Dean Wareham on Movies, Covers, and the Advantages of Connectivity

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Been a huge fan of Dean Wareham since discovering Galaxie 500 as a teenager and keeping up with his output as part of Luna as well as the Dean & Britta records (L'Avventura from 2008 remains a personal fave). He's got a great new solo album out next week, That's the Price of Loving Me, and it reunites him in the studio with Galaxie 500 producer Kramer for the first time since the Galaxie swan song This Is Our Music 34 years ago. I was very excited to talk to Dean for all of these reasons and the ensuing convo did not disappoint. Check it out:

Tell me about working with Kramer again. From the press materials, it seems like you guys have remained in touch even as you didn't work together for a while.
For a while we weren't in touch, maybe since the '90s. He played a Hammond solo on the first Luna record and then we kind of fell out of touch. During the pandemic, we had him mix a Dean and Britta track for us, and that came out really well. He just kept reminding me periodically, "Hey, we really should make a record together. It's crazy that we haven't." And maybe he's right.

We never had a falling out or anything. He also recorded something with Britta as well. He's a busy, very active person. He has a lot of energy. When I look back to the Galaxie 500 days, we'd come in and maybe he wouldn't be ready for us—he was running a label. It's only when I was running a label myself that I realized how much work that entails, on top of everything else.

He lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He was in Florida—outside of Miami—and he wanted to escape the hurricanes and the politics. Right after we finished this record, he went back to Asheville and they got clobbered. But he came out here and stayed in a spare bedroom downstairs, and every day we'd make him oatmeal for breakfast and go out to the studio and work a very focused eight hours.

Sometimes, when you're in a band, the more records you've made, the more time you waste. You'll get to the studio and will do anything to not get to work. But we didn't do any of that. We went in the studio—Lucy's Meat Market, a fantastic studio—and everything was set up. The drum kit was mic'd and ready to go, which is very nice, because usually when you start a record you spend four hours checking the kick and the snare drum. It's very deflating. But we were working within an hour. We recorded five songs on the first day, and five songs on the second day.

You know, Kramer has really kept up with the new technology. I think he's a better mixer now, but I feel like his real talent is arranging. He's a pretty amazing musician in a way that I'm not. He'd have a plan for the songs. I offered to send him demos, and he said he didn't want to hear them because if the songs get in his head ahead of time, his ideas for arrangements start to get less interesting. Working with him isn't like sitting there doing the same guitar part for four hours—you're doing it quickly.

It was the same in Galaxie 500, really. I only ever did one take of a guitar solo back then. This time, it was maybe up to two. He'd be like, "Can you start somewhere else on the neck?" and that's it, we got it. You can spend a lot of time searching for perfection if you're playing a guitar solo, but the harder you try, the further away you get from it. Sometimes what's interesting isn't the note you planned, but the one you played by accident. You can learn to just live with it for a minute.

So he had the songs mapped out very quickly upon hearing them. I knew exactly what he wanted to do. Sometimes I as like, "Really?" But I put my trust in him, which is nice. It's more relaxing than sitting there debating. There's a lightbulb joke about this. "How many producers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" "I don't know. What do you think?"

What's your demoing process at this point? Are you always jotting things down on the fly, or do you need to be properly situated?
I use voice memos—I think everyone does that on the iPhone. I wind up having about 20 or 30 of those stored. But I don't finish songs unless I have studio time, which is what finally made me do this record. I don't have a routine of writing songs every day. I might go a whole year without actually writing a song—but once the studio time is booked, I force myself to focus.

How quickly does it all come to you?
With this record, I feel like five songs came to me pretty quickly. It felt easy. Then, sometimes, a curtain comes down and it's like, "That's it." There were others I was really struggling with. Sometimes you just sit there and are like, "I've got nothing," and you don't understand how you can have nothing. The lyrics is the thing. It's easy to start a song—it's easy to come up with an idea for a song, to have the chord progression and maybe even a melody—but finishing a song is hard.

In Galaxie 500, we didn't make demos. But it is helpful to make demos, because otherwise you don't realize until you get in there and start singing, "Oh no, this doesn't work at all. It looked okay on paper, but it doesn't sound good coming out of my mouth."

