Kevin Devine is a saint rambling off his sins. The Brooklyn singer-songwriter has grown from acoustic tracks in his bedroom to a man with a backing band to one half of Bad Books, his project with Manchester Orchestra‘s Andy Hull. All the while, he’s been popping bitter truths in his mouth that are too honest to be bashed for their devilish allyalities. It’s clear he’s got a good heart, but when he steps behind the microphone, he creates intimate songs that gnash their teeth with angry jabs at the world around him. Ever since he started writing in music in 2001, Devine has been an honest wordsmith that twirls the pen at the end of every other sentence, making his music as well-phrased as it is suggestive, raising the bar for himself and his audience in an encouraging shove to reach for something higher, to be better, to grow.
At age 34, Kevin Devine isn’t trying to pull any strings. He’s still dabbling in singer-songwriter intimacies, emo, folk, and indie rock after eight studio albums. Now, after releasing two full-length albums in 2013, Bubblegum and Bulldozer, Devine is working on Devinyl Splits, a year-long split 7″ series that sees him dropping brand new originals and covers beside songs from Nada Surf, Perfect Pussy, Tigers Jaw, and more. Given his relentless work ethic, it’s both a huge project and a nice break.
He plays The Sinclair this Friday along with Into It. Over It, but he gave us a ring on a late night drive in his car beforehand to chat. As expected, he talked at length about the topics at hand, going behind the 7″ project to discuss changing the lyrics to his own songs, the time he threw demo tapes onstage at Pavement, and when we can expect to see Andy Hull, Jesse Lacey, and him playing together on a stage again.
Allston Pudding: So where did the idea for the Devinyl Splits 7″ series come from?
Kevin Devine: I’ve been thinking about what the next thing would be after the two records. I didn’t want to make a proper full-length album, but I wanted to do something. I was kicking around songs and ways to stay working, to stay sharp and visible, but also not over-saturate people. I’d had this idea for a while about doing a single standalone. I grew up around that a lot with punk and hardcore. I had done a Manchester Orchestra one in 2010 and maybe one in 1998 with Miracle of 86. It seemed cool to revisit it, but then I kind of feel like because I straddle these worlds—indie rock, emo, singer-songwriter, punk—there’s different hats I get to wear and artists I get to work with. I thought it would be cool to do a series and have the series, on some small level, speak to the breadth of people I’ve gotten to know in the last few years or longer while being me, while doing this. I like the idea of having it span a few indie rock generations, you know? Some people I listened to, some people I’m peers with, and some people who are a bit younger and may listen to my music. It’s a cool way to draw a line between all of these different times.
Then came the work of asking people, and that’s still happening. There’s still some moving pieces. It’s mainly about figuring out the mechanics, who the partners will be, who will publish it, all these less sexy administrative sides of it. But here it is, all ready to roll out for people to see and hear. It’s exciting. It’s been a gestating idea for a year, so it’s amazing to see it public now, and to have the first one out in three weeks. Matthew [Caws of Nada Surf] has become a close friend over the past five years, but prior to that, and still, he’s a songwriter that I admire. He’s a brilliant pop craftsman that uses smart, emotive songwriting. He doesn’t lean too far in one direction – like, he’s never too clever or too nakedly emotional. I like that. He’s a benchmark in some ways. To get to share a release with him is an exciting thing for me.
AP: When you’re looking at the bare bones of a song in your hands, how do you know if it should go the solo route or get Goddamn Band treatment?
KD: It’s weird. I developed backwards. 98% of the songs I’ve written in my entire life have been written on an acoustic guitar, including rock songs. There’s certain times in the way chords are voiced or the way I hear the arrangement where you’ll just know it’s a band song. What changes is a loud band song or a tight, quiet band song. You can’t always predict that. So I’ll do a lot of different versions and have stuff evolve over time. It’s funny, too, because I like writing on acoustic, but I generally like to make recordings with other instruments. I like dressing the songs up and then the challenge of stripping them back down to be compelling as an acoustic performance. I don’t like getting up and playing the chords on an acoustic guitar. It shouldn’t sound like the song the band would play when the band’s not there. Your job, my job, is to be a compelling performer whether I’m alone or with three or four or seven people onstage. Even songs that got built into something like “Brother’s Blood” need to be as compelling alone as it is when you’re surrounded by this wall of emotional violence. Normally I can hear if something’s more acoustic-leaning or not, if that makes any sense. What I’m still trying to develop more is if it’s a Bad Books song, a Goddamn Band song, or both. Which basket to place it in, you know? But that will keep developing over time.
AP: What about when it comes to lyrics? It’s clear you put a lot of thought into metaphors, visuals, and advice. Do you try to put weight on one over the other?
KD: I think the abiding principle for me with lyrics is that I want them to make sense but I don’t want them to be super obvious. I want them to be a treasure map that people put together a path through, and treasure at the end being subjective. I know what my songs mean to me, but I’ve heard lots of really interesting interpretations from people that I wouldn’t want to disabuse them from, you know? It’s not necessarily what a song means to you, but once you put it out in the world, you lose exclusive ownership of it in that way, and I like that. I like when people have their own interpretations. Sometimes people share their theory and I’m like, “Damn, I wish that’s what it’s about to me. That’s way smarter and nuanced.” [laughs] I want them to be articulate, to make sense, but I don’t want them to be diary entries. I want them to be pieces of writing.
