Nation of Language on Tour Buses, the Shire, and Quitting Your Day Job

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Enough table-setting: I greatly enjoyed Nation of Language's latest record Dance Called Memory—I think it's the finest album they've put together to date, honestly—and I've also watched their eventual rise across this decade as a sneaky-popular indie rock band with quite a bit of fascination. "Weak in Your Light" went HypeMachine-platinum over the last year or so (perhaps you heard it in the final season of You, and I swear I've heard it needle-dropped elsewhere, too) and in general they seem like an increasing rarity in the current indie rock landscape: A band that, rather than explicitly coming out of nowhere, has just simply gotten steadily bigger with each record. (To wit: Dance Called Memory had some actual U.S. charts movement for the first time in the band's career, with "Inept Apollo" and "I'm Not Ready For the Change" marking the AAA charts this year.)

Suffice to say, I was very interested in hopping on a call with bandleader Ian Devaney while they were on tour this past fall, and I found the conversation to be quite fascinating as far as where Nation of Language have gotten so far, and where they possibly stand to go moving forward. Check it out:

You guys are on the road a lot at this point. How do you feel about it?
We thankfully love being on the road. It's different this time, because we're on a bus for the first time ever. I've basically been touring in some form or another since 2010, so it's interesting to have a brand new experience, because you don't have to drive yourself anywhere.

What do you like to do when you're traveling in terms of blowing off steam?
When we were driving ourselves, we'd do a lot of things like visiting national parks or finding a river to jump into. But since we get driven overnight while we sleep,
we're just bopping around whatever town we wake up in. We'll find a coffee shop, a bookstore, a record store, a vintage clothing store, and just explore what each place has on offer. When we're doing van tours, we only roll into town right in time for soundcheck. It's nice to walk around some of these places.

Are you a light sleeper or a heavy sleeper on the road?
I sleep pretty good, usually. I was worried about the bus, because I was worried it would feel like being on a boat, which I'm not generally a fan of. But it's actually very cozy on the bus in a way that I wasn't expecting. It almost feels like you're on one of the first-class seats on a flight where where you can lay all the way down—which I don't think I've ever been on myself—but if there was no TV or service of any kind. It's like if Spirit Airlines had that option.

How have you felt about the reception to the new record?
I feel really great about it. When you're in that lead-up period, you go through so many emotions trying to predict how people will feel about it—and then you come to peace with the fact that it's so far out of your hands. But I think the reception has been really nice, especially with playing the new songs, which is always just the best feeling—when you get that immediate feedback that people are excited you're playing one of your new songs.

Talk to me about how the band's sound has evolved over the last five years.
I still think of us as a synth band, even though a lot of these songs were started on guitar—which is pretty unusual for us, as far as the writing process. With the first record, I was very intentionally trying to exist within of sonic wheelhouse of early new wave, so there was a lot of shaping the music with intention. With each record—in particular, with this record—it's been a little more of letting things go where they would. This one felt a little bit more like being on a journey where you weren't exactly sure what the next step was going to be. The key was to keep the core emotion of the song in the front of mind and keep the process engaging for us

When I first heard the first record as it came out, I was like, "Oh, well, this will be very popular." I also hadn't heard anybody do this sound that way in a minute, which was interesting. I hear a combo of the dance-pop stuff that was in the air in the 2000s alongside the chamber-pop sounds that were also happening around that time. You guys figured out the formula pretty well almost immediately. As you guys continue to make records, are there moments where you consider avoiding the act of being pigeonholed?
Not so much at this point. With this record in particular, I feel as though I was able to sidestep a lot of those questions: "Is this too us?" "What do people want from us?" Unfortunately, I think that was because I was super depressed when writing a lot of this record. But that did allow me to not think about that stuff, because I was very much just trying to get the emotions out and into something else. The fact that I felt there was this need to to exorcise these feelings meant that I didn't care so much whether it was too us, or not enough us, or what people would think of it. Alex reminded me the other day that when we were working on the record, I was like, "Just so you guys know, this one might be just for us. I don't know if anyone's going to like this."

Talk to me more about your mental state while making this record and how that dovetailed with expressing yourself lyrically.
I was going through a difficult mental time. At the time of writing, I was 33 years old going into 34, and I'd figured that since I hadn't needed antidepressants or therapy up to that point in my life, I was like, "I'm good." But there was this feeling of feeling blindsided by my own mental demise, so that was a revealing experience that's expressed in the record in that there's a lot of feelings of destabilization, where what I thought I knew is no longer the case.

To be honest, for a lot of other people in my life, their long-term relationships and friendships were falling apart, relatives were dying, and everyone just felt like things were not going well. With a lot of the songs, I'm weaving my story with the stories of the people around me to capture the full experience of what it felt like to be in my friend group at the time.

Do you find the act of being creative helps with your mental health, or does it pose a challenge?
Before I was really trying to fix my mental health, the act of being creative was very helpful. It was all of the other hours of the day that were so difficult. When someone is an artist and they're thinking about taking antidepressants, they're like, "What if it hurts my creativity?" That wasn't even a momentary question for me. I didn't even care, and I don't feel less creative now. If anything, to have helped myself will help in the long run, because to be completely consumed by one emotion all the time...as an artist, I don't want to only make songs about one thing for the rest of my life. To work on yourself in that area allows you to see other things within the world, instead of just what is top of mind when you're super depressed.

You've been making music for a while, even before Nation of Language. Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?
I'd just learned how to form chord shapes on the piano so that I could play songs from Lord of the Rings. I scrambled some chords from one of those songs and started writing some probably not-very-good lyrics over it.