The press materials mentioned losing friends to the pandemic. Tell me about that.
For Kramer, Britta, and myself, we did lose a friend early on. They passed away quite early, he was very close with Kramer. Adam from Fountains of Wayne passed away, and it was really like, "Oh shit, this is real. This is not a joke." A couple of years ago, another friend of ours—our tour manager Kiko Loiacano—died unrelated to the pandemic. When he went, he was only in his 50s, and it occurred to me after I kept saying to Kramer, "We'll make that record one day," that we should do it now.

As tragic as it was—and this country did horribly with it—I made a record in 2020, and it had been seven years since I made an album. So the pandemic actually forced me to sit and work.

Yeah, I've heard that from quite a few people over the last few years. Some musicians were actually getting more money from the government than they ordinarily would have.

What's your relationship like with touring post-pandemic?
It was weird for a while, obviously—with all the rules, the vaccinations, the nervousness, and the masking. It's hard to keep everyone healthy, and it actually just led us to sensibly stop people from congregating in the dressing room—which, I kind of like that there's not 30 people in the dressing room after the show, because invariably people have a nice drink and they're just right in your face.

Every time touring, approaches, I dread it. I don't want to go, and I'd rather be home—but I get out there, and it's fun. I mean, it's not fun all the time. It's a grind. It's enjoyable. I earn some money doing it—some. I don't get rich. But I'm always amused—annoyed—when I see bands announcing, "Oh, we had to cancel the tour because it's just too hard for bands to tour now since COVID." Look, you tour with two tour buses and a truck, and you're making 10 times the money that I can, and I'm getting in the van and doing it. Why can't you? Sure, you can't tour at the level that you want to tour at, or maybe the demand went down for you. But then everyone shares those articles and they're like, "Look, it's impossible." It's always possible to lose money out there.

That is a sentiment I've heard from people who have always kept a low profile in terms of how they tour. Obviously, a lot of the tension as far as post-pandemic music industry stuff comes from the fact that, if there was a perception of the way things were done before, you can't really do things that way anymore. You have to adapt and adjust. As much as there's people who are willing to do things differently at certain costs, there's also plenty of people who are like, "If I can't do this the way I used to be able to do this, I'm just not going to do this anymore at all."
Well, there's always that option—to just stay home. I mean, I shouldn't make light of it, because I feel for younger bands. I think that's hard. At least I have some fans and some places where I can make a decent guarantee. Some of them are pretty shitty, too—just in terms of paying for the hotels for that night or whatever. But, also, my fans are older, so they probably charge more for tickets than for younger bands. But for younger bands, there's no tour support. It's not easy, certainly, for some of the bands to go to Europe.

Let's talk more about money. How have you seen things change over, say, the last decade?
I mean, I haven't had to get a day job. Most musicians I know do have a day job. I make money from, believe it or not, the occasional license. Britta and I were doing a Patreon. You have to be doing a bunch of things—selling T-shirts, streaming, direct-to-fan, playing live. There's obviously more work that you do yourself now, which is annoying—all the social media that nobody wants to do at this point.

Some people will posit that, before the MP3, iTunes, piracy, and streaming, it was a much better time to be in a band, and you could make a living—that there was this middle class of musicians making a living. I just don't think that's true. Back then, you could get signed to a label, maybe you get a nice advance out of them, which you'd have to pay for your record out of that and then split the money. But if it didn't sell half a million copies, you were likely to get dropped, and it would be over.

The internet has made it harder to sell music, obviously. But it's also enabled us to connect more directly to fans in a way that wasn't possible before—to get the music heard all over the world. I think even Steve Albini said this too, and I don't agree with him on everything. But, again, he's got an established band, and so do I. I can book things and let my fans know about them without dealing with a label or an agent.

The press bio mentioned you and Kramer catching matinees during recording, both back in the day and working on this album. What have you seen lately?
I saw Anora.

What did you think?
I enjoyed that. What was his other film?

The Florida Project?
That was great too.

Have you seen Red Rocket?
No.

You should. I think it's his best, honestly.
He's made a lot of films, right?

Quite a few, yeah.
I thought Criterion had just announced that they'd put a bunch of his earliest films [on Criterion Channel].