My songs, a lot of them, revolve around themes, not the inner nature of man and if we’re inherently bad. That’s a conversation we may have, but that’s not compelling in a song as a question. It’s about finding new ways of saying old things. Every song is about love or lack of love, friendship or loneliness, family or drugs or sobriety or politics or inner emotional turmoil, but we’re all writing about the same ten things, and really it all boils back to a love song anyway. Your job is to find interesting ways of saying that shit that’s also singular in your own voice but isn’t obnoxious. You know when you read someone that’s overwriting and you go, “Oh, gosh. Stop. Calm down.” Instead, I’d rather have songs with sharp left turns while still feeling colloquial. I’m trying to include all those things you said. I want to give songs a reason to exist. I can acknowledge when I write something that’s not anything. I do think about words a lot, for better and for worse.
AP: It’s funny you mention you want it to sound like standalone writing. I was going to say your lyrics remind me not necessarily of a book, but of a piece of writing beyond a poem or what lyrics are normally associated with, so—
KD: That’s good!
AP: —has any author’s voice, in literature or music, rubbed off on you a lot?
KD: Oh my God, so many. So many. Everybody who writes or paints or sings is always cribbing things from somewhere. You’re learning and internalizing. The first thing I tell anyone who asks me about writing songs is to read a lot, hear a lot, and listen to how people talk. There’s so much good shit out there and that’s how you learn to be better yourself.
But yes, tons. For musicians, the formative ones were Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Elliott Smith, Kurt Cobain, Michael Stipe, and Sinead O’Connor. Whether it was someone who was really abstract or image-alistic like Kurt Cobain or Michael Stipe—like they were making collages, something evocative and big with mystery—or someone like Sinead O’Connor who would communicate really nakedly, really emotionally, with so much confrontation that dared you to make fun of it. Standing right in your face and being like, “This is the way I feel about this thing. It’s massive to me. Boom.” And you were like, “Oh, shit. Alright.”
For writers, there’s so many people. There’s E. E. Cummings and Carl Sandburg, Edgar Allen Poe, JD Salinger, David Foster Wallace, so many. Words are magical and there are so many people who have been master sorcerers. You can go and worship at their alter.
Leonard Cohen stands at the top of the mountain for me, in the middle of music and words. I like the way he sings and his songs have such deep, perfect, music with a weird incredible space where sexuality and spirituality meet—he writes tangible things about the body and wraps them around ephemeral bits about the soul, where it’s approachable but also the voice of God—flawlessly. He is somebody who is a spectacular and phenomenal writer. I always tell people who like the way I write to go listen to Leonard Cohen. I don’t mean to talk to much about white men, too, but I suppose that’s who was hitting my ears when I was a child, which unfortunately you don’t have a hand in deciding when you’re young.
AP: Music is fun in that you can edit your work after its come out, in a live setting, whereas authors can’t. When you perform live, you tack on an extra verse at the end of the song or swap out some words. It’s only noticeable because you have such a strong fanbase. People will be singing all the words and suddenly they don’t match up, like on “Ballgame“. When did you decide to do that? Why?
KD: Sometimes it’s as simple as a dancing tick in my brain. There’s a song called “I Don’t Care About Your Band” on Bubblegum with a line that says “You were DIY, you were test-tube made, and I wasn’t biting either way.” It’s more about music journalism and a band that’s the subject of momentary adoration. There’s major label paint-by-color stuff going on in a cool loft in Bushwick. Certain words and rhyme schemes beg to be played with regarding the construction. Immediately after writing that line, I thought I could change it to, “You were DIY, you were Pitchfork praised.” Same syllables, alliterative quality, general rhyme, so sometimes I switch that up because the lyric in my head and the line following it up that jump up first so you pick it and it gets sung.
With other songs like “Ballgame,” I reserve the right to change it. The kid who wrote that song was 22 and I’m 35. There were specific instances in that song that I’m writing about from a very different side. It’s cool to make it a conversation between the young man who wrote it and the slightly older man who’s singing it. I think my audience is cool with that more than they’re not, but the end happened one night at a show at Bowery Ballroom. It tumbled out. That’s true; that’s not a revisionist bit of history for a good story. It just showed up and I decided to get it out of the way. So I’ve taken it out, packed it on there, and amended it on the fly. It’s a challenge that’s fun, plus an idea that, similarly to jazz, gets to be improvisational and re-explored. For someone as verbal as I am, it’s neat to see your brain do that.
AP: You’re such a kind-hearted musician, especially compared to other people who let their ego get ahead of themselves. There are two gifts you seem to consistently give fans: a unique show experience where the songs are different live than on record, and the option to talk after the show. You hang around for a long time to share a genuine conversation with each person. Is that just a scene you grew up in, where musicians gave their fans a lot of time of day?
