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Showing posts with label Greg Dulli. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greg Dulli. Show all posts
2 June 2017
PHOTOS: THE AFGHAN WHIGS at KOKO
Amazing as usual... photos of The Afghan Whigs at Koko, London on 30th June
5 May 2017
IN CONVERSATION WITH THE AFGHAN WHIGS
Greg Dulli discusses new record "In Spades", memory, mortality and what legacy the Whigs will leave behind them
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| The Afghan Whigs at Koko - Photography by Eleonora C. Collini |
When we meet at the London’s Royal Institute of British Architects, Greg Dulli is radiant, pleasantly chatty, a far cry from the turbulent, moody person he used to be. “It is almost as if my past was predicting the future, and now that I am in the future I am actively able to view the past”, he tells me while talking about the recently-found balance of consciousness and reconnection with the past that inspired the new record of his main outlet The Afghan Whigs.
In Spades, the second album since the Cincinnati band reunited five years ago, is mainly about memory and how, over the last couple of years, Dulli has been revisiting his childhood through frequent lucid dreams. In one of these dreams he regularly has, he is reliving a memory of a bike ride through a field by a river near his house that he took almost every day as a child. “I would ride up on the river bank and see the river, then I would go back down the hill into the field and while I was there my imagination was where I felt the most free and at peace in my life. In probably an early version of meditation, I could see things, and in my mind I would see this place, which I didn’t realise till about a year ago is actually where I live now. I was basically seeing where I would end up”, Dulli recalls smiling.
To him, this reconnection with the past is very comforting, but also illuminates on the person he was then, who he is now and how he got to the present. ‘Those experiences made me who I am. They made me smile then, and it is ok for them to make me smile now. I don’t live in the past, but I like to visit it”, he points out.
During the extensive reunion tour, the chemistry between Dulli and the members of the Whigs’ new reincarnation (a.k.a. guitarists Dave Rosser and Jon Skibic, drummer Patrick Keeler, multi-instrumentalist Rick Nelson, and co-founder/bassist John Curley) was so strong that as soon as the tour came to an end in Spring 2015, Dulli invited everybody to reconvene at Nelson’s studio in New Orleans. There, in just a week, five of the ten songs that would end up on In Spades were laid out, while the other half was composed over the following year and recorded between New Orleans, Memphis, L.A. and Joshua Tree.
Though most of the tracks were written in the traditional Whigs way, evolving out from a riff Dulli created at home or in the studio, this time the creative process was approached more collectively. “I wrote all the songs, but the band helped me shape them. I hadn’t done it that way in about 20 years. The new record sounds so rich and textured because of them being so involved”, he explains.
Album opener 'Birdland' (which is both a homage to the iconic New York jazz club and a literal reference to a neighborhood in Ross, Ohio where Dulli went to school) stands out for being the most unique song on the record in terms of instrumentation. Composed by Dulli alone over just an hour “while messing around with an instrument in Memphis”, the track was done by stacking six mellotrons and mixing in a woman voice imitating the mellotron, and then embellished by Rosser on classical guitar and Nelson on cello and organ.
However it’s another album track, ‘Toy Automatic’, named after a band his friend had in the 80s, which is Dulli’s favourite. “Usually my favourite song is never anyone’s else favourite. I can almost predict it”, he jokes. “It’s a short song, with no chorus, just two and an half minutes of pure emotion, and I really feel like it’s my favourite vocal performance that I have ever done. I was singing in a way that I had never felt that free singing before, as if I was almost exploding”.
In Spades is not only about memory and revisiting the past, it is also about mortality and how that affects our lives. 'I Got Lost’ was written just after finding out that longtime collaborator and friend Dave Rosser had been diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer. Currently undergoing treatment, Rosser can’t join the band for the upcoming European tour, but the Whigs are optimistic that he will be able to play shows in America later in the year. After playing around 800 gigs together over the span of a decade, Dulli admits it was surreal to play without Rosser for the first time at the benefit show organised for him last December. “Dave always stands to my left and I always turn around to him, and when at that first show without him I turned around and he wasn’t there… it was really strange, not just to me, but to the other four guys as well. So, once we realised the power we had when all connected, we decided to play as a five piece and not try to replace him”, he proudly tells me.
