Before their show at The Rock Shop a couple weeks ago (that I reviewed here), I sat down with three of the guys from Deleted Scenes and picked their brains on what they think makes a good song, possible interpretations, and what the whole process is like for them. This is an intelligent group of guys, if not a bit self-deprecating, who have a clear vision for themselves. Read on after the break for an introduction to the band, the first chapter, and what’s next in the story of Deleted Scenes.
Kelly Knapp: Alright, so I’m here with Deleted Scenes, talking with Matt, Brian, and Dan. How did Deleted Scenes start?
Dan Scheuerman: Well, we’ve known each other since various grades in elementary school. We grew up in the same suburb in DC, so we’ve been playing in crappy rock bands our whole lives. Deleted Scenes started because we finished college and we decided to play music again and we didn’t know anybody else because we’re pretty shy dudes, so we called each other up and started playing again.
KK: How do you guys construct a song? Does everyone bring ideas to the band or is there one primary songwriter?
Matt Dowling: I’d say Dan’s primarily the songwriter, and he and I construct ideas and then present it to the band in a place where it has some kind of traction to it and we can get everybody involved. We’re not really a band that gets in a room and just starts jamming, it’s kind of like little free meditative structures.
KK: Your songs come out as really varied – none of the songs sound the same. Is that a reflection of your influences, or where do you draw from?
MD: We were just talking about this the other day. Most of the stuff we do, or whatever bands we’ve been in, its always varied. In some cases embarrassingly varied. I don’t know, I guess we do have a lot of influences. This kind of relates to the earlier question of how we started as a band, and Dan and I getting together and working out some songs he had written in college that he was doing on his own; on the side of other bands, and we were philosophically thinking about the songs as b-sides of the bands we liked, and it kind of fits in with the name Deleted Scenes. Dan came up with that name; I don’t know if that subconsciously had to do with the b-side idea.
DS: I think I said that making fun of us because our songs sounded like other people’s songs but not as good. I would say that’s an after-the-fact explanation. We’ve never set out to write songs that sound like other people’s songs. I think we just get really bored with one thing and we quickly move on and try to evolve as quickly as possible, and that’s why things change a lot.
KK: What do you guys think makes a good song? When are you satisfied?
DS: I don’t sign off on a song until I think the lyrics are really saying something. It could be somebody’s favorite song or it has all it’s tensions worked out in a very compelling way like a short story. I studied short story writing in college, and I was really bad at writing short stories, but I definitely learned how to edit the sh*t out of what I write, and that’s kind of the approach I take to writing songs. So that’s for me, but Matt won’t sign off on a song unless it’s really compelling structurally and rhythmically.
MD: Yeah, for me I feel like the song musically has to have a landscape – not necessarily a beginning, middle and end – but a landscape that’s kind of compelling…I don’t know, it’s hard to describe. You get better at it as you do it, and it’s something you kind of know; when it’s done it’s done. Generally, for me it has to do with the landscape of the song, that it’s just in some way compelling, I guess.
KK: Sounds like you guys are the perfect balance, with the story and then the composition.
MD: Yeah, to some degree that is a good balance, and it’s what I feel like has sustained us as a band for a while. And maybe part of the variance is that he doesn’t care enough about what the song sounds like as much as what the words are, so it leaves room for things to change a lot. For him, lyrically, a rap song and a country song could be on the same album if the lyrics are related, so it gives leeway for different styles. Brian, you have more of an outside perspective on it.
Brian Hospital: Do I?
MD: Well, you have more of a third party perspective on it.
BH: Well, I mean, if it’s got a good drum part!
KK: And that’s what you take care of.
BH: I try to! Well, you know, usually these guys will present something and have an idea of what the drums are going to sound like, and I just take that and hone it into what I would consider a complete drum part that’s well-organized, and has all the dynamics in the right place. Dynamics, I think, are a big aspect that might get overlooked at times, and you know, little subtle things that really it takes – for me, at least it takes – playing the song on tour, playing in the studio, demo-ing it dozens of times to really feel like it’s done. Usually. Sometimes the first go-through you’re like, alright it’s good. But usually it takes a long time until I feel like, ok I’m actually happy with it.
KK: You have to break it in a little.
BH: Yeah, and hear it from different angles and stuff.
KK: You’re based in DC now, and that’s where you started, but then you moved to New York and Baltimore…
DS: Two people live in DC now; two people live in New York. I lived in New York briefly, for a year. But we started in DC, yes.
MD: Yeah, Dan and I live in DC, and Brian and the other guy live here in Brooklyn.
DS: The other guy being Dominic Campanaro, guitar player.
KK: What are the major differences you’ve noticed between all those music scenes, and has that affected your sound as well?
BH: They’re pretty different.
MD: Pretty different, yeah. I mean, DC traditionally has the Dischord Records pillar that everyone aspires to, and there hasn’t been much in DC for a while that’s reached that level of notoriety.
DS: Yeah, I think a virtue in DC that you develop is lack of dreams. You sort of just do it for it’s own sake. You don’t expect to become famous because there’s no music industry in DC. These punk bands flare up and play house shows and then they die, and that’s sort of the rule. There’s no careerism in DC. There’s not a lot of phoniness, because everyone just seems to be doing it – I don’t mean to idealize; they’re not just doing it for the fun – but I think there’s a certain like, it’s not cool to be a star if you’re in DC, because it’s probably not gonna happen anyway.
