I’m not sure when or where I first became aware of DW Dunphy and his awesome music. It might have been in the Dambed (The Daniel Amos Message Board) many years ago. That seems like the most plausible scenario since that is where I came across most of the artists who have been featured on the Basement Tapes. I may not remember exactly when I first heard DW but I do know I was blown away and to be honest, a bit jealous. He has consistently put out some great records and I think we are overdue getting to know him better.
DW, you have quite a discography available on BandCamp. How many records do you have available and how long have you been recording?
There are 12 or 13 floating around out there, but in total I have probably recorded 15, and I have been a part of some duos and group efforts. Some of the first stuff came out as part of an indie cassette collective under the Secret Decoder Records label.
I have been doing this since the mid-1990s, and I started with a relatively crude recording setup. Two boomboxes. I’d record on one, play back, sing and play along as I recorded on the other, and on and on until I built up a rather fuzzy-sounding version of multitracking. It was a pretty neat trick at the time, and thankfully the technology has become more affordable and better since then.
Your latest Test, Test, Test so far is an instrumental and is being released one song at a time. Tell us about this new project and why are you releasing this one song at a time?
Test Test Test is showing up this way really out of necessity. First of all, time is a huge factor. As we move from year to year, the time we can allot to making music gets smaller and smaller. Responsibilities, time lost in commuting, even just making yourself dinner and answering phone calls can swallow up your evenings. My ability to park myself in front of the PC and just do it has been constrained.
This is usually the point at which the individual — especially the individual who is more involved in this as a hobbyist than as a career — tends to quit. Life intervenes. Yet I enjoy it too much to just give up.
Then there is the other side of things that, because of the need of the Internet world to constantly produce, produce, produce material, or else you get forgotten about, making the album and putting it out as I go along works with both these constraints.
As a medium, I love the album format. I love the package, how the songs work together or contrast each other. There’s nothing wrong with a great single, but I’m fascinated by albums that hang together as a fully realized piece of work.Test Test Test will be a full album, probably ten or eleven tracks long, but it’s arriving in piecemeal form.
Your new instrumental tracks seem to blend progressive rock and smart pop, a trait the rest of your output also has. Who are your musical influences?
That’s hard to say. I am a voracious consumer of music. I really enjoy progressive rock, and that goes back to the conceptual aspects of the album. But I also like what we would consider “classic” pop. So in there you have your British Invasion bands, The Beach Boys, Motown and Stax on the soul side…I’ve been listening to some of the reissues from the band The Knack, which falls into the power pop category.
One of my favorite bands ever is Daniel Amos, and I think my fragmented sense of what a rock album can or should be is informed by those records. My first rodeo was with the Doppelganger album, which was so weird the first time I heard it, but was so magnetic that I couldn’t back away from it.
At the same time, I am really into movie music. I’m particularly a fan of John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, those big orchestral scores and the classical pieces that helped inform them. So I draw from a lot of different places, and it all gets distilled into a specific thing that I do. That’s always the most difficult question to answer when people ask, “Who do you sound like?” I don’t think most creative people have a good answer to that, no matter what you do. It has been a hindrance to being able to move this thing forward in some ways. It’s much easier to say, “I sound like The 77s” and then you can have all the 77s fans try out your music. That band is also an influence on me, but I doubt that people automatically would make that association while hearing me.
It’s good and bad. Good because I can say I’m unique, but bad because unique is really hard to market.
Besides putting out your own music, you write for Popdose and host a radio show. You obviously are a big music fan. Is anything in today’s world of music exciting you?
There’s a lot of exciting stuff out there. I was a big fan of the most recent Steven Wilson album that came out last year called Hand.Cannot.Erase. A band that is brilliant and criminally overlooked from Dublin called Pugwash is coming out with a new one called Play This Intimately (As If Among Friends). A friend of mine, Brandon Schott, just concluded a successful KickStarter campaign for his new album Crayons & Angels. A group called The Deafening Colors just released Carousel Season through BandCamp. Then you have all the other artists in the Down The Line Collective who keep putting out inventive stuff, and are frequently working on the same non-existent budgets as I am. That’s always inspiring. One day I’d like to be able to meet them all in public in one place. I think the universe might collapse into dark matter if it happened though, with such a concentrated mass of nerding out in one place.
