Artist Interviews

Q&A: Dandy Warhols

By | Published on Wednesday 28 July 2010

Dandy Warhols

Starting out in 1993, The Dandy Warhols released their debut album, ‘Dandys Rule OK?’, on Tim Kerr Records in 1995, and soon went on to sign with EMI’s Capitol Records. Their first release for the label was ‘The Dandy Warhols Come Down’ in 1997, a release that created enough of global buzz around the band for them to appear on the cover of the very first edition of CMU in May 1998 (in the days when CMU had a cover). The band have just released a new compilation, ‘Best Of The Capitol Years: 1995 – 2007’, featuring tracks from all four of their releases for the label. To celebrate, we caught up with frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor to ask the Same Six.

Q1 How did you start out making music?
I began with piano and violin at about four years old. There wasn’t really anything else that got to me like music did. I grew up riding dirt bikes and shooting BB guns and shit, but music was my thing. My only thing. I began playing drums at nine and played in symphonic bands, jazz bands and marching bands throughout the rest of my schooling. I took up guitar when I was about fifteen and found it easier to write songs on that than the piano, but I didn’t actually play guitar in a band until the Warhols.

Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Albums for us are just collections of music that has happened since the last album. I have never just sat down and written an album, the individual songs are what require a direct subject matter or inspiration. Each one, of course, is different, but mostly I write songs to deal with frustration or unhappiness, and if you were to really analyse my lyrics you would probably find that nearly all of that frustration and unhappiness is caused by other people. I guess in that way you could say that other people inspire my records… but mostly in a bad way, really.

Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
I usually lay down the basic chord changes, or we lay down the basic instruments together. This is then followed by an eternity of overdubbing as many different sounds and instruments as we can think of, followed by a long and drawn out editing process, followed by mixing the final mix. The whole thing tends to take us a couple years and I’m not sure it’s the best way to go about it, but whatever. As Brent [De Boer, drums] and Zia [McCabe, keyboards] write more songs I’m sure the methods will change.

Q4 Which artists influence your work?
I can never really tell. We’re so inundated with music that I think it would be impossible to know. Usually this type of question is just an excuse to put in print a lot of bands that one thinks are cool at the time. You know, like Coldplay saying they were influenced by The Clash and Joy Division when really they sound a hell of a lot more like they’re influenced by Scott Walker and James Angell.

Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?

I try not to talk during music. I learned very early in life that music is too distracting for me to keep a train of thought going. I think this is why I have such terrible social skills. Music is virtually everywhere. It is in greater abundance and more accessible than water which is the fundamental building block of life. Weird.

Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
Oh, I guess the same as ever: make it awesome, play some great shows, have fun on tour, have great parties, read some good books and continue to write one sentence movie reviews on our website so that our people and fans can waste less time and money on poorly constructed entertainment. God knows there’s just so dang much of it out there.

MORE>> www.dandywarhols.com



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