In early August, The Damnwells released Bad at Beautiful, their first studio album since their 2015 self-titled release. Having no specific plans to release an album, initially, releasing a single track produced such a big reaction on social media that they used Kickstarter to crowdfund an entire album, making for a very organic process. Significantly, the album features all the members of the original band who formed in Brooklyn in 2000, songwriter and vocalist Alex Dezen, bassist Ted Hudson, guitarist David Chernis, and drummer Steven Terry, and the making of the album was very much a collaboration in writing and recording. The album also features Morgan Wade and Aaron Lee Tasjan.
Alex Dezen is a prolific songwriter, with several projects underway alongside working as a Producer, including the Punk band he co-founded with his wife Amber Bollinger and NHD, a songwriting trio. Always working, whether on his own or with others, for him, The Damnwells is a unique opportunity to find a synergy with other members of The Damnwells and create something that arises from the combination of their personalities and sounds. I spoke with Alex Dezen about teaching, self-discipline, working together as a band, and about the development of some of the songs that we find on Bad at Beautiful.
I saw you’d taken some time teaching while pursuing graduate studies. Everyone I’ve known who’s taught, even if it’s just for one semester, has found that it changes them.
It really does. I know a lot of people who don’t like teaching because it takes too much time away from their art, but when I was in Iowa, I thought I preferred that to writing. [Laughs] Writing is this lonely endeavor where you’re just sitting there looking at a blank page most of the time. But a classroom’s intention is very rich and profound, even when it’s not going that well.
It’s in motion, and anything can happen, because it’s in motion.
Yes, absolutely.
For the album, Bad at Beautiful, and the songs on it, you didn’t even know that album was going to happen, did you? Though you write a lot for various projects, maybe you weren’t even thinking about demos for The Damnwells. Or are there always things you put in a bucket, just in case?
There’s always stuff in a bucket, for sure, although I think I may have exhausted the bucket at this point. There are titles or an idea. I think the intention with The Damnwells is for the four of us to be able to do something together since it’s our brotherhood, so to speak. There’s no real force that’s pushing us together other than our friendship and fraternity. So, I don’t write Damnwells songs unless there’s an impetus to do so.
Steve Terry, our drummer, is always the guy who says, “We should do another record.” He loves to play, and he’s really good at taking an idea of mine and turning it into something more exciting. On the self-titled album we did, it really crystallized for me how important he is in crystalizing the song in the way that it will be presented to the public. When I write songs, I write with an acoustic guitar and we make it louder. With Steve, though, he’d make it louder or quieter, but he’d always make it more interesting.
With Dave [Chernis], too, when I was a young 20-something, I think I always kept him on a leash. I had ideas back then of what I wanted The Damnwells to sound like, rather than just letting it be what it is. With Dave, I realized that left to his own devices, he comes up with great lyrical parts. Sometimes I feel like my songs are just an accompaniment to his parts! The same thing with Ted [Hudson], I think that he brings a surprising element to the way that he either stacks his rhythm with Steve, or the way that he diverges from it. Rock ‘n Roll is such a simple equation, but the slight turn of the screw suddenly makes it more interesting. I think when I was younger, I didn’t appreciate that, because I was chasing something that was in my head, or that I thought that people wanted from me. Allowing a band to just be a band is maybe the hardest thing ever.
Music is so mysterious, it doesn’t make sense to try to control every aspect of it. It makes sense to allow things, surprising things, to arise in collaboration.
That’s true. But one thing I was lucky enough to be taught in graduate school was discipline. I think when I was younger, I had energy, so I would stay up all night working on a song. But as you get older, you just don’t have as much time. Being disciplined is kind of the only thing that you can learn. It’s kind of like working out. No one wants to start working out, but once you create a pattern and a schedule for yourself, it’s a lot easier to slip into that behavior that yields a positive outcome.
When I was in graduate school, I had deadlines, and I really wanted to finish the things I was working on, so I would sit and do it. I got a lot of great advice from my professors, like “Don’t finish what you’re writing for the day. Don’t work with a blank page.” So I would do this thing where even if I knew how something would end, I would stop. I wouldn’t finish the idea, so when I came back to it the next day, all I had to do was solve the equation. I wouldn’t have to come up with a whole idea.
I have heard that before. It really breaks the ice, whereas sitting down to a blank page is really some thick ice to deal with. A lot of people struggle with where to start, and this bypasses it. It changes the atmosphere. Also, making room in our lives for creative work is increasingly difficult, so discipline helps.