You’ve embraced digital distribution which is very cost effective and also worldwide. Do you think this is a viable method or just a flooded market?
That is the question of our times, isn’t it? The Internet has democratized music creation and distribution, but it has also subdivided into two separate “Internets.” Think about it: what was once released in a week, or a month quantity-wise is released in an hour now. The Internet promised it was a very big pool so everyone, come on and jump in. So we did, but we find that it isn’t as big as we thought and have to go to some extremes to stand out. If you don’t have something really flashy and really controversial to differentiate yourself with, you can easily find yourself canceled out. That’s one Internet.
The other is the Internet where the stars who had all the power before have just as much, if not more, and are under the same needs to gain the attention. They have much more money and influence to do that. The Internet didn’t kill the record labels, it just turned them more into a multimedia consortium. In all this you can understand why every so often Kanye West will say something outrageous or controversial, or why so much attention is paid to what celebrity Taylor Swift’s latest song is about. That drama keeps you current in the news feed, and that keeps you “alive.”
I heard a story about a famous musician — not a huge celebrity musician, but well-respected and a consistent earner — who took two years to write and record an album. When the album came out he had to defend himself from the label that it was a comeback. He would say that he never left, but because he didn’t have this ginned-up media cycle behind him during his supposed downtime, the public presumed he had quit. So when people see this celebrity or that celebrity appearing out of nowhere, doing something shocking or saying something scandalous, take it for what it is. It is likely an attempt to remind the audience of your existence.
With those big sharks at the top sucking so much of the oxygen out of the water, you can imagine the difficulties for the others — the other Internet — down at the bottom of the tank.
I’m reminded of a recent KickStarter campaign for a new Mike Knott EP and a live show, and I’m grateful that the campaign was successful, but if I recall correctly it wasn’t a barn-burner. That Knott and the Lifesavers need to do a KickStarter at all shows how hard it is right now. The same can be said of Bill Mallonee, whether it is an older Vigilantes of Love offering or a WPA disc or a solo thing. He’s selling his guitars to keep it going, and to think about what he’s done over the years, that’s stunning and kind of heartbreaking too. It can make people jaded and cynical to think about the promise of what technology can do, and how limiting it still can be. You can reach the world with your music, but unless you set your hair on fire and dance the Electric Slide as you’re putting the fire out, you’re visibility can be extremely limited.
I don’t want to sound like an old crank about this, because I’m not. I’m genuinely thankful I can do what I do at all, and that’s really all thanks to technology and the Internet. We are coming to terms with what is afforded to us and gradually lowering our expectations to be more realistic. I think everyone goes into this believing they too can be a big shark. Those who are really devoted to the craft of making music continue to do so long after they’ve made that adjustment and settled in.
Would I like a horde of screaming fans chanting my name and asking for my autograph? Sure, why not? The key is staying true to my creative expression even without the ego gratification.
Tell us how people can find you and what is your next move?
Next move is continuing work on Test Test Test as well as a track for a Christmas song compilation. This song is called “Neon Green Xmas” and it touches on both the way the holiday is changing as we continue to age, and that melancholy that settles over us because we have to be grown-ups. When you’re a kid, it is all whipped cream and lights and this wave of euphoria. When you’re older, you have to recognize the meaning behind things and their costs, both spiritually and financially in the literal sense. Clearly, my track will not be the holly-jolliest on the album.
I also worked on an EP earlier in the year with some guy named Indest. I’ve been sending it around to as many people as I know might accept it. Everyone says my ukulele playing on it is awesome, but that’s the instrument I didn’t play on the thing. Cue the sad trombone music.
As for getting to me, I relaunched dwdunphy.net and everything I do tends to park in that parking lot. There’s also the BandCamp page, the Noisetrade page, the CD Baby page and of course the Down The Line Collective BandCamp page. Therefore, if anyone says they couldn’t find me, that’s their problem.
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