Alex Dezen: In His Own Write

alex-300x300At 37, Alex Dezen boasts the sort of prolific career that can cause onlookers to pause and reflect on their own, wallowing in bouts of fractured self-esteem paired appropriately with and soothed by sides of Alex Dezen music. With 8 records under his belt as The Damnwells’ singer-songwriter, a master’s degree in literature, and a slew of songwriting credits for the likes of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, and the Dixie Chicks, to name a few, Dezen has just released his first official solo album (self-titled, Rock Ridge Music). Quietly raw and gut-wrenching, it’s disarmingly candid, clever, and lyrically honest in a way that few contemporary singer-songwriter releases seem to be these days. (Calling all Play MPE users, especially Triple A-ers: delight in the download of Dezen’s poignant, lush single “This Is the Last Song (I’ll Ever Write On This Guitar”), sent out, but of course, through Play MPE. Dare say, this one’s got Country legs as well.)

During a haze of Triple A charting and touring that defined their early 2000s, The Damnwells found themselves the subjects of the critically-acclaimed documentary Golden Days, taking its name from their soothing Fleetwood Mac-ian single. Catching up with Alex, we spoke about the new record, songwriting, and about that film which captured the band’s triumphant signing to and unceremonious drop from Epic Records. (It was at that time that industry promo vet Paul Langton (Ravel Rouser) swooped in –cape not shown in film- to ensure their album see the light of day.) So, naturally, when Alex completed his solo album, Paul was the first person to receive it.

So, Paul Langton sent me the record, and I haven’t stopped listening…and maniacally emailing the lyrics to friends.
Thank you so much. It means a lot–I really appreciate it. When people respond to it, it makes me feel good. Paul was the first person I reached out to. We (the band) wanted him to do radio for the last Damnwells record. I was insistent. I really wanted Paul to come on board.  I had sent this record to him early on to get some ears on it and he responded really favorably. He was like ‘I think we make another go at it like we did with Golden Days.’ That was the record that he worked that kind of started everything.

 You’ve spoken about the importance of lyrics. You’re always clever, but this one in particular– this is like hip hop style rhyming. ‘Gelato’ and ‘Chicago’? C’mon!
(“When I’m in Chicago, we get dairy free gelato…”; “To all the lovers I wrote love letters. And all their mothers who bought me nice sweaters. To all of them, I hereby extend…this ode to ex-girlfriends … ‘Ode to Ex-Girlfriends’)

(laughs) I know, I was just talking to my friends about this, lyrics writing. I think there’s almost like an instinct as a songwriter (in quotes) to be academic in some sense: let’s try to stick to the true rhymes. Let’s go a/b, a/b. Let’s not write to the rhyme. We just need to tell a story. The rhyme should appear transparent.  We shouldn’t call attention to it. But, I don’t care about that anymore, ya know? I’ve written plenty of songs at this point, so I feel like if I wanna go and branch out and try different stuff, I can always play “Golden Days” in the set and people go ‘yeah’ and then I can play the song you’re talking about, “Ode to Ex Girlfriends” and some people would be like “What?” And then I can play “Kiss Catastrophe” and then people are like “Oh, I like that.”  But, I think it’s good and important to have songs that are messy.  I like that about this record.  When I was making it, I wanted to make sure that I retained a lot of the messiness.  A lot of those vocal takes are the first or second go at it- just kind of learning it as I went so that it kind of felt fresh and nuanced in that way when I was putting it down.

It’s impeccable.
Thank you.

I mean– you sing about Tums.
(laughs)

I stopped taking notes at a certain point. As a kid, were you really verbal? Did you play Scrabble a lot, always love words, or is that byproduct of adulthood?
I don’t think I read a complete book until I was, like, 15.  I was a late bloomer.  I don’t know what it was –  I was not interested in school, any sort of academics whatsoever. I wasn’t interested in books.  I certainly wasn’t interested in poetry or anything else. But, my sister was.  And my sister has always kind of been…. she’s the first in the water. That’s our relationship.  If she goes in, then I’m gonna go in after and just kind of follow her lead.  She got into music very early on, and I would just steal her Replacements records.  I remember we had a vinyl copy of Let It Be. And, ya know, when she would sleep over at a friend’s house, I would go in there and steal it and go play it on my record player. She had that boxed set that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band came out with in the mid-80s. I listened to all that stuff and …my sister was always reading giant tomes like Clan of the Cave Bear and Les Miserables. I would kinda steal that stuff from her and that would influence me.  So, I didn’t really get into it until much later.  As I got older, I was in a band and writing songs. Unlike a professional dancer or a professional singer, if you’re in a band, everyone gets to see you grow up as an artist. To me, the first record to the most recent record sounds like one of them is a complete amateur and the other is a little bit less of an amateur.  But if I was a professional dancer, I wouldn’t be able to step on the stage until I was at my absolute perfection.  So, as I’ve gotten older, I went to graduate school for English and got a Master’s degree and taught at the University of Iowa for a little bit.  So, I definitely got into it pretty heavy as far as literature, books, writing, all that kind of stuff.  And that seemed to start later in life, though.  I’m 37. I graduated from graduate school in 2010, so I was about 32. It was a late beginning for me, but once I got into it, it was pretty much off to the races I guess.

