• Home
• About
• Interviews
• Special Features

I spoke with Dan Black back in April about his new album ((un)) the ideas behind the music and his most recent tour.

A: On your last album with The Servant you felt stifled, do you think that lead to you branching out and creating solo work?

D: Yeah, Completely. That was a key part of it.

A: You’ve said that you wanted the album to sound like N.E.R.D. and Sigur Ros, were there any other prominent inspirations you drew from during your songwriting process?

D. Yeah, many [I took inspiration] from [people like] Nick Drake to Bjork, to early Missy Elliot, Scott Walker, Trent Smith and Sebastien.

A: You’ve said that what you really like to do is come up with melodies, are there any artists that you admire for their ability to put together a melody?

D: Sure, I love Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, she’s an amazing melodicist. I quite like Perry Farell and his work early on with Jane’s addiction and of course Morrissey.

A: You wrote your album largely in the winter of 2007 at your place in Paris, what was that like?

D: One of the key things that was different about this album was that I’d made it totally on my own and that was heightened even more by being in a country where I didn’t speak the language that well and it being winter so I was kind of holed up in the cellar so it was very, very, solitary, even though I was in a city.  It was very much just making music in general, which is sort of an eternal sordid thing, but it was heightened by it being winter and it being a city that I didn’t know that well and not knowing any people didn’t speak the language well so I didn’t properly understand people so I was sort of locked in my own little bubble.

A: How did you decide on Hypnotize the Biggie Smalls song “Hypnotize” to cover (Which Eventually became lead single “Symphonies”)?

D: Well I did a bunch of these experiments when I first began to see if I could do the sort of songs that I loved and was inspired by. I was thinking about the songs and ways to properly and literally sew the songs together to see if I could make them work and put other things on top. They were basically experiments to see if I could make music that way; if I could solve that puzzle. But some of them came out in such a way that they were more than an experiment, they had a life to themselves. So one of the ones that was like that was “Hypnotize”. “Hypnotize” the original song was one of my favorite hip-hop tracks ever and I wanted to see if I could bring it into a different universe. A different world.

A: How did using the Starman theme from the John Carpenter movie come into play on that song?

D: Well, it was a film I’d seen when I was a kid. I remember loving the soundtrack when I was a kid, when I saw it. And it just popped into my head and it was a nostalgic thing for me.

Dan Black's ((un))

A: You’ve expressed that the reason behind naming the album “UN” was because each letter was the opposite of the other. How did the idea of including the concept of opposites in your album come about?

D: Making the songs work for me is a mix of searching for things and making the song sound, well, good and sound real and true. The way it works to have a song with a contradiction in it, it’s got two things that are so opposite. I noticed that afterward, it wasn’t something where I thought to myself “I need to do this”. I’d like certain songs and I asked myself “Why does this song speak to me more than other things?” and often it would be because the song contained a happy quality or a sad quality at the same time or something that was aggressive but also sort of fragile. Or something that has electric elements in it but at the same time it sounds human and sounds organic. It was more of a discovery of that thing more than going “Oh, I want to do this”. The concept came after with me looking back at what made the songs work.

A: You recently played in Albany New York, how did that go?

D: It went really really good. We’d never been to Albany before so our expectations were kind of low. We’ve been to all these places where there are so many people who want to see you and check you out and Albany was pretty quiet, so, it was really really good.

A: I watched a video where you performed with a couple of your bandmates with samplers and laptops while you were sitting with an acoustic guitar. Was this how you performed in Albany or did you perform full on with all the members of the band?

D: It was full on, it’s only the three of us still, but I’m playing a laptop and triggering songs and stuff and I’m singing and the other guys are doing sometimes percussion and sometimes  guitar, sometimes bass and sometimes keyboards.

A: What do you like about working off of laptops as opposed to playing with a more traditional rock set up? What do you find more satisfying about that?