Were you a huge Lord of the Rings person and are you still now?
I'd say I was and remain a big Lord of the Rings person, because [bassist Alex MacKay] is also of the same mind as I. There's a lot of Lord of the Rings references going on in the tour bus.

There was a bit about Lord of the Rings fandom in I Love L.A. that reminded me that it's one of those things that has endured across many generations at this point. What is the appeal for you?
As far as the movies go, they were so well done that that there was almost a sense of relief. There's not many parts in the original trilogy where I would cringe if I re-watched it now. A lot of other fantasy and sci-fi gets involved with camp, and [the trilogy] feels like they're telling a story that is told well and well-acted. They took it seriously. The themes of industry and war destroying nature, that sadly has not left us, so it still feels very relevant.

Did you like the Hobbit movies?
The first one, I did not like. The second two got better, but none of them compared to the originals to me.

I only saw the first one, and that's roughly how I felt. At the same time, it was one of those moments where it was very clear that, if it's a big screen and it's a movie I don't even really like, I'll just sit there and watch it no matter what.
When I was watching it, I was like, "This is a kid's movie." And then I was like, "Well, The Hobbit is kind of a kid's book, so maybe that's appropriate." It's not exactly for me anymore. I'm not their target audience, necessarily.

Did you see either of the M3GAN movies?
I did not. Did they talk about Lord of the Rings?

No, but my wife expressed something similar while we were watching M3GAN 2.0 the other night. My wife was like, "This is basically a children's movie." It does feel like—and I don't know if this is a great thing—but over the last couple of years, a lot of stuff that's even "made for adults" has a childlike feel.
You know, that's how I feel about a lot of music these days as well. When some insufferable song comes on, we're like, "This is essentially music for babies." It's masquerading as adult contemporary or indie music.

Tell me about making the move to Sub Pop for this record, and what that entailed for you guys business-wise.
It felt very natural. Our other contract had ended, and we knew we had our own timeline of when we wanted Dance Called Memory to come out. We sent it around to some labels, and for a lot of people they were like, "How do you feel about putting this out at the end of 2026?" We were like, "Um, no." But Sub Pop somehow felt really natural, because Seattle had already become a second home for us.

I remember this moment we were playing a KEXP session in their meeting space. People could watch us perform, and there were a bunch of people from Sub Pop there, but none of them knew that the other ones were coming. I was like, "Oh wow, that's really cool. This is a legendary label, and all these people that work there are just like my band enough to come to this thing." That was quite a while before our other contract ended, but because the label was so legendary to me, I was like, "There's no way that they'd work with us. We're just Nation of Language." So when our other contract ended and they reached out and were like, "What's up," it was pretty mind-blowing for me. They were super on board and were like, "Yes, let's get this thing out, we really like it."

It also feels like the right sort of community environment that we believe in. They're all about small record stores and radio stations, and the indie rock community has been shrinking and shrinking—especially as I sit here in Austin, where I'm pretty sure there's not even a music portion to South by Southwest anymore. So it feels good to be aligned with people that still believe in the mission.

You guys are one of the rare out-of-nowhere success stories when it comes to 2020s indie rock—and it happened during COVID, which is even rarer. Walk me through what experiencing that was like.
It was very odd. We were supposed to put the first record out in March 2020, and just before it was going to come out, we went out on tour, and I remember going to my bosses at work and being like, "Hey, I need to go out on tour for a few weeks," and they were like, "I think we can work the schedule so you can still have your job when you get back." We go out on tour, three days later we get the call that we have to cancel. I get back to New York, and the next day all the restaurants closed down and I just never went back to work.

I never disliked any of my jobs. I did imagine some sort of triumphant moment where I was like, "I'm a rock and roller now," and that never really happened. It was like a gradient into music being the only thing that I honestly had time to do. Growing up, playing shows—that was the only outlet that I knew of for trying to get people to learn about your band, just playing as many shows as possible. So I really thought that we were totally cooked, because we had no idea when we'd be able to play shows again, and I was like, "Well, I guess no one's gonna hear this record."

On the internet side, Stereogum was one of the first sites to post about us. Then KEXP and KCRW started playing us during the pandemic, and it was a strange sense of someone telling you, "Trust me, your dreams are coming true, but you can't step outside, play a show, and feel it. But if you look at this graph, you'll see that more and more people are listening to you." And it's like, "Okay, I don't exactly know what that means, but cool." So finally being able to tour again was just so huge for us, and we've never stopped ever since.

Tell me a little more about your pre-music jobs. Any highs or lows?
I don't think I ever really had a worst job, luckily. I was pretty much down to do whatever. I worked as a barista for a long time, and I worked another job that was making and packaging cookies that would get shipped to grocery stores, and then I was working at a restaurant right at the end. The only time I ever remembered disliking my job was when I was much younger, working at a place where, over time, all the people that I liked moved on and the only person that was left was someone who really ground my gears. I was like, "Okay, I really don't like coming to work anymore."

You guys have worked with Nick Milhiser of Holy Ghost! for a minute now. The pairing makes so much sense to me.
What's nice is that he has a much deeper well of knowledge about not only recording, but synthesis in general, than us. Simultaneously, he has this very off-the-cuff style of working, where he loves to experiment, flick switches, and twist knobs while you're doing stuff to see how we can surprise ourselves. One of the great things about synthesizers is that you do just walk up to it, turn one knob a little bit, and the sound can be entirely different than what you were previously working with. That unpredictability and lack of preciousness has really helped in my process of being less tight-fisted about the creative process.

When I first started, I was sort of stiff, and I really wanted things to be exactly how I had first imagined them—which was probably not an unhealthy place to start, to have intentionality like that. But over time, I do think it is nice to see where the music and the studio experience takes you, and he's really great at ushering us along through that journey.