Dr. Dog - Scott McMicken Interview

Dr. Dog Accepts Its Fate

by Tina Whelski

There comes a time when everything makes sense. The stars align. Clocks freeze. The universe is trying to tell you something. At least that’s what Dr. Dog discovered while recording Fate, the follow up to the band’s critically acclaimed album, We All Belong.

When “fate” surfaced as a possible album title, the Philadelphia band stopped in its tracks. And after a few days of “swooning, and freaking out,” as singer/guitarist Scott McMicken tells it, they realized something greater than themselves was weighing in. Songs they’d written over the last six years suddenly had similarities. And “fate” tied them together conceptually. So members Frank McElroy (multi-string guitar, full-grip chords, harmonies), Juston Stens (trapset & harmonies), Toby Leaman (finger bass, vocals), Zach Miller (organ), and McMicken (woof + mud distortion solo guitar and voice) stepped aside to let a process of observation take over. Instead of finding ways to put ideas into their material, they looked for ways in which they already existed. The result was an album McMicken describes as a subjective experience.

“I’ve never felt as detached from my own songs,” says McMicken. “And I mean that in a good way. This is probably as close as I can get to hearing them as though I didn’t write them and didn’t have anything to do with them. That way of thinking was so important to making the album. Just separating everything you put into them. So that you can re-interpret them and try to put them into this greater story.”

Scott McMicken talks to The Aquarian about recording Fate.

“Fate” wasn’t the intention for the record. How did it evolve?

It was a very natural thing. It just unfolded very slowly from very tiny little seeds…Like Toby saying, ‘What about Fate as a possible name for the album?’ And that was chosen at that point in time just as the word…I liked it immediately aesthetically as a big powerful four-letter word. I don’t know if I liked Fate or didn’t like Fate. I didn’t know what I thought it even was. It was just this big romantic thing in my head. That being said, right away I did realize that it was an interesting title just in the fact that it causes me to question. It’s a word taken for granted. And obviously everyone is so familiar with it. But I really had nothing to say about it. It’s one of those interesting things. What the hell is fate?

What themes emerged as you questioned fate?

The interesting thing is all the songs were written well before we started talking about this idea of fate…So it had less to do with how we were going to go about writing and manipulating our songs to suite this idea and more to do with just re-interpreting these songs…I’d say the only way we got manipulative of material, in order to represent what it was we were slowly starting to think about, was that it helped us choose which songs fit and which didn’t.

The metaphor of trains runs through the record. Why does that work so well?

Basically it was just like, ‘What can we do to point out what we are starting to notice about these consistencies between the songs?’ There’s enough of it in the songs themselves. But we wanted to take it up one notch and tie them all together. So Frank came up with the idea of the train…It suits everything about the album because it’s such a musical sound. It’s got a nice constant, flowing rhythm…And the dynamics. I really like that the passage of time has a lot to do with this album. And I think the passage of time has a lot to do with the train. Its presence is always somewhere in the abstract. It’s like it’s always far from you, but on its way…There’s just this romance around the train.

Can you tell the story of a song from the record?

There are little bits of magic sprinkled through all of them. That’s what got them past the chopping block…When I got to looking at these songs, in my head, they represent how constantly changing I am as a songwriter. Not on a huge level, but like trying new things over the years that I like a lot, like simpler songs. “The Breeze” was me trying to write a song that essentially didn’t change at all. It’s one melody and one chord progression that goes like five or six times or whatever and then it’s over and it never really breaks. So that was an experiment in songwriting for me.

“The Rabbit, The Bat, and The Reindeer,” that’s a weird song too, because that was me again trying something that was really not my thing in songwriting, which was sort of a hate message. I always try to put so much passive acceptance into every song I write (laughs) because that’s how I like to live. But that was me trying to be angry about something.

On We All Belong Dr. Dog was getting used its upgraded recording equipment after the success of Easy Beat. Did knowing the studio better free you up on Fate?