D: We’ll be able to play all aspects of the song. I can build and sculpt the whole song. I like the fact that it makes more music, it’s like a leveler. Everything can be equal and turned into a wave form and you can do what you want with it. Whether your resource is a synth or a bass or a broken car engine they all turn into the same substance and they are equally malleable. From that point any possibility is possible.

A: For the visuals associated with the album, what kind of guidelines did you have for their creation?

D: Partly, just stuff that reflected me and my feelings at that time as well as the music. I just got loads of images together that I felt reflected what we were trying to do. We were trying to take everyday objects and bend them to their own will. It was similar to how I make songs that ring true in a way.

A: From those objects one that sticks out in my mind is the Gun Head that you wore in the video for “Yours” how did that idea get started?

D: When we started the very first thing we did was an avatar of me levitating in my studio. At that time I wanted to come up with a logo that made people think of Dan Black and one of the people that I had been working with came up with a shirt that had a bird that had a gun for a head. She replaced the bird’s head with a gun and I thought “Oh, that’s really cool,” and I thought maybe we could do the same thing with the [levitating] body and stick a gun on its head. At first I thought that could be a really good logo. I wasn’t quite sure why I liked it. It dawned on me as I was making the record that I had one mission and sacrificed every aspect of my life just to make the record and make the music and also how it was “Do or die”. I was shooting these songs out and I had only one function, and when it came time to do the video I thought “Hey, wouldn’t it be great to actually make the gun head and do a video with it” and so we did.

A: While we’re talking about visuals, the video for the song “Symphonies” is spectacular in the way that it cycles through the vignettes of classic films, how did that idea come to be?

D: The lyrics of the song are talking about “When is the soundtrack of my life going to kick in”. So they said why don’t we have you walk through the titles of classic movies and I thought that was really cool. So we sat there and discussed the kinds of films that we thought would be 1: executable and 2: relevant. From there we just made a crazy wish list and tried to make it work and then at the end slide it together.

A: You ended up getting Kid Cudi to rap on a version of the song, how did that come about?

D: It was very simple, my friend of a friend played him some of my stuff and he liked it. So he got in contact and said he liked it and asked for an instrumental and so I e-mailed him back with an instrumental. Then he sent me back a track with his vocals on it and I loved it and it was done. At that point I thought “What am I gonna do with this thing”. I was in Paris and he was in New York so it was a very modern music [project] using the internet. It was a very simple, uncomplicated thing.

A: In the video for “Symphonies”, there are some outer space scenes, and this question is kind of left field, but what is your favorite planet?

D: I don’t know, maybe moon of Saturn or Jupiter or even like Io, I like those weird kind of far away lonely places.

A: After listening to your album repeatedly, I feel like the album itself is about personal triumph, can you speak about that?

D: I wrote the album when I’d left a band and at that point I thought “Should I maybe give up music?” I’d been thinking about it for a long time and wasn’t having any more. Was I stupid to keep trying to do music, I wondered if I had peaked artistically. I had to make the choice and at the end I had to do it. A lot it stems from fear and in the end that’s what it’s all about, continuing. It’s about adversity and personal triumph. So that was definitely a theme.

A: What are some things that you were able to do on this record that you’re really excited about as opposed to any other music project you’ve done?

D:  To not have my work filtered by others. Each song is my sole vision on how that song should be. That was the key thing that was different. I was able to include obscure hip hop things as well as pop things.

A: Speaking of pop and hip hop things, the bassline on “Alone” is great, how did that come about?

D: That was the first part of the song I wrote. That bassline came from just breaking up a beat and getting out a bass and just playing along. A lot of my songs come from just playing and that feeling of having fun and being free. I remember making the beat up and playing the bass part quite fast and the rest of the song came from that.

A: While you’re doing your tour what are some things you’re looking forward to?

D: Meeting new people. At the moment everywhere we’re playing is new so right now it’s just a question of covering as much ground as possible and playing good shows.

Dan Black Myspace

Dan Black – Symphonies Ft. Kid Cudi