Kevin Devine is primed to kick off an impressive run of Australian tour dates, both solo and with the magnificent Manchester Orchestra and while still at home in New York, he chatted with Larry in length about the highs and challenges of being a touring musician in today’s music climate, new music and more!
What’s the day to day life for you, off the road?
Doing what I do at the level I do it is sort of like running a small business. And I feel like, especially when it’s been a seasonably warm Fall, it feels like a crime to be in your office or apartment or where ever you are, for six or ten hours replying to e-mails. You have to make a concerted effort to get away. Even if it’s just to go outside for a bit to soak some of that up and stay sane.
I think the perception is that people think that the musicians life is that we sit around and watch TV all day… and I don’t want to skirt complain, at this point this is just what I do. I didn’t get up at 7am today and trek into Manhattan, to wage war until 6pm and then commute back to be home at 8pm. There are days when you can sort of go… well, fuck it! I’ll do it tomorrow. But you’re still in this business where you’re on call all the time. But I do think there is more flexibility, you can structure your day a little differently. So I’m not complaining! But there’s defniitely work to be done, all the time.
It’s that saying that you work an 18 hour day so you don’t have to work the eight hour day!
*laughs* That’s exactly right!
Can you tell me a little bit about the “She Can See Me” 7″ that’s about to come out and the partnership this is debuting?
We put out (my two simultaneously released records) Bubblegum and Bulldozer a little over a year ago now. In Australia it came out in March. On it there’s a track called “She Can See Me” and it reminded me of a Vasaline song, a naieve song about complicated feelings. Simply lyrics, simple pop structures, but about big things. I wrote it and thought that if I did it in a certain way it would sound like Belle & Sebastian. And if you did it in another way it could sound ilke Nirvana. I feel like Vaseline splits the difference between the two. Things could be quite twee or punky twee. So I thought, since each of these albums are two distinct animals, I though why don’t we put one song on both records. And that seemed to be the obvious choice.
Bulldozer was meant to be a folk rock record, and Bubblegum was meant to be more noisey, punk pop record. I think I got there with Bubblegum, but Bulldozer ended up sounding more like Nada Surf or The Lemonheads. It got a little spritlier than Belle & Sebastian.
I even heard a bit of Pixies in there…
Yeah, exactly. So the records may have moved a bit closer to each other than I intended initially, but they’re still pretty distinct versions. I think it’s one of the most accessible tracks on the record. it’s god a simple, repeated chorus, and a strong melody. It’s under three minutes. It’s not a challenging song to listen to. So my thought was from forever ago that I’d like to make that one of the “singles”. And I’d like to do a limited edition double A-side 7″. With one version on each side, and you get someone to do some neat artwork for it, and you make it something that’s essentially a piece for collectors. Anyone who already has the records already has both songs, so it’s not like you’re putting out anything new. But you’re making it its own standalone release.
So Thomas Nassiff and Zack Zarrillo have a label called Bad Timing Records, and they both have day jobs with a blog called Absolute Punk. So we partnered up (with my label Devinyl) and we have a bunch of plans for 2015, which involves some new music and some re-issuing of some older material of mine that’s out of print. It’s be this year and a half long plan between our labels which helps us in the sense that there’s someone to bounce creative ideas off, production decisions off and there’s someone to help finance it, who knows the world in which we tread. And it helps them in the sense that they’re having a productive and visible artist partnering with them, right out of the gate. So that’s what the 7″ release is.
I think we put it up for pre-order at Noon on a Thursday and I think half the run had gone by 5pm that day. There’s something to be said for that, a release with two songs that are already available and have been for almost 13 months. That’s not a bad starting point. And the artwork is beautiful, we did a day/night theme. Bulldozer version is the day, Bubblegum being the night. Our buddy Jordan Noel who’s an artist and video director from Athens, Georgia, he made the cover art and then we made two music videos, one for each version of the song. They’re mirror versions of one and other, meant to be played on a loop, again on a day/night theme. The first of those is about to premiere, to coincide with the official release of the single. So it’s a pretty cool piece to peg our Fall around here.