Yeah it certainly was convenient…It felt like the first time we as a band went into making an album with a really strong sense of our own identity. For years the studio has just been this blank slate. Especially for the first three, four, five years of being a band, when we never really played live. It was all just this completely imaginary band. We weren’t trying to capture a sound that actually existed. We were just inventing one for every song. So this felt like the first time we actually stepped into the studio with this pretense, you know? I think where we’ve come so far as technicians in the studio made that possible. And the truth is though I’m very very happy with the way the record turned out and I have no regrets…I don’t think it was a full hundred percent representation. But I’m totally fine with it. I accept that about the process. I know that you can only really go so far as you’re capable of. And that every step of the way is educational. I think we just put a foot in the door on some different ways of recording. So I think for the next one, we’ll just pick up where we left off.

Originally published in The Aquarian Weekly November 26, 2008 issue.

Dr. Dog perform "The Rabbit, The Bat, and the Reindeer" on Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson .

and "From"

Dr. Dog - Scott McMicken Interview

by Tina Whelski

Dr. Dog has its day with We All Belong, the imaginative follow up to Easy Beat. Working with better recording equipment allowed the Philadelphia band to unleash more layered vocal harmonies and textured instrumentation, giving songs bigger bark and a more dynamic sound. But upgrades presented Dr. Dog with a unique creative challenge: Songs initially sounded “too good.”

“We got all this new stuff and it was awesome,” says Scott McMicken (woof + mud distortion guitar and voice). “I certainly realized a bit into making the album that we were in a little over our heads. I think we had taken on too much at one time. So we started removing a lot of things and just pared down to using our new tape machine and the console for it and basically one microphone. It was weird. We stepped into the situation aware that it was a whole new phase for us in recording and I think that initially I turned off too many of my reference points for how to do what we’d always done. It was sort of a lesson to learn that a lot of the ways that we used to work, even though we were trying to make improvements on what we’d done in the past, were still really valid…It was definitely an awesome, challenging experience. We have always wanted to have more substantial recording equipment to just try out ideas.”

Working with 24 tracks felt infinite to the band against the mere 8 they used on previous records.

“There’s really no reason why we should ever have 24 tracks,” says McMicken. “It’s kind of like an endless amount of tracks.”

But once Dr. Dog figured out how to avoid going overboard and restored familiar attitudes about the process, the fun flowed.

“As a band, we’ve always loved what you can do with stacking up voices and that awesome feeling you get when you hear yourself in a harmonious relationship with some other singer or even against your own voice,” says McMicken. “Just that really weird, magical thrill you get when you put your own voice on top of itself. That unrealistic scenario that’s exciting to hear back in the speaker. We could also get different tones out of instruments. Double them. Take one part and make it come out of two instruments. That’s stuff we’ve always wanted to do.”

Traditionally Frank McElroy (multi-string guitar, full-grip chords, harmonies), Juston Stens (trapset and harmonies), Toby Leaman (finger bass, vocals), Zach Miller (organ) and McMicken take songs into the studio before learning them as a band. It just ends up being a little more exciting because no one’s necessarily attached to any particular part or sound.

“You can just start from scratch and allow these accidents to occur and sort of shape a sound of a song that you could have never particularly crafted ahead of time,” says McMicken.
McMicken initially pictured an old country ballad for “The Girl,” but the song wanted something different.

“It was just me and Frank in the studio and of all of us he’s probably the one who’s least savvy with how to run things on the board,” says McMicken, “which is good because he stays pretty objective as a listener. He always has really great insights and perspective because he’s not there to think about turning things on and getting the EQ straight and stuff. But he was forced to run the board while I was on the other side of the room to do piano and he mistakenly turned the mic on with the volume completely cranked. So I hit one note on the piano and it just nearly blew the back of my skull out. It was this really distorted sound. At first I just screamed and ripped the headphones off, but then I was like, ‘Just leave it like that and we’ll just turn it down in the headphones so I can survive this.’ We wound up with that really heavy sound you hear. Like I said, from that mistake, it completely shaped the fate of that song. So that’s one of the most fun things about the studio is you can go there with really no sense of what’s going to happen and wind up with these treats. These things that just present themselves to you, as opposed to you having to feel so connected to every idea that you come up with.”

Watch Dr. Dog perform "My Old Ways."



and "The Girl."



and "Ain't It Strange."



Interview originally published in The Aquarian Weekly.