They did.
Kramer's always had an abiding interest in film, too, so on tour with him, that was always his favorite thing to do. "Let's go to a movie." What else did I see...I saw The Brutalist. Have you seen that?

I did. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The second half didn't quite match the first, for me.
Yes, I think we can all agree on that.

Really good score.
Oh, incredible score. It's interesting, because usually Britta and I will watch a movie and just go, "This score is horrible, the music is hitting you over the head and telling you what to think." But this was a really good one. She was like, "Who did this? And we looked it up, and it's Daniel, who I know from Yuck. I'd met him in Spain years ago.

You and Britta have done a fair amount of film scoring yourself, especially with Noah Baumbach. It's become a bit of a hustle amongst musicians in general when it comes to supplementing income.
We haven't made a huge effort—we've just learned it's a lot more fun to score a good film. We were lucky that we got to do a couple of Noah's movies. We did Mistress America right when we moved to Los Angeles, and it was a long road to get there. We tried various different approaches, and we had a year because he went away and did another film in the meantime. He was like, "Listen to the opening of Tootsie, it's kind of jazzy," and then Britta was trying to do this jazz thing and I was just like, "You know what, I can't do this," and it didn't work anyway. We wound up doing something that's in the world of Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark and New Order.

It's trial and error—we don't know what we're doing, but we were really thrilled with how that score turned out, and I think he was really happy with it too. Not a lot of people saw that film, but it's very funny.

Yeah, I loved that one. Did you see White Noise?
Yeah, because Britta and I are in it for 15 seconds. We're a couple of hippies sitting on a car in the evacuation center, playing "The Cloud Is Coming"—which is the final song on this record, but a completely new version.

There's a Mayo Thompson cover, "Dear Betty Baby," on this record. I'm always interested whenever I see his name pop up in anybody's field of vision these days. When I was a teenager, when it came to being like, "I'm going to listen to all this music and discover it," the Red Krayola and his work in general was just something on the path—not so much anymore. What is it about his songwriting that makes him unique, to you?
He's an intellectual. He studied art history, he worked for Robert Rauschenberg. He thinks deeply about art and political theory—Marxist theory. The first Red Krayola records I got were the late '70s-early '80s ones, where he's in England working there. Then I went over the old ones. He was in Pere Ubu for a little while, who I saw around 1980, 1981. He was the guitar player, wearing a suit.

He only made that one solo album, Corky's Debt to His Father. He's a strange songwriter. The topics might just be Jackson Pollock crashing his car into a tree. That's one He wrote this one about a sailor who cries to deceive the captain. For "Dear Betty Baby," I just sat down there and played it on the guitar. It seemed to suit me. I should send it to him. He lives out here.

You've done quite a few covers across your career. I'm really curious to hear you talk about what makes a cover song special. It's kind of a lost art these days.
Well, maybe one reason you don't hear them on peoples' records as much is because it's money that you're losing when you're covering something. It's a royalty that you're not getting—someone else is getting that. I do think, in a way, that was part of the push for it everyone to write your own songs—that's what the money is in, publishing, right?

It used to be that everyone's records were filled with covers—the Byrds, the Stones, the Beatles early on. I like to take songs that most people don't know. Most people don't know "Dear Betty, Baby," or the Nico song I did on this record that was written by [Lütz Ulbrich]. It's not on streaming—it was on YouTube—and I was like, "Wow, this is amazing." I simplified it a little—the bridge was a little proggy, it had too many chords for me.

But mostly you gotta figure out if you can convincingly deliver the vocal and the lyrics that someone else has written. I've discovered there are things I can do and things I can't. I tried to do a Led Zeppelin song once, and I was like, "No, that didn't work."

Tell me more about what you've discovered about your own strengths and limitations over the years.
Well, I'd say maybe my strengths are my limitations. I'm pretty limited in what I do on the guitar. I didn't go to a college of music, I can't play every every genre, I only took a handful of lessons. But because of that, I developed my own slightly clumsy style and, I guess, spending more time concentrating on tone and sound. If you can dial up the right sound, the instrument almost plays itself. Even before I open my mouth, with my guitar playing, it sounds like me. I'm not sure how that happened, but I think I have a recognizable style, and hopefully there's some personality behind the lyrics and singing, too.