KD: Well, first of all, thank you. I have an ego, too, since everyone has one. I have more mirrors in my life than other people may, but maybe I have more humble experiences that help me check it. I have my own version of diva moments that are quieter in volume or smaller in scope, but yes, I do go to shows to avoid carbon-copy versions of songs. There’s something to be said for proficiency, which I would like to be, but you can also be exciting. Part of being proficient is being good in different ways. There’s a numbness that comes with touring and the performance should be the part that turns you on. If I’m just punching the clock, not only is it a disservice to them, but it’s like, what the fuck am I doing with my life? My job is to find new roads to experience.
That’s informed by what I was taught where I grew up: punk shows. I like Nirvana’s energy and attitude onstage, but he wrote nasty, weird, dirty songs that were pop songs at their core, but they were punk. They weren’t pop punk; they were punk pop. I was into these indie rock bands that are cerebral pop like Pavement and Superchunk, Helium, Sonic Youth. The punk and hardcore kids liked stuff like that, too, that was raw and on independent labels. The lesson at those shows was that the performer and the audience are the same. The crowd was the band was the crowd was the band. Five kids in the crowd would be the ones standing on stage immediately after. That’s not quite how I play or what the shows I play are like, but that intellectual idea are what things are like today still. I don’t exist without an audience. I don’t get to tour if there’s not an audience to do it, otherwise I’m just playing these songs in my garage or my room. So selling my merch and meeting people is a way to acknowledge the circularity of that relationship.
AP: That’s funny you brought up Pavement. I read somewhere a while ago that you threw cassette demos onstage when you saw them play a festival.
KD: At a festival?
AP: Yeah, and you threw your demo tapes onstage during their set. Did they listen to them?
KD: Oh, oh, oh, yes! When I was 15, I went to Lollapalooza on Randalls Island in New York. I saw Pavement, Sonic Youth, Hole, Beck, Jesus Lizard, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Cyprus Hill, Superchunk. It was a huge day for me because it was the first huge concert. I snuck in four of my band Delusion’s demo tapes. I threw them from the audience at Pavement and Sonic Youth [laughs]. They exploded off their amps. I don’t know what I thought, too. Were they going to listen to them on the bus or van or something? If anything, they were probably like, “Fuck the kid who tried to kill us with demo tapes,” but that is true. I did do that and I’m 100% sure they never listened to them or that the tapes even surprised the throwing.
AP: I’ve always been curious about that. Glad to know it actually happened.
KD: Yeah, totally [laughs]. It’s true.
AP: Lastly, how did you meet Andy Hull and Jesse Lacey? And would you three ever do stripped down, acoustic sets at a few small venues like you did several years ago?
KD: Hm, well. I met Jesse like 16 years ago. My old band was called Miracle of 86 and he was in The Rookie Lot and Brand New. So Miracle played a show in Washington DC with a band called Last Days of August. They said we were good and said we should put out a record on their label, Fadeaway Records, and Mike Dubin would call us. He called, we talked, we decided to put a record out, and he brought us out to Long Island. We got involved in this Long Island scene for a little while. We were a Brooklyn band, but we played shows out there with Taking Back Sunday and Glassjaw and Brand New. We played with Brand New in a backyard once with a band called Excite Bike opening. There were probably 30 people there. It was a church backyard and I think I did a solo acoustic show? We did a festival together with Dashboard Confessional and our drummer didn’t come, so Brian from Brand New volunteered to play. We did three Nirvana covers and a Who song or something.
AP: Get out.
KD: Yeah [laughs]. So we knew them, but we didn’t know them well. I knew Jesse a bit and liked him. Then I got to know him much better around the time I did Make The Clocks Move and they did Deja Entendu because we were both on Triple Crown Records for that. That’s when our friendship, as it currently is, started to take shape. It’s been close for the last 12 or 13 years and increasingly so, to where it’s, like, familial. We’ve seen each other through a lot of changes. There’s musical development, personal development, whatever.
Andy and I met through Jesse. I guess they met one another when Brand New was making music in Mississippi in 2006. Jesse told me about these young bands from down there and was like, “You gotta hear these bands, man. They’re really good.” I met Andy the week before we did that tour with Brand New and Manchester Orchestra in late winter, early spring of early 2007. The three of us met up in the city and had dinner, went to a record shop, and had hot cocoa somewhere and walked around. I instantly thought he was super funny, really smart, curious. He was 20 or so at the time. You could tell he was a cerebral guy who wanted to know everything. We got along instantly. That’s also a relationship that’s obviously become super deep since we’ve started a band together and Jesse produced records. We’ve been in each other’s weddings and stuff.
I think we would absolutely do another show like that. I’m sure all three of us would be playing music together in some iteration forever – until one of us can’t, barring some dramatic dissolution of our friendships or something. We’ll always circle around and do something together. I don’t know when or where, but I’m sure we will. Every year since 2007, there’s either been Jesse and Kevin, Brand New and Kevin, full band acoustic, Manchester and me, Manchester and them, all three of us, Bad Books and Brand New, you know. There’s always been something like that happening. At least once a year for the last eight years. This year will be no exception.