Altnation, one of the commercial Satellite Radio stations around here, is playing it around four times a day. Which for someone like me, who never gets on the radio, is something you’d normally pay thousands of dollars to get someone to make happen for you. But they were fans and I just sent it along directly and they put it in rotation! So I was happy to see that there was still some juice in these records a year after they’d come out.
The fact that the single has sold as quickly as it has, too, reflects the lifespan of the record, with the crowdfunding campaign kicking off its release in the first place. Fans getting behind it and getting behind you.
Yeah, it literally exists because of my fans. I mean we would have found a way to make and release this music either way, and there would probably have been a record label to put out the next Kevin Devine record, but I don’t think there would have been one who would have put out both. Or done it the way that we wanted to do it. And I think that… a lot of the things that I ended up doing on my own in executing the plans for this record are things that I probably would have gotten push back on from the label, or the label would have lost interest…
There’s a lifespan to these records and they get shorter and shorter each year. It used to be that you’d get 12 to 18 months out of a record, inclusive of touring and the release of your singles. And as things broke, you might get two years out of an album. And now, you’re really looking at 10 month intervals – and that’s kind of a long cycle. So when we put these records out at first, there was a bunch of press, we charted on Billboard. There was a song charting on XM Radio, there was a tour, there was a lot in the beginning. And then, as is the law of averages when you’re putting out indepdent music at the level of which we are, it starts to get quiet. And unless something catches, unless something transitional happens into your career, you have to start thinking about the next phase in your career.
But when you’re putting out your own record and you have a likeminded team, now we can figure out how to make this thing last. My vision was that I’d be on tour and doing things related to these records until May of next year. And it kind of seems like that’s what’s going to happen. I did learn though that no matter how ardent your fan base is, or how creative you get with that stuff, it doesn’t mean that you are exempt from the gravitational laws of the music industry as they exist. And we mapped it out as well as possible – we had a big support tour with Manchester Orchestra, full US tour, playing to 500 to 3000 people a night. Big shows off the back of Cope. And we put out another single, “Little Bulldozer” and made a really cool video for it. We released it in the UK and Europe and toured that region. Eventually released it in Australia and now coming over to tour there. But we still saw that it was hard to keep eyes on your project after a certain amount of time. We might get 60,000 plays of the first single but then 20,000 of the second on YouTube…
It’s this hard balance of being visible but not oversaturating people. Letting fans miss you, without going away for too long. It’s a lot of navigating. But we wouldn’t have been able to do any of this stuff the way we’d done it if it hadn’t come out off the back of the Kickstarter thing. It’s very literally a fan driven experience in that way.
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Kevin Devine will be kicking off his upcoming Australian tour in Adelaide on November 10th with a FREE SHOW at Argo On The Square to celebrate the release of a new coffee courtesy of Adelaide’s own Hobbledehoy Record Co & Monastery Coffee
You can RSVP here: http://on.fb.me/1x2eu0W
Kevin will also be playing two solo shows as well as a few dates with Manchester Orchestra!
You can check out the dates and where you can pick up tickets below:
*Kevin Devine Solo* TUESDAY 11th NOVEMBER–CROWBAR, BRISBANE 18+
Tickets available at http://tinyurl.com/q2jxmrq
*Manchester Orchestra & Kevin Devine* November 12 – BRISBANE @ THE HI-FI – http://bit.ly/1nHKYOE
*Manchester Orchestra & Kevin Devine* November 13 – MELBOURNE @ CORNER HOTEL – Sold Out
*Manchester Orchestra & Kevin Devine* November 14th -MELBOURNE @ CORNER HOTEL http://bit.ly/1owKHsJ
*Manchester Orchestra & Kevin Devine* November 15 – SYDNEY @ METRO THEATRE – http://bit.ly/1pJN0hJ
*Kevin Devine Solo* SUNDAY 16th NOVEMBER –NEWTOWN SOCIAL CLUB, SYDNEY 18+
Tickets available at http://tinyurl.com/pn2wltm
You can RSVP to the solo shows here: http://on.fb.me/1mLQtex
See more at: http://www.kevindevine.net/