It is. Even making time to read in this world is so difficult, and I try to read at least once a day. I’m reading two books at a time. It’s good for my mind! People think I’m saying I have a big brain when I talk about it, but that’s not it. It’s what people used to do before social media. It’s like running on the treadmill. You’re not trying to run a marathon, you’re just trying to keep the mind moving.
By the way, I think I’m hearing in this new group of songs, some of the different elements that you were talking about with Steve, Dave, and Ted. There’s plenty of room for each of those elements, and they all have their space on these songs. There’s a mobility there.
Ultimately, the responsibility of the leader of a band is to know how to not lead at times. Me giving them room to do that, I think, is really important. If someone’s in a leadership position, it’s their responsibility to let them drive the ship sometimes. It’s a form of democracy. The worst thing that you can do for someone, too, is intimidate someone during their creative process. Sometimes, when I’m in the studio working with artists [as a Producer], they get nervous because studios are this sacrosanct, holy ground for a lot of the music these artists have been inspired by. They walk into the studio, and see all these machines, and freeze up. I try to facilitate that bridge between the dream-like child inside of them, and the bank of compressors that can be extremely intimidating, that go from the floor to the ceiling.
I saw that “Pretty as Pittsburgh” was a song where you’d had an idea about it for a long time. Was it difficult to decide, in the end, what to write?
I think it was difficult to just show up and do the work that the song needed. It just needed to be what it is, in the same way that “Atlantic City” needed to be what it is for Bruce Springsteen. It’s a song about a place, but about a relationship. I needed to see that relationship in the song. It was hard work, and I didn’t want to do it! [Laughs] When I sat down with my discipline, and did it, it worked out.
The sound on that song is quite subtle, sometimes delicate. It has a lot of atmosphere.
Dave had this great mandolin part, particularly at the end. Some of the guys wanted it to be a little more rocky, but I wanted it to be rocking without a loud guitar feel. I think it just kind of happened naturally. I liked the way that the guitar line opened the song with no bass. It felt like an over-enthusiastic guitar, and I liked that because in a relationship, there’s always someone who’s way more over-zealous than the other at times.
It creates a lot of contrast.
Yes, but it’s Pop music, so it’s not particularly experimental. I think little things like that, to me, make the music a bit more exciting. It has an anti-opening, and a kind of anti-ending, where things get smaller, sonically. From a Producer’s point of view, I feel like I want to give people what they want, but I also want to challenge them in a way that gives them something they weren’t expecting. Stuff like that feels minor, but it adds to a collective emotional presentation.
I actually felt a lot of those things with several of those songs. What I was thinking was that a few of these songs, particularly “Pretty as Pittsburgh”, is that they remain a little unsettling and unresolved. But the gentleness of this one makes it palatable.
What’s interesting, too, going back to the collaboration that we were talking about, is that when Ted sent in his bassline for that song, the last note was unresolved. And that was before we had really put in all the other pieces. Ending on this unresolved note sort of reverberated backward through the rest of the Production. It was born of the collaboration between the four of us. That’s exciting to me.
The song “Bad at Beautiful” is quite different, and stripped down feeling. What was the impetus behind that song?
It veers away from explaining why someone is “bad at beautiful”, but it was a meditation on what that is like. It winded up becoming non-confessional, but more narrative, as opposed to some of the other songs. “Without a Heart” and “One Way” are more confessional and professes something. But I’ve always loved songs where people say things that sound profound, but they are really just the exploration of an idea.
It’s a good distillation, that intensifies the idea. It brings together all this intense stuff that we might associate with being “bad at beautiful”, but I think that people have this feeling often. They’ll recognize it, even if it usually remains unspoken. The very direct vocals help.
I think something like that is where I was at. I think, with that song, I kind of did it on my own and presented it as what I thought would be a good title track. Often within The Damnwells, this has happened, that when we’re getting near the end of an album, I sort of gather what we’re doing sonically and thematically, and I make a song like that, by myself.
You seem to want the album to be a related body of work, and I can see how this song brings things together.
Oh, yes. Most people don’t think that way about albums anymore since it’s not what streaming wants. But I’m so steeped in that world, that it’s very hard for me to think of a continuous reem of singles that goes on, in perpetuity. That sounds like a nightmare to me, unmoored, and random. I know the first Beatles album was just a compilation of their singles, but it’s not as good as Rubber Soul! It just isn’t! [Laughs]
Well, I agree, because that’s my favorite album of theirs.
Or Sgt. Pepper, or The White Album! I think bands should make albums. Albums where there are songs that are born at the same time.
