Kevin Devine’s Bulldozer & Bubblegum

A former Capitol Records recording artist, Devine has seen the music industry through major-label eyes as well as via indie goggles.  This month the natimve New Yorker who is also the frontman for Bad Books, released two albums – the politically charged Bubblegum and the more introspective Bulldozer.

We caught up with Devine while he was in Brooklyn waiting for rush hour traffic to diminish so he and his “Goddamn Band” could leave for Akron, Ohio – the first stop on his fall tour.

Since you mentioned driving to Ohio, what kind of transportation are you and the band using for this tour?

It’s a Sprinter van and a trailer.  There’s this company from [Crawfordville], Fla., called Rock-it Ships.  They have a fleet of re-outfitted, elongated Springer vans that they’ve built five or six bunks in.  It’s more comfortable than a 15-passenger van while not exactly being a bus.  Somewhere in the middle.

So it’s you and the Goddamn Band?

The Goddamn Band is kind of a loose catchall for anyone who I’m on tour with.  Whoever’s playing with me.  For this tour, including myself, it’s a four-piece rock band – bass, two guitars and drums. The bassist and the guitarist also sing backups.  We also have a front-of-house guy who’s going to do the majority of the driving and a merch guy who is also probably going to be the second-most frequent driver.  All of us do and will drive. For us … a two-person crew plus the band is kind of like the most luxurious tour setup we’ve ever had.  We’ve had a tour manager before doubling as a merch person but to have two people beyond the band … is pretty extravagant for our group.

Why aren’t more songwriters covering political issues these days?

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly political songwriter.  I write certain songs that are expressly and unambiguously dealing with certain social issues, my reflection on social issues.  But if you did an overall pie chart of my songs, I made eight records, made two with my band Bad Books and I was in a band [called] Miracle Of 86 before any of that.  We did two records.  Out of 150 songs or something, probably 10 percent of them are expressly socio-political in content.  As a result of that 10 percent … I’ve heard lots of people totally write me off and not be interested in my music because they heard one song that said something about a political idea that they disagreed with.  So they basically threw out the 140 songs that were about … love or family or stories you make up about the people you meet over the course of your day.

Perhaps one reason [for lack of politically oriented songs] is that [artists] are just trying to get people to listen to their music and there’s a bit of a fear of [saying] something that unintentionally offends someone’s sensibilities. Maybe … while more and more corporate centralization of the music happens, some of the same three or four parent companies have their fingers in more or less everything, everybody is more concerned about being marketable and palatable and those [political songs] aren’t marketable and palatable things to say in songs.

Also, on some level, it speaks to the multi-headed nature of social ills at this time. Not to say it wasn’t always that way, but things like the Vietnam war or the civil rights movement cast a wide net and were sort of a big ticket. Now it’s more … splintered. … these little camps you can rally around.  They’re not as big a magnet as they were in certain times in the history of purchased music.

You released two albums this month. Were both albums financed through Kickstarter campaigns?

We put up a Kickstarter campaign in the middle of January for 45 days with the intent of making these two records.  Bulldozer, which was called LP 7 for a long time, and Bubblegum, which was called LP 8 for a long time.

Were you apprehensive about using crowd-funding?

Yeah, I think the bulk of my apprehension came from seeing other Kickstarter campaigns that I felt maybe took advantage of certain artists’ stature or platforms.  Also, there were a couple of things going on at the time I mounted mine. One [was] the whole Amanda Palmer thing and one had to do with one of the guys from Animal Collective who had done one and after two years had never sent out anything. I was very conscious of a perceptional backlash and conscious of the possibility that if I screwed up and weren’t able to follow through on some of it [that] people were going to have my head.  I just thought there was a lot of risk involved. 

Plus, there’s the risk of mounting it publically, pushing it hard and having it not work. [That] could really be debilitating, especially this far into one’s career. It could definitely earn a perception that you’ve kind of run out of gas. That the traditional label structure wasn’t really working to propel your career in a meaningful way and then when you tried an outside model that didn’t work either.

I spent a lot of time turning it over, thinking about it and debating it in my mind and with the people I work with.  Ultimately what I decided to do was go forward with it but speak to all of that in the accompanying essays and video pieces. I wanted to talk about why I was making the decision to do it, what informed that decision but also all the misgivings I had going into it. Which in its own way was maybe kind of a risk because there are probably plenty of people who really don’t give a shit about stuff like that.  We run the risk of people not being super-interested and caring about the labyrinth … inner workings of how you got there.