MD: Even though there are plenty of DC bands that are sort of careerists. New York essentially has 95% of the music industry relevant to a band like us, and has a lot of really great bands, a lot of cool DIY venues. Then there’s the other side of the coin, like, I don’t know, the Manhattan bands that are signed to major labels. DC is very tiny compared to New York, in terms of bands. The sheer numbers of bands is like, many orders of magnitude higher in New York, but it’s kind been good for us to have a connection in New York, and meet bands up here and you know…we’ve played a lot of crappy shows, we’ve played some really great shows. Mainly crappy shows.
DS: And that goes to another thing about DC, is there’s this sort of get-in-a-van mentality, so you don’t worry about whether there’s a demand for your band, you just go on tour; so that’s what we’ve done. We’ve gone on a lot of tours that have been pitifully, badly attended.
KK: So you guys identify most with the DC scene.
DS: Definitely.
MD: When people think of us, they think of a DC band, and that’s really where our fanbase is. New York is sort of like…no one really cares about us in New York.
KK: You’ve played here a lot, though.
MD: Oh yeah, we’ve played here a lot (laughs).
BH: Well, one advantage of New York is that you can play it a lot. In DC we can’t play there more than once a month, once every other month, or else people are like, they won’t come see us. But New York is like…there are shows every night, and it’s kind of like what we’re doing right now. We’re just jumping on as many shows as we can up here.
KK: I think that’s great, because then it’s like, oh, I can’t go to this one but I can go to this one.
BH: Yeah, it doesn’t really matter up here so much because it’s already so saturated.
KK: It’s not like, ‘I missed their only night!’
BH: Exactly, so I guess we’re trying to use it to our advantage.
DS: Yeah, we have three shows in three nights.
BH: All in Brooklyn. Our Brooklyn tour.
KK: Your last album was Birdseed Shirt from 2008?
DS: 2009, but it actually got released – we did a CD release show – in 2008.
KK: Do you have something else in the works?
DS: Yes! We have two things: We have an EP coming out in July, and a full-length coming out in September. We’ve been chomping at the bit to get these songs out because we’ve been developing them for a long time.
MD: We finished the record in January.
KK: Did you have a lot of post-production to do?
MD: Just the process of producing the records and getting everything ready for tours, and press stuff and things like that.
DS: We want to do this one with an actual release. Last time we just started selling it, and we didn’t even promote it; we just booked a tour. Then some people started reviewing it and there was some sort of buzz behind it, but when we released that record there was no sense of promotion, so this time we’re going to take our time and we’re going to announce it ahead of time. I think that’s why it’s taking so much longer.
KK: What was the process like with recording the new album? Were you going for a different sound from the last one?
DS: We had the same producer, so there’s continuity. This time, the songs are a lot different; the songs are a little more focused. The last album we recorded over the course of a year, and it just took an incredibly long amount of time, so it’s a lot more all over the place. This one we recorded over a period of three months, so it’s more focused, it’s got more repeated elements throughout the album. All the vocals have a similar feel, a lot of the drums have a similar feel, the rhythms have a similar feel, so it’s not as totally bonkers. We wanted to limit ourselves to a small amount of time because we felt like (the first album) was maybe a little bit too all over the place. It’s cool, but you don’t put on a song off that album and think ‘oh, I’m listening to Deleted Scenes’ if you’ve never listened to Deleted Scenes. You think ‘oh, this is cool. Who is this? Who is this that I’m listening to, it’s really weird.’ Or maybe, ‘this sucks, I never want to listen to this band again!’ and then you listen to a different song and you think ‘oh this is cool!’
KK: (laughs) Whoa, who’s this??
DS: Exactly. It was more of a mixtape, and the new one is more of an album.
KK: What do you want people to take form your music?
DS: (sighs) Next question. I’ve tried to answer this question before, and I can’t do it. I prefer just to write the song. I want it to be important to them, as far as what they get out of it. Hopefully the songs are well-enough constructed that they can get a variety of experiences out of it and it will grow with them, and they won’t get any one thing out of it.
KK: Is it the kind of thing where you want people to interpret it however they feel?
DS: I have a very specific meaning for every song, but I also build multiple meanings into it. Because that’s part of life – ambiguity – so to reflect life accurately you have to build ambiguity into your work. If that sounds really pretentious, that’s because we’re in Park Slope.
(laughter)
BH: We have no choice. It’s permeating our existence.
KK: So it comes from one thing, and then it can kind of be interpreted multiple ways.
DS: Sure, and it’s not that there’s one right (way)…it’s like there’s poles. You can say that there’s one right interpretation, you can say that’s there’s any number of interpretations, but I disagree with both. There is a range of correct interpretations. The plausible range of interpretations is wide, but not super wide.
KK: Fair enough. So what else can we look forward to from you guys? Are you touring more after you release your new work?
MD: Yeah, we’ll do a tour in July around the EP release, and then in September we’ll do the record release and tour around that.
KK: All in the U.S.?
DS: We’re doing some Canada dates too.
MD: We’d like to do some European dates too, we just haven’t figured out a way to make that happen yet. But another thing about the band is that we play a lot, given that the band thus far has only released an EP and a full-length, we’ve done quite a bit of shows off of that, and we’ll continue doing a lot more.
Deleted scenes are making good on that promise and playing in Brooklyn again June 19th at Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg. Check out their calendar for more dates, and look out for their EP in July and LP in September.