Moved by the recent passing of many music icons that inspired him over the years, Prince’s death a year ago was a particularly difficult blow to deal with. I remember asking him once to pick a record he wished he had written and without hesitation he told me Purple Rain, and although the two never met, the Minneapolis star was like a family member to him. “I really experienced a loss when he passed away. I felt as if my uncle or my older brother had died”, he confesses. “I followed him since the beginning and I saw him playing more than ten times. I was really sad for a long time and I still have moments when I can’t believe he is gone. “
The mysticism and spectral imagery of the lyrics is cleverly reflected by the monochromatic artwork designed by Christopher Friedman. “Chris and I met on Instagram. We usually send each other stuff that we both like and for this album, he found this woodcutter from Brazil, Ramon Rodrigues Melo who already had drawings of the spirit that is on the cover facing in different ways in a woods, in a Victorian city etc., so I commissioned him what I wanted to be a vision of pre-civilization and civilization”, he explains. “To me the album cover is a piece of art. Out of 15 albums I made, only 4 had written words on them, while the others only had an image that stood for itself, evoking something, while letting you make up your mind what it is about.”
I finally ask Dulli what legacy he thinks the Afghan Whigs will leave behind them. “I am telling you this without any kind of arrogance or lack of humility …. when on stage we feel like we are the greatest band in the world, and we act like we are in terms of playing and giving the audience everything we have”. With so many successful years behind them, it’s hard not to agree with him.
5 February 2015
16 July 2014
PHOTOS: THE AFGHAN WHIGS at ELECTRIC BALLROOM
Photos of mesmerising Afghan Whigs show at Electric Ballroom, London last night
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7 April 2014
IN CONVERSATION with GREG DULLI (AFGHAN WHIGS)
The moment the Afghan Whigs fans have been impatiently waiting for has finally arrived! After being one of the most influential bands of the 90s thanks to masterpieces such as Gentlemen and Black Love, the Cincinnati four-piece officially called it quits in 2001, allowing frontman Greg Dulli to concentrate on his solo-driven collective The Twilight Singers and his project with Mark Lanegan, the Gutter Twins.
Following a surprise appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon thirteen years after the band last played together, in 2012 all founding members (except for the original drummer Steve Earle) reunited for a few shows including a headline gig at ATP I’ll Be your Mirror.
Losing guitarist Rick McCollum along the way, Greg Dulli and bassist John Curley finally entered the studio together last year and the result, the fabulous Do to the Beast, is coming out on 14th April via Subpop.
I chat with Greg Dulli just before he goes into rehearsals for the upcoming tour with the rest of the band which along with Dulli and Curley now features guitarists Dave Rosser and Jon Skibic, multi-instrumentalist Rick Nelson, and drummer Cully Symington.
The plan of making a new album was first conceived in Austin, Texas where the reunited Afghan Whigs played a collaborative set with R&B superstar Usher at 2013’s SXSW conference. It was The Fader that came up with the idea and invited them. “I was in Australia at the time and they phoned and asked me if I was interested in doing it”, Greg recalls. “I said ‘sure, get Usher to call me and I’ll talk to him’. So Usher called me, we spoke over the phone about what we could do a couple of times and then chose to do it.” It was then that Dulli and Curley first talked about making a new record together. “The evening after the show we had dinner and decided to go into the studio and see what would happen”, Greg explains.
The news of an upcoming Afghan Whigs record was revealed to the world in a sort of unconventional way. Breaking Bad’s star Bob Odenkirk found out about it through mutual friend Mike Brillstein (who had remixed one of the new songs) and then made the announcement on twitter in spite of being asked not to. I am curious to know if Greg is mad at Odenkirk. “Absolutely not. I thought it was actually flattering”, he admits.
