By Matt Jarrard
I first met Dare Dukes the same way I first meet most of the people I interact with as a local musician, electronically. This was 2007, so my preferred method of communication and new music discovery was myspace.com. Dare was in the process of moving from NYC to Savannah GA and wanted some tips on booking some shows in Savannah. He introduced me to his songs, and I introduced him to my Savannah buddies. I’ve always admired Dare’s musical and personal style, and anxiously await each record he puts out. The songs on his latest release, Thugs and China Dolls, run the gamut of fun, focused, beautiful, and heartbreaking. Dare just inked a deal with Athens based Marazine Records (Hope for Agoldensummer, PacificUV, Electrophoria), who will be releasing the new record. 
When Dare comes to your town, don’t miss him, I’m sure you’ll hang on every word…just like I do. Atlanta will have that chance at the Highland Ballroom Lounge on January 21st, he’ll be playing with locals Book Club (my band) and The Georgia Fireflies. Via email (I deleted my myspace account long ago), I asked Dare some questions about his music and new record.
MJ- Congrats on the new record! It sounds terrific! Tell me a bit about the process of making Thugs and China Dolls, compared to your first album.
DD – The first record was sort of a fluke. I was about to leave NYC, and before moving I wanted to capture what I’d been doing with my bandmates. We’d been playing out in the city for a couple years, and it was the first band I’d had in maybe 10 years, and I liked what we’d been doing. So we recorded basics very simply with no pressure of actually releasing anything. Then I moved to Savannah, and a couple months later I heard the tracks and was amazed at how great they sounded. So I took my computer and my mBox and a mic into the attic and started layering and layering, and I recorded a couple more songs, including a brand new one. I released it, and a lot of people liked it, and my circle of fans expanded beyond my friends, much to my shock and glee.
The big differences with the second record: 1) It was planned, 2) the instrumentation is largely acoustic, 3) there are truckloads of musicians playing on it, 4) I recorded it in Athens, and 5) I’m a much more confident band-leader, song-writer, and arranger now. Oh yeah, and 6) I had a co-producer in Suny Lyons, and, on one song, a producer in Jim White.
Did it go as planned? Not really. I had hoped to record entirely with one band so that it’d be simple to recreate the studio arrangements on stage. But band-members came and went, and the songs evolved, and I wanted to hear instruments that didn’t exist in my standing band. The acoustic dominance of instrumentation is the way it is mostly because that’s what I had to work with in my standing band when I started. Because those instruments were in my band, I wrote songs with them in mind. Banjo and accordion, especially. But then I wanted a lot of horns, so I tracked them on many songs, as well. And because I recorded it in Athens with a ton of Athens musicians (save for all the horns [Brooklyn] and Marla Hansen [Berlin]), it feels to me like an Athens record. Confidence: it helped me go way out of my comfort zone both in scope of songs and arrangements, as well as in my ability to work with some really talented musicians and look them in the eye. And that confidence helped me with especially with Suny and Jim White, both extraordinarily talented fellows who did wonderful work on the record–and both of whom have huge ideas and big personalities that could have easily crushed me if it had been my first record.
MJ – You seem to have gathered a great group of musicians to play on this album with you, tell me about some of their contributions, and how those connections came about.
DD – Well, um, I think I can trace all the Athens characters back to two people: Claire Campbell (Hope for Agoldensummer) and Kevin Sweeney (Sunshine Fix, Hayride). Claire is a very generous soul, and she introduced me to Suny, just as he was opening his studio, Popheart Productions. She and everyone she lives with (JoJo Glidewell [Modern Skirts] and Thayer Sarrano [of Montreal]) are on the record in big ways. And Kevin, whom I had the great pleasure of playing with a couple times, convinced Jim White to put me a bill of his. Jim and I hit it off, and when one of the songs wasn’t tracking well, I took him up on his offer to produce one of my songs. I was about to throw the song out I was so unhappy with how it was turning out. He turned it into something beautiful and surprising, and captured exactly how I’d always felt it. And he’s been incredibly supportive in other ways, as well. E.g., I crashed at his house more times than I can count, and his piano is on the record in several songs.