Everything I was concerned about, basically, got obliterated in the first nine hours of the campaign.  It was the audience collectively being like, “Hey, dude. Calm down.  We just want you to keep making music and don’t think so much.”  And it was nice to get that [feedback].

Considering the response, you must have felt pretty good by the end of the first day.

I felt incredibly good.  This might sound like a little bit of “Golly gee, gumdrops” but I genuinely felt it was as much their achievement as mine.  I put up the thing and I spoke to what I spoke to and I guess more than anything the Kickstarter thing is best viewed as a standalone experiment and not a referendum on someone’s career.  But in my specific instance it turned out to be both. What it really felt like was the real core audience was basically validating the approach we had undertaken for the last 10 years of my career, and in specific the last six where I was sort of reacting from being dropped from the label structure after an 18-month flirtation in 2005-2007 where we had to knuckle down and figure what my career was going to look like if it wasn’t going to look the way we sort of thought.  That reaction from an audience perspective showed that they’d been keeping track and being connected and savvy.  It made me feel incredible and [gave me] a flush of wild gratitude.  But it also made me feel like they felt an ownership of and connection to it in a way that was almost like it’s theirs, too.  That’s the way I felt about the music I loved since I was a kid so if that’s the way they feel about me, whether I sell 200,000 records or I’m on the covers of magazines, any of that stuff is irrelevant.  That means I can have a life in music if I keep honoring that.

What kind of incentive packages did you offer in exchange for funding?

We went from one dollar to $4,000 with about 20 stops in the middle. Anyone who donated a buck got a free acoustic demo from one of the records the day the Kickstarter campaign ended.  We went up from there where you could order either record as a digital download, CD, vinyl or combinations of those three things. We did a Kickstarter exclusive bootleg vinyl 12-inch where people could only get it there.  It’s kind of a catchall – demos, b-sides and unreleased stuff from the last six records.  We did a T-shirt, we did a poster and then for some of the higher-up specific things, I would pick a book from my library, write a note about why it’s important to me and send it along with a deluxe package.  Skype conversations, come to a sound check, have a cup of coffee and hang out.  Guest list for life … two tickets to any headlining show … for as long as you want to keep coming.  I’d learn a cover and record it. Two people opted to come to Brooklyn, it’s going to be in December or January, and write and record a song together in a studio.  The highest [incentive] was a house show where you pick the setlist and the guest list and I’d perform at your house.

What is the creative process like for you?

It’s changed around a lot.  There’s not like one fixed way. It used to be much more words-centered, lyrics centered.  More like poetry, poetry might be lofty but something in that vein that would then get married to a guitar pattern or chord progression. I’d find the meter in a poem and translate it into a song.  I think over time I’m still very conscious of lyrical content.  It’s kind of like the first thing that got me into music.  But I also think I was made aware of the fact that I needed to strengthen my melodic and musical progression.  The last few records, a lot more of the time something will start with a guitar piece, a little riff or a chord progression.  I’d be walking around … doing something else and start singing something and realize like, “That’s a song I’m making up right now.”

Sometimes it would come with the lyrics, not the full thing, but sometimes I’ll start singing a line that sounded interesting to me or came from somewhere.  I read somewhere that Neil Young’s wife said he could be out at dinner and if a song comes he’s like, “Gotta go.” He follows it wherever it goes.

I’ve been trying to get better at clearing out space for that.  I think I’ve written a lot of songs but I also know there have been things over the years where I thought of something cool but when I went back to get it it wasn’t there anymore. These two records, for the Kickstarter campaign, the only abiding principle was like, “Any idea you have, finish it.  Sit down and make it a song. And if it’s stupid or not the right thing yet, that’s OK, it will get there.  And if it doesn’t, at least you’ve honored the process.”  I think that was really helpful.  Especially when you’re trying to write, like, 20-plus songs that you think are good and justify a release.  It moves around but for now it seems to start more with melody and less with lyric.

Did you show any signs of being good with words when you were growing up?

I remember being in second grade, 7 years old … and we had to write an essay about Ronald Reagan and why we loved the president. … I wasn’t politicizing or anything.  I … grew up in a Catholic household and the president was like Jesus or something.  They were these two people who were in my prayers every night.

So I wrote this essay about that.  I remember being called to the principal’s office and he asked me to read it over the intercom to the whole school.

