Dr. Dog's Scott McMicken - Interview

Dr. Dog’s been running stray under the radar for nearly four years now, but with bands like My Morning Jacket and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah choosing them to open tours in the last year, it’s only a matter of time before fans outside their Philadelphia hometown start wagging their tails to the sounds of Easy Beat, the band’s first proper release on National Parking Records.

Captured with eight-track honesty, Toby Leaman (bass/vocals), Scott McMicken (woof+mud distortion solo guitar/vocals), Andrew Jones (guitar), Juston Stens (trapset/ harmonies), and Zach Miller (keyboards) deliver kicking rhythms, grinning lyrics and mesmerizing harmonies all tinted with dreamy, dark undertones.

“Dr. Dog tries to operate with as little thought as possible,” says McMicken laughing. “We have been fortunate, Toby and me, to have known each other for so long that we can work from each other without thinking too hard or with very little pretense. That’s one of the things that I’m most consistently thankful for in this band, just the ease with which things work. We have a lot of catch phrases in Dr. Dog and they all pertain to just working with immediacy, like ‘just nail it,’ which means just go at it, hit it in once and it’s done…In Dr. Dog if it’s not working immediately then it’s just abandoned.”

Live, Dr. Dog’s pack demonstrates its musical instinct best, tuning in for those convincing bits of time where everyone is having fun. Wearing oversized sunglasses, perhaps to shade the band’s warm tones hallucinating around him, McMicken ultimately is so stricken with song he lands on the floor scratching around his guitar. In “Wake Up,” Dr. Dog sing, “We are only part of a dream” and it’s a delightful trance they create.

“It’s been a couple of years for us and the fun just keeps compounding,” says McMicken. “We really hadn’t done any touring prior to a couple years ago and while we would have wanted to, the opportunity just didn’t present itself and we’re not the type of dudes to have that kind of labored discipline. If My Morning Jacket wouldn’t have asked us to go on tour, chances are we’d probably still be in a basement. Getting in front of people really helped us get better live and helped us appreciate how much you can do with a live show.”

Lyrically imaginative lines like, “I was born at the scene of a crime/every witness, he was deaf and dumb and blind” (from “Wake Up”) fuel the delirium the band patches together.

“Toby’s one of my favorite lyricists on the planet and I have really no idea where he’s coming from a lot of times,” says McMicken. “…He admires my ability to be so direct… but I’ve always wished I could write more from the imagination like he does…That kid can come up with a song on a dime. He must write like ten songs a day off the top of his head…A permeating theme in Dr. Dog the last two years has been ideas about dreaming. For the next album there’s a lot of that…So many of the songs are about the difference between dreaming and being awake and those lingering emotions you have while you’re asleep that when you wake up you can’t quite pinpoint, how it affects your day. This comes back to Toby’s lyric-writing…One aspect of Toby that I’ve always noticed is that he’s severely dark and twisted is his dreaming world. That’s got to have a lot to do with his aesthetic sensibility as a lyricist.”

Dr. Dog is nearly finished with its follow up album, but the main challenge has been that things just sound “too good.”

“We’re working with a lot better equipment now,” says McMicken. “Easy Beat was made with eight tracks only and we have 24 tracks now, so a lot more is possible… A lot of people think it [Easy Beat] doesn’t sound that good or they call it lo-fi or something like that, but to me that’s what I wish all music sounded like. It has a bit of a smoke screen in front of it. It does kind of put it in this context. I think that’s why some people who like it appreciate that it appeals to your being sort of removed.”

Dr. Dog performs at Mercury Lounge January 27.

Originally published in The Aquarian Weekly 1/11/06.

Dr. Dog video for "Fool's Life."