When I hired Suny I thought I was hiring an engineer. What I got was a co-producer and a multi-instrumentalist who edits in ProTools like he’s playing video games. Suny was a joy to work with. He’s very kind and soft-spoken, but he usually has very strong opinions and big ideas, which I really appreciate. I don’t always like or agree with his idea, but his willingness to throw them out gives me something strong to work with and, because of that, the songs evolved in unpredictable and dynamic ways, ways that I couldn’t have planned. And it’s one big reason why this record sound so different from the first one.
I wish I could list all the players. They all did such amazing work. My standing band is fantastic, and I’m honored to play with them: Chris VanBrackle (mandolin, banjo), Blake Helton (drums), Anna Chandler (vox), and Phillip Reynolds Price (keys). Daniel Beauregard and Andrew Smalls both did amazing upright bass work. I recorded all my horns in Brooklyn, where I new I could easily capture what I wanted. My friend and amazing Trombonist Kevin Moehringer, who played on my first record, had just tracked for TV and the Radio’s record, and he assembled the very same horn section for me. And a friend, Marla Hansen, has a huge presence on the record. I met her at an open mic night in the East Village years ago, right after I started taking my music seriously again after a long hiatus. She went on to record and tour with an incredible list of people (Sufjan Stevens, the National, My Brightest Diamond, DM Stith, Kanye West, to name only a few). And when I was struggling to find a female voice that could nail one very tricky song, I thought of her. We emailed her the tracks in Berlin, Germany, where she lives with her fiance. After the first song worked out so well, we tracked her vocals and viola on several songs. Thank god for the internet.
MJ – Travel and (more specifically) mass public transportation seem to be themes which surface in a lot of your songs, why do you think that is?
DD – I have no idea. My best guess is that travel and transportation are in my soul because I grew up in California. Travel and transportation also figure prominently in the 1 ½ novels I’ve written. Roads and migration have a very different place in the landscape in the West then they do in the East. The landscape, and therefore the culture, is largely defined by them. Re-invention is expected, running away or chasing a dream is expected. And with all that movement there are many, many interstices, places to get lost between two points, where amazing and horrible self-erasures and marginalization can happen. When you layer the franchise “culture” on top of this, things get deeply weird very fast.
MJ – I think you’re an accomplished chorus melody writer…Lament of the Subway Rider and The Lesson have been especially hard for me to shake, likewise with Lucas Goes to the Demolition Derby and Sam’s Cathedral from your first album. Do you have any specific melody writers who have especially inspired your knack for writing a lingering tune?
DD – This is hard to say. My melodies are not at all intentional. They pop into my head. The lyrics usually require a great big ugly and lonely effort, but the melodies alight on me from out of nowhere. My melody heroes in pop music are David Bowie, XTC, Tom Waits, Kurt Weill, The Clash, The Pixies, Laura Veirs, Neil Young, Sparklehorse, Nick Cave. I could go on.
MJ – After some Googling, I now understand the context of Jim Eggers’ Parrot a bit better. Can you save everyone a bit of time and explain the story of Jim, and what about his story inspired you to write a song about he and Sadie?
DD – I read about Jim Eggers’ in a New York Times Magazine piece about a new generation of service animals (apparently miniature horses are much better seeing eye animals than dogs). Jim Eggers’ has a rather extreme case of bipolar disorder with psychotic tendencies. He has violent outbursts and has been jailed for threatening an archbishop on the phone.