I remember getting a big book, “The Borzoi Poe” by Edgar Allan Poe, in fourth grade.  And I’d write all these short stories, these sort of kiddie horror stories and read them in class. I remember my fifth grade teacher giving me a poetry USA book and getting me into Charles Dickens, like off the curriculum and stuff.

That was always my strongest thing and that was the thing I was most interested in – words, expression and stories.  I went to school for journalism and English. I have a bachelor degree from Fordham University.  It always seemed to click for me best within the context of song.  I write prose and I can do that well although I’m a little out of practice.  The words are there but the shape isn’t always.  I need an editor.  I’ve never been a short fiction writer and I don’t have the discipline to write novels.  Whenever I write short fiction I think it sounds like whatever I’ve just been reading.  Whenever I write songs, especially the older and more practiced at it you get, your influences are synthesized more seamlessly and it starts to sound more like you.  That’s kind of why I’ve stuck to that form over everything else.

You mentioned your book collection as one of the items involved with your Kickstarter campaign.  Do you consider yourself a heavy reader?

I feel like I could be heavier … but I do like to read.  Probably for most other people there is ample distraction from it.  There are all these screens to be looking at – refreshing your Twitter feed.

I do like to read.  I have been reading pretty much every day, “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace.  I’m resigned to and at peace with the fact that at the pace I’ve been reading it, I think I started in late May and I think I’ll be done with it around Christmas.  I’m about 670 pages in and it’s about 1,000 pages plus 100 pages of footnotes.  But it’s amazing. It’s digestible and very readable, but his brain was subsets of subsets of subsets of subsets of thought that he managed to somehow tie up. It’s a brilliant book. 

While reading it this summer I also read this book “Hit Men” which is like a history of the music industry up to about 1991 right before Nevermind came out.  It’s like six months prior to that whole movement in popular rock music.  That was fun and trashy and recommended to me about 10 years ago.

You’ve called the music business an “unstable industry.”  Care to expand on that?

What I’ve learned is that everything is an unstable industry now.  My brothers and sister, none of them are musicians.  One of them is a journalist, one works in finance and one is a freelance designer.  And all of their lives have been uprooted in terms of their work relationships at some point or another in the last five years. I think the music industry is an especially unstable microcosm for the culture and economy at large, and for better or for worse, what comprises modern capitalism.  I also just want to say in advance of this, I think being mad at the music business for being what it is, is like being mad at the weather or something.  It doesn’t misrepresent itself.  I made two records for small independent labels and then I got seen at CMJ in 2004 and someone offered me an opportunity to make a record for Capitol.  I was 95 percent sure based on the numbers and the kind of artist I am, that I wasn’t going to become a famous household name through Capitol.  I was pretty sure I’d get dropped [but] the things I told myself were like, “Built To Spill has done it, Modest Mouse has done it, Sonic Youth has done it, and Elliott Smith did it. … You can make a record for this label and find a little niche and be like the cool guy on a major label that doesn’t sell a lot of records but the press likes him.” That’s stuff I told myself and I got a little reinforcement from the A&R guy and the president of the company and the people that blow smoke up your ass. But I didn’t need much help.  I had already chosen the narrative that I wanted to believe to justify the decision despite overwhelming contrary evidence to the opposite.

These are my seventh and eighth records.  These are being made independently and released.  I have a relationship with a distributor and a couple of overseas labels will help me out in those territories.  But I own these.  Prior to this I had made six records and had been on five labels in America, two labels in Europe, two labels in the U.K.  There’s just a lot of turnover.  I have an audience and it slowly grows.  I have a presence and all that. But I’m not like a famous person and I’m also not a huge moneymaker.  Ultimately it’s the music industry, the music business. It’s not like hang-out art gallery collectives in someone’s garage. If you don’t make these labels money they have every right to not to be super-interested. Or if you’re going to be really challenging [for them] to figure out how you can make them money, the way the business is right now people don’t have the time or inclination for that.   Their turnover rates are super-high, too.

My experience is that it’s not a really friendly place at this point for artist development at that level.  I understand why. At a certain point I had to take a shot at something that would be more appropriate or more realistic or speak to my specific arch. That’s where we’re at now.

I kind of anticipated that no matter how successful the Kickstarter campaign would be, we’d have to take an operational step backwards at the actual release of the records and rollout.  Even if you’re on an ineffective record label there’s still a staff, there’s still people.  Theoretically, even if they’re not doing what you think they should be doing, they’re still there.  People to send [the album] to radio, people to send it to press, people to send it to marketing and distribution.