It’s audible in the music–the education.
Oh good.

I read that for this record it wasn’t like you wrote 30 songs and chose the 10 best, but that these specifically kind of came to you. How does that happen for you?  All these thoughts and melodies are flooding to you and you narrow them down to individual songs?
It’s funny- I’m making this record with friends of mine, and I have hundreds of notes in my phone, here’s a melody, here’s a riff, here’s a thing, here’s a song title, here’s a phrase. And I found some of the early versions of these songs. It did go through some stages of development. It happened very quickly with this particular record.  It started on New Year’s Day, 2015. I was sitting in bed at my girlfriend’s parents place.  I was looking at the computer, on Facebook, and I saw an elephant playing in the water, in the ocean.  It was like one of those memes, like “have a great day!’ or whatever and I saw that and wrote down the lyric, and the meter as well came to me at the same time, so I just wrote down “Today I saw an elephant, playing in the ocean, playing in the ocean on Facebook’. That was the first lyric that I wrote and then it all came out pretty quickly, moved from one song to the next and to the next.  When I was about 4 or 5 songs in, I noted to myself that I was making a record. I was kind of like “OK I think I’m making an album.”  And I decided to write 4 or 5 more and I was going to be done. I wasn’t going to edit; I wasn’t going to cut anything from the tracklisting. I wasn’t going to write like 30 songs, like when bands go to make records, they show up to the producer with a hard drive of songs- 50 songs, maybe 60 songs. And that’s what we’ve done in the past as well. But, with this, I just wanted it to be.  It just kind of came out as that, and I thought well maybe I should just leave it. Jack Kerouac was famous for never editing anything and many people, including good friends of mine are like “Yeah, sure wish he did.”  But, there is something to be said at least once or twice in your career as an artist of just, ya know, walking away from the canvas and just saying “This is done.” Because it’s usually so difficult to get to that point where you’re done. But, sometimes it can be very liberating to put the brush down and say “I’m finished.”

Well worded, the metaphor of walking away from the canvas.  And, I have to say, in hearing that song for the first time, I’m sure I’m not alone, I’m like “Omigod, I love that video…I feel the same way about that video.”  There may be many videos of elephants frolicking in the seas, but I remember being so struck by that because there’s something about this record and the lyrics that it’s like a time capsule. Because you’re touching on things that are sooo, present, to actually hear Seth Rogen’s name and “Obama,” these keywords in our post-social media universe is pretty compelling.
I appreciate that. I feel like songwriters are so…snobbishly academic about what they do.  I remember when I first played the record for someone, they were like “Wow. You went there, huh? Dropped the ‘Facebook’ in the lyrics, huh?”  As if that was sort of a juvenile thing to do. And I just thought, I’m so tired of people telling other artists what the rules are. I used to say “Well, you should learn the rules before you break ‘em.” Now, I just feel like I don’t think anybody needs to learn anything. Either they write something that is compelling to someone or they don’t. I mean, you can learn all there is to know about songwriting- you can sit in a room with Jackson Browne, and anybody- and they can give you all of the tricks and secrets and blah blah blah and you still may walk out of there with “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

And there’s the whole “Who made them king?” thing.  There are no rules for creativity.
I think why that happens is there’s so few pathways for singer-songwriters to become successful and I think that any time that a genre of art or a particular kind of art starts to lose its credibility in a commercial sense, it starts to sort of double down on the academic side of it, ya know? By saying the reason why is we’re not applying the rules enough. We’re not reinforcing the archetypes and that’s why we’re losing and that’s why people aren’t listening to this music anymore. It’s not being true to the academic sense of what it’s supposed to be. I understand that sometimes. I sometimes lament the possible end of the singer-songwriter, the end of the band, of the Cat Stevenses and the Bob Dylans and stuff.  But, then I think wouldn’t it be such a relief if we didn’t have to worry about that shit anymore? And there were never gonna be another Cat Stevens or Bob Dylan? Wouldn’t it be such a nice thing if all of a sudden there was something new and different and exciting in the way that Bob Dylan was new and exciting at the time? So I definitely got to a point with this record where I just didn’t really care about even rhyming particularly well. Or that the lyrics would follow a meter. That the lyrics are supposed to go “Bappa- dappa- -dappa-dappa–dappa–dappa-da” And I just thought “F#%* that, I’m not gonna do that; I’m just gonna do whatever the hell I wanna do, because people are either gonna like it or they’re not. I can’t try to pander to what I think is good songwriting.