Greg has been writing songs since he was thirteen and he believes that his writing process is not widely different from when he first started making music. “I usually make a riff, start to play with it, sing a melody on top of it and then go from there. I don’t think that has changed drastically since I was a teenager. Songwriting for me is very instinctive, I just go with my instinct wherever it takes me and that’s really the only way I know how to do it.”
The album cover, a black and white image of a person whose face seems to be exploding, is a photo taken by long-time friend Amanda Demme. “We have known each other for probably eighteen years ”, Greg reveals. “She did an exhibition in Los Angeles last year. I also follow her on Instagram and that’s where I first saw that photo and immediately decided that would be the cover. So I just asked her if I could use it.”
Do to the Beast owes its title to another Greg’s friend, Manuel Agnelli who accidentally came up with it while visiting during a Cincinnati studio session. Agnelli is the frontman of Italian band Afterhours some of whose records were produced by Dulli and the two have been close friends for years. “I was doing a beatboxing session and from the control room Manuel misunderstood what I was singing and thought I was saying ‘do to the beast what you do to the bush’. So it was his misunderstanding that made the album title”, Greg says.
The lead single “Algiers”, a beautiful ballad that slowly builds up evoking a Spaghetti Western atmosphere, is accompanied by a video in the making of which Greg was heavily involved. “I have known Phil Harder, the director for half of my life so we were really trying to capture what the song is about as much as we were trying to have a good time. Making a video is not an exact science, it’s just a form of expression. We were loosely talking ideas and then I thought of the movie High Plains Drifter and we sort of adapted it to the music.”
Most of Dulli’s lyrics have clearly been inspired by films and in addition to his recording career he has also appeared in some movies in the past including Ted Demme's Monument Ave. and Beautiful Girls, as well as Matt Bissonnette's Passenger Side. Greg points out that cinema and music are just different forms of expression. “I have always been interested in and have had an urge to write stories, songs or poems, they are all ways of expressing something.”
One of the new songs Greg feels particularly attached to is “Lost in the Woods” as it reminds him of his childhood hearing “You are my Best Friend” by Queen on AM radio at his parents’ house, which the distorted Wurlitzer at the end tries to capture. There are a lot of other little personal homages throughout the record, but when I ask him if he could share some, Greg is quite evasive. “Those things were like done in the moment. I would have to go through the songs and try to remember. Those are personal things to me and trying to explain them to other people would probably lose the power that they have to me.”
For Dulli is also quite difficult to say what old tunes he still feels particularly connected to. “If I don’t put something in it, if I don’t invest myself in it, then I have no connection. I have a strong relationship with all my songs. There are some songs of mine that I wrote twenty-five years ago that I still love. So there are too many to mention.”
Do to the Beast represents a comeback to Subpop which put out the Afghan Whigs’s sophomore Up in It and then Congregation, though Gutter Twins’ Saturnalia and Twilight Singers’ Dynamite Steps were also released on the Seattle record label. Greg explains that most of his friendships are long-lasting and usually if he becomes friend with someone, unless something terrible happens he stay friends with them. “[Subpop founders] Jonathan [Poneman] and Bruce [Pavitt] started more or less around the same time I began making music”, he continues. “I have always had a wonderful friendship with both of them, so my relationship with their label hasn’t really changed at all.”
In October last year Dulli played a couple of shows with Steve Kilbey of Church in Los Angeles and the pair have also written some songs together. I’d like to know if there are any plans to work on a record together anytime soon and he confesses he’d be up for it. “I think Steve is actually writing a Church album at the moment though and I am about to go on tour so that’s not going to happen in the immediate future. But I’d like to finish what we have done. We have sort of written a few songs already so we don’t have too far to go.”
When I finally ask Greg if he has any regrets in his music career he reveals that he would love to do a song or collaborate with Jimmy Page in some sort of way before he dies. But if he had to pick just one album by another artist he wishes he had written he would probably go for Purple Rain by Prince.
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