Fun Facts About Nashville, TN:
• One of the lowest cost-of-living rates in the U.S.
• Average year-round high temperature: 70 Degrees F
• Home of the best biscuits, red-eye gravy, and ham ever (Loveless Café)
• Population 575,000 (most of them diehard music lovers)
• Home to rising pop stars and vintage swimwear connoisseurs De Novo Dahl

De Novo Dahl is an eclectic psych-pop five piece crew that favors stunning Nudie suits as stage uniforms (read on for more on Nudies), sponsors dance competitions (sign up here), and loves NBC comedy. Classic good times.

BYT’s new Russia bureau chief, Rachel Eisley, had the opportunity to pick the mind grapes of this eccentric band.

Hi! Thanks for doing an interview with us. I’d like to start out by asking how your band came together.

We originally had six people, in the band, Joel and Serai and I are what is left of that six, so we had a regrouping time, and decided we wanted to carry on, so we picked up Keith Lowen, the bass player, and also Matthew “Moose” Hungate, on keyboard. And we’ve been doing that for 2 years now. We all grew up around Nashville.

A great segueway to my next question. We’d love to know what’s up with the Nashville music scene right now. Especially the indie music scene which seems to be blowing up with bands like Be Your Own Pet and Paramore coming out of Nashville which has more stereotypically been known as a country music mecca more than anything else.

I think it’s great, I think it has been great for the past 7 years, definitely for as long as I’ve been in this band. We’ve been playing with this band the Features, actually our former keyboard player, Mark, went to play with them and is with them now. Also, the Half Pipes, How I Became the Bomb, all these bands. The Pink Spiders as well, and Kings of Lean who have kind of blown up lately. We’ve hung out with them through SXSW and gotten to know them pretty well.

What would you say are your main musical influences?

They vary. We’ve always let everyone’s musical influences in, no matter how strange. I’m into just about everything, we all listen to a wide variety of music, Joel is love with old country music right now, and hip hop, Matt’s into Japanese music, animation and video game music, he loves female fronted bands.

De Novo Dahl’s video for “Shout”

Speaking of music that you like, if you had a make a dance party playlist, what would be on it?

MIA, we love her, and Girl Talk. We got to open for Girl Talk in Nashville recently, that was fun. Moose, our keyboard player, doesn’t believe in dancing. It’s against his religion.

Well then, what would he like to watch other people dance to if he himself would not participate? Unless watching is also against your religion…

Moose says his ipod is full of Japanese Final Fantasy music, and David Bowie. And he would like to add Technotronic music, like the Pet Shop Boys, also a favorite of mine.

Final Fantasy jam

That’s a good dance party playlist!

We might want to throw some old country in for good measure, Joel could help me out with this, but he’s asleep right now. Some Tammy Wynette, George Jones, or Hank Williams, so we can remember where we came from.

Very good. Where are you guys right now?

We are in Lexington, VA on a day off. We’re on our way to Huntington, WV

Tell us about the outfits that you wear on stage and isn’t it difficult to get them dry cleaned while on the road?

Yeah, that’s something we looked into today, to see if in the few hours we have off we could get them dry cleaned. The problem is that if we a rush dry cleaning in one day, they just get hung up and steam cleaned, and so the smell doesn’t really go away.

What is the design influenced by?

They’re influenced by the costumes worn by old country stars, anyone who’s been on the Grand Ole Opry and worn a Nudie suit. There aren’t our first costumes per se, we started out with 6 people so in an attempt to make the stage look less cluttered we started out wearing the same color, or rainbow colors and then someone bought 6 Teddy Bear sweaters, and so we put those on, and take those further. Nashville hasn’t had a ton of artists who like to be really playful with their music, so we like to capitalize on that. We’ve put blacklight paint on these gray outfits and lit the stage with black lights, we also did a spaghetti western where we dressed like cowboys and served spaghetti, stuff like that. The Nudie suits were just the next phase.

The what suits?

The Nudie suits. Nudie Cohn was the person who started this trend or made it famous, and the one who designed them all for the old county singers and Elvis.

Nudie Cohn (Top), and his craft displayed (below)

How is it be on a major label?

We’re on Roadrunner which is now owned by Warner. It’s alright. It started out really great, because it was a big indie label, and now honestly, it’s become a little bit more of a hassle, because there are more hoops to jump through and lots of red tape, it’s being run differently now, because everything has to be approved and I’m sure they have to print things up in triplicate and all this other crap. That’s just me being honest, it started out really great, things flowed really well, but now it’s just kind of like the major label stereotype that you hear about. My suggestion for small bands it to just do it yourself for as long as