Yeah- It’s almost like the Venn diagram of actually putting out there what you’re innately creating, vs. actively, in the moment of creating, simultaneously thinking about “Oh, is this gonna jive with whoever?” They’re two different things.
Right, and I think I spent a lot of time writing songs with Bob Dylan on one shoulder and Paul Westerberg on the other, kind of looking on, usually pointing and laughing at me. So I felt like with this, that I was just gonna put all that to bed.

Hear, hear. Good choice.
Thank you! I’m glad.

 Talk about what it’s been like as a songwriter for other artists.  You were essentially a songwriter in residence at Atlantic, and I remember hearing that and thinking both “That’s so badass, and… God, that’s gotta be so weird.”
I wrote a song for Justin Bieber that was on his record.  I wrote a song for the Dixie Chicks, which went on their Court Yard Hounds record. Some of that stuff was fun. Writing with people that I liked was fun. You know when I was writing with the Dixie Chicks, they’re like chasing the song which is exciting. When you’re writing stuff for Bieber, they’re just chasing like some kind of trend. So I think I’d rather chase the song and I think that’s fun and exciting and that feels really cool and good. I’ve met a couple people through songwriting in New York and LA that are song-chasers, and people who are really dedicated to the craft of it and that’s all also very academic. And that’s exciting to a certain extent as long as it’s not me, ya know? Doing the academic songwriter with someone else can be really fun.  Like putting together a puzzle.

In my mind it was definitely sitting at a piano and collaborative and beautiful. And I was really happy for you in that moment.
If it had been Aretha Franklin, man that would have been amazing. Anybody like that, and I did get a couple of opportunities to work with artists like that but it was few and far between.

 Surreal for sure. Knowing you’ve written for the Justin Biebers of the world- if you were suddenly the guy with his ridiculous fame and recognizability, would that be hell for you? Or would that be an ok trade-off in order to get the music out there and connect with people?
It’s a really good question.  I mean I think personally, I think I’d jump of a bridge. I don’t think I’d be able to live with myself anymore. That’s not to say that Justin Bieber should jump off a bridge. I don’t mean that at all. I just mean that it’s incredibly frustrating to find yourself in a position where you’re chasing your former successful self and trying to recreate that self in a new atmosphere in a new culture with a new trend at stake. I just think that’s an impossible thing to do and artists who are able to do it have to be just willing to take the blue pill or the red pill or whatever the reference is to The Matrix. They have to be willing to say “OK, yeah, I’ll do that, I’ll do this, this is cool, let’s go do this, let’s go do that.” If you’re a very successful artist, you have the opportunity to do that. I mean Rihanna just put out a record that’s like almost unlistenable – that’s how great it is. It’s a completely different album than you would expect from a pop star.  She can do that because she can afford to do that and people are going to follow her into that world.  I mean I think the record’s really cool. I think it’s ugly and it’s got rough edges and I think that that’s cool. I think there’s something about that that’s going to help propel us into the next wave of pop music. But, I think to be able to do that and keep doing that is really hard. Because you can be loved and adored one day, and then you’re the butt of every joke the next, when you’re that level of pop stardom, ya know? So I think I would just freak out.

You’ve spoken about wrestling with anxiety.  Is songwriting an antidote to that? Or is it something that’s sort of alongside.
I think songwriting is an antidote to that- in that anything is an antidote to having panic and anxiety. You wanna just be distracted, and not sit there and ruminate on it. The problem with what I do is that it requires a tremendous amount of just thinking, being quiet and contemplative.  Sometimes if it’s a particularly stressful time in my life, it’s difficult to do that. I think part of the reason these songs came up so quickly, so effortlessly, is because I was in a really good place where I wasn’t having to struggle with any of that so I could just be contemplative. Without getting panicked. It’s definitely an antidote– it’s not a cure all. Ultimately, my anxiety is a product of being a fucking songwriter in a band. My anxiety is “How am I gonna #%#-ing make any money ‘cause I’m in this band and we can’t sell out this tour?” It’s kind of a catch-22.  It can be very debilitative.

Yeah, and being a nostalgic person, that is all over your music. It’s a tough thing, having a reverence for the past sometimes. I kick myself when it’s robbing me of the present.
Beautifully said. There’s a fine line between robbing yourself of the present and thinking about the past. You’ve gotta be able to do both. But every day I have a moment where I say god, I wish I could go back to that time, I wish I could go back to that place and that feeling. But, you know, you can’t.

You’re so emotionally literate, you must have been parentalized as a kid, made into a little adult very early.
Yeah, my sister and I talk about it all the time.  Co-dependency is the nature of my relationship with my parents as opposed to children and parents.  It’s the nature of it, but I can’t complain. I have a wonderful mother and a wonderful sister and we all get along together really well. We have our struggles, but I think we’re gonna make it. (laughs)

I feel like I’m being too personal.
No, I made the record!

Anything you’d like to add to all the folks out there?
The only thing I would add is that I wish that you were still programming radio stations.

I’d be waving that flag so high!  Thanks for taking the time to chat, Alex.

I appreciate what you did for me in the past and taking the time to talk with me today.

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