happened George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. It’s like it’s ongoing, this shit is happening too much around us. So we just had an idea to reboot the justice song again. Then we also had another election year as well, because when we put it out before it was on the heels of all of that stuff that had been going on with the Trayvon Martin’s of the world, and Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and that was four fucking years ago. When you think about shit that’s been going on for a lot of years, and obviously there are cell phones and things around now that make all this stuff more visible to everybody. So the shit’s been going on, man.

Do you think that music still carries that power? You talked about Marvin Gaye and Sly and the Family Stone albums that are timeless? Can we still in today’s media world have that impact with music?

I think music will always have the power to move people and music is a beautiful part of part of our lives. I don’t know what we would do without it. With that particular music, I don’t think anybody is going to make an album like that, like Stand! or What’s Going On. There are several records that were made back in the day that say a lot. There are songs that come to mind that spoke a lot about that same mindset and condition that’s still relevant now. You want to hope that there’s a lot of younger artists that are going to write more music that makes statements like some of that music. I mean, obviously, you can’t repeat that stuff [because it’s] just timeless classic shit, but I’m sure there’s a lot of musicians out there that are saying stuff.

You have so many talented band members in Dumpstaphunk, and what was the process like in the studio for this record, in terms of creatively who brought what to the table?

We basically take turns driving pretty much. I mean, that’s kind of how it is – we’re all in there together and everybody brings different aspects to the table. Like there’s some songs where I might write some lyrics, there’s some songs Nick [Daniels III] might show up with, and he’s got some choruses and some verses and whatnot, and we may come up with a chorus one day, and then the next two days later, and somebody might show up with some verses. It’s all up in the air. Everybody contributes equally, and in different aspects. Ian [Neville] might start a groove off with a guitar lick or something that becomes a song.

I think of one song called “Backwash” that came from an Ian lick. There’s no absolute formula for it, we just kind of express ourselves. A lot of the times when we used to do soundchecks for live gigs, we’d be at a club or a venue or whatever, and somebody might come up with a thing, and we might start playing some riff, which becomes a song. So there’s no absolute formula for it, we just kind of go in there and do what we’re doing and listen to one another. We’re all fans and we’re all music lovers, and we can we listen to each other, we love each other’s playing. Everybody’s contribution helps create as a whole what we do.

Were most of the tracks recorded live or did you do a lot of overdubbing?

Everything was recorded live, I mean, the basic tracks were recorded live, we were mostly in a room together and we played. There was some overdubbing here and there, like I might put a layer on a keyboard, put some synth stuff down or something. And there were things that we sat on for a while, and we came back and said, okay, let’s do this to that. In the latter stages of the production part of it, constructing the song is basically just kind of by chance.

I feel like it probably has to be a challenge to capture that live energy in the studio sometimes.

Yeah, it’s kind of a different thing. Obviously, when you got people and you’re performing live, that’s a different beast because the energy that you get from the audience is incorporated into the music that gets played at that time. The studio is definitely a different beast. But you know, it’s an absolutely beautiful and fun process to create something, develop an idea into a song, which is a beautiful thing, you know?

I’ve noticed in recent years that funk has become really popular, but it seems like it’s whitewashed. Do you have any thoughts on where funk music is now, as a genre created by African Americans, and is the proper credit being given?

That’s a hard question. We got contemporaries, and we got some of our friends that have been making music, like Lettuce, they’re doing some funky shit, and our buddies Galactic still doing the thing and Trombone Shorty is incorporating some rock and some funk together and he created a new spin on it. There are a couple of other groups that I’ve checked out recently – there are these guys Ghostnote that are doing some fucking serious shit. They’re fucking doing insane shit with some grooves and some musicality that is pretty fucking awesome. And then you got Corey Henry the keyboard phenom, who’s fucking soulful and plays his ass off.

Funk music is alive and well, with many different interpretations of it. You got fast groove funk, slow skanky funk, swampy, and then you got uptempo with lots of horns honking. But it all comes from the same sources to some degree. I mean, it all stems from that shit that James Brown was doing. Then Sly [Stone], what they did with mixing some rock and funk, and then what Parliament-Funkadelic did with it later on. And then you got a lot of groups out of the 70s like the Ohio Players and Earth, Wind and Fire, and Tower of Power. And many others saw that kind of laid the groundwork for what we can borrow from. We’re just borrowing still from shit that was already thought of. All we can do is try to expand on it as best we can.

Of course.

James Brown to me, that was like kind of the start of shit, you know, as far as I’m concerned. And then, us coming from New Orleans with my uncle Art [Neville] and his band the Meters had a brand of funk that did a syncopated, fucking skanky kind of thing.

Thinking back on the musical legacy of your family, which one of your uncles taught you the most musically?

It’s a combination of all of them because they all taught me different stuff. I can’t say that any one of them taught me any more than the other. I mean, I learned from all of them and my dad equally in different aspects, because I played in the band with the Neville Brothers. I was around all of them and I saw what they would get from each other. And obviously, Art being the keyboard player, playing with him and listening to him while I was playing, learning in the early days, was a big deal and that influenced me a lot.

Obviously, Charles was seemingly more knowledgeable musically than the rest of the brothers in it, how they learned from him, and how I listened to him, and listening to them listen to him. It was like all this shit, this musical gumbo and knowledge and just stuff. I was just absorbing all that shit and my uncle Cyril, he being closer to my age, he being the youngest brother, I mean, he and I had a lot more interaction when I was coming up and I would sit at his house sometimes and listen to a lot of music that I really learned to appreciate as well.

Art, Charles, Aaron, Cyril…it was just a fucking treasure chest of stuff, of like musical gifts. To this day, I’ll still listen to something. I’ll harken back to something that will remind me or I’ll hear something new in something that they had laid down a long time ago. I’ll say, why didn’t I notice that?

So I’m still learning from that stuff every day. I’m going to single Art out right now, because Art played that organ, and he played a lot of ghosty shit, and ghost notes kind of in some of that Meters funk, and he was doing this stuff. When you listen to that stuff now you’re like, damn, I didn’t hear that, and I’ve heard that song a fucking bazillion times, this is a song I’ve been hearing my whole life! And then I just heard something new that I had never heard before. So it is a beautiful thing to just be still learning. You know, just stay open-minded and you will keep learning, you know?

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