He took in a badly neglected African grey parrot, which he named Sadie. According to him, soon the bird began sensing when he was beginning to spin out of control. It would say things like, “It’s alright Jim. Everything’s gonna be okay. I love you Jim.” The bird would calm him down. So now he carries it around in a cage on his back, and the parrot acts like a kind of mediator for the troubling reality he experiences. Like an angel. It’s an amazing story. And to add another nuance, Radio Lab did a story on him (which I didn’t hear until after I wrote the song) that suggests it’s possible Jim is only hearing the parrot’s voice. That somehow he’s projecting a nascent conscience onto the parrot, which, of course, is no less fascinating.
I like writing songs about interesting characters from our world. They force me to step outside my trivial daily experience. You know that advice they give budding writers? “Write what you know”? I know what they mean, but I think that’s the worst possible advice to give an artist working in any medium. That is a very precise and effective formula for killing your imaginative capacity. Actually, I suggest you write what you don’t know. There’s an amazing novel from the 70s or 80s called How German Is It? by a writer named Walter Abish. It’s a book whose main character you could say is Germany. And he’d never been there. He just imagined it.
MJ – Writing about one’s community, and not just one’s self, has always struck me as a sign of a mature songwriter, and I think that’s something you do well. Old West Broad is a good example of this. How did living in Savannah bring about that song….and what other ways have living in the deep south inspired and frustrated you?
DD – I should preface this by saying that I don’t think Savannah or the South have cornered the market on bad things, like structural racism. Savannah’s history, for sure, is stark for obvious reasons, but I don’t think the North or the West get a pass just because slavery didn’t happen there.
Savannah is one of the most beautiful, most exotic, and weirdest places I’ve ever lived. I didn’t realize just how weird until I’d lived here a couple years. In many ways, good and bad, it’s a hundred years behind the rest of the country. I still can’t believe some of the things I see while driving down the street–incredible beauty juxtaposed with images of poverty that are unreal. One of the weirdest and most counter-productive forces here is the drive to turn the historic district into a museum, a simulacrum of a pretty antebellum South where there’s next to no representation of the history of slavery and no room for an aesthetics of the new (though Banana Repbulics and McDonalds are fine, apparently). As an outsider, it’s extraordinarily glaring. The other thing that’s painfully apparent is how race and class are conflated here. Savannah has a very high poverty rate–almost 22%–and something like 80% of those living below the poverty level are African American. This stark fact, of course, doesn’t worm its way into the museum zone. But you have to drive only a couple of blocks east or west of the tourist center to be smack in the middle of some of the poorest neighborhoods in America. And this isn’t Robert Moses poverty. This is old poverty, shotgun-shack poverty like you see in old footage of President Johnson’s War on Poverty.
West Broad used to be the name of what’s now, ironically, called MLK Boulevard. When MLK was West Broad it was a thriving center of African-American business and culture. Apparently there were some amazing jazz clubs there in the 60s. And I think it was a Jewish center, as well. Then, like in many an urban center across the US in the 70s, they built a flyover from an Interstate that literally cut the neighborhood in half. Then the population was displaced, Robert Moses-style, into dreary public housing that, if you squint, looks like a prison. They killed a neighborhood in the name of progress. I used this event in “Old West Broad” as a way into treating the stark juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness in Savannah. Very challenging.
MJ – In addition to Thugs and China Dolls, you just released a couple Christmas songs. They sound great! What’s your favorite (more traditional) Christmas song and why?
DD – I love Silent Night and Little Drummer Boy and that weird duet that David Bowie and Bing Crosby did and any song from the Rankin/Bass Christmas claymation epics (e.g, “Put One Foot in Front of the Other”!)
MJ – What’s next for you? Tour? Another record in the works yet?
DD – Working on the tour! Five, maybe 6, of us are going on the road. We have some amazing shows set up–including an 800-seat theater in Louisville. See http://daredukes.com/events
Also, I’m toying with the idea of doing a whole new project, a whole new band, with a very select cast of characters, in which I would be the songwriter but not the front man. I sort of want to hear my songs sung by other people. I’ll start working on this in March, when I get back from tour.