[I have my] managers John Mathiason and Antony Bland, Fred Feldman from Triple Crown Records who is interfacing with the distributors for us, Alissa Kelly (of PR Plus) who is doing press, and me – that’s a team of four or five people.  I just thought … we’re not going to be able to do what even an ineffective label, like the last one I was on, was able to do with 50 or 100 people.  But it’s the best rollout of an album we’ve ever had, the most visible … we’ll see how long we can sustain that.  It seems, so far, we have more momentum going into this tour and with these records.

Is there anything you want to tell fans about the tour that they may not be aware of?

Something most people probably don’t know because of the amount of time I’ve been making music, this is only the third full U.S. headlining tour I’ve ever done.  We did one for Brother’s Blood in 2009 and one for Between The Concrete And Clouds in 2011.  I think it feels different for me. It feels like there is more energy and focus. I think … the show is going to reflect it. I feel like it’s the rockingest show we’ve ever put on. It’s very focused on that side of my brain. We have a backdrop on stage.  For us that’s like busting out the Cher stage designer or something.  We’ve never had a visual component like that. … I think the pairing of us with the direct support band, a really wonderful group from Indianapolis called Now, Now, is a really great match.

I feel simultaneously more comfortable and confident and the least neurotic I’ve ever felt. Hopefully the shows are bracing musically but also loose and fun.

Upcoming shows for Kevin Devine:

Oct. 25 – Denver, Colo., Hi-Dive
Oct. 26 – Salt Lake City, Utah, Kilby Court
Oct. 27 – Boise, Idaho, The Shredder
Oct. 27 – Seattle, Wash., Vera Project
Oct. 29 – Portland, Ore., Backspace
Oct. 30 – San Francisco, Calif.  Rickshaw Stop
Nov. 1 – San Diego, Calif., Soda Bar
Nov. 2 – West Hollywood, Calif., Troubadour
Nov. 3 – Scottsdale, Ariz., Pub Rock
Nov. 5 – Austin, Texas, Stubb’s Bar-B-Q / Waller Creek Amph.
Nov. 6 – Dallas, Texas, Dada Dallas
Nov. 7 – Houston, Texas, Fitzgerald’s
Nov. 8 – New Orleans, La., One Eyed Jacks
Nov. 9 – Atlanta, Ga., Purgatory At The Masquerade
Nov. 10 – Orlando, Fla., The Social
Nov. 11 – Jacksonville, Fla., Jack Rabbits
Nov. 13 – Nashville, Tenn., High Watt
Nov. 14 – Charlotte, N.C., Evening Muse
Nov. 15 – Chapel Hill, N.C., Local 506
Nov. 16 – Richmond, Va., The Camel
Nov. 17 – Washington, D.C., Sixth & I Historic Synagogue
Nov. 19 – Columbus, Ohio, The Basement
Nov. 20 – Pittsburgh, Pa., Rex Theater
Nov. 21 – Philadelphia, Pa., Union Transfer
Nov. 22 – New York, N.Y., Webster Hall
Nov. 23 – Hamden, Conn., The Space
Nov. 24 – Boston, Mass., Brighton Music Hall
Nov. 26 – Atlanta, Ga., Center Stage Theater
Nov. 27 – Asbury Park, N.J., Stone Pony
Jan. 18 – Schorndorf, Germany, Manufaktur
Jan. 21 – Cologne, Germany, Blue Shell
Jan. 22 – Wiesbaden, Germany, Schlachthof
Jan. 22 – Munich, Germany, Kranhalle
Jan. 24 – Berlin, Germany, Magnet Club
Jan. 25 – Hamburg, Germany, Knust
Jan. 27 – Vienna, Austria, B72
Jan. 28 – Graz, Austria, PPC
Jan. 29 – Innsbruck, Austria, Weekender
Jan. 30 – Salzburg, Austria, Rockhouse Salzburg
Jan. 31 – Zurich, Switzerland, Rote Fabrik
Feb. 1 – Basel, Switzerland, Parterre
Feb. 4 – London, United Kingdom, The Lexington
Feb. 5 – Bristol, United Kingdom, The Louisiana
Feb. 6 – Manchester, United Kingdom, Soup Kitchen
Feb. 7 – Glasgow, United Kingdom,  Nice ’N’ Sleazy

Please visit KevinDevine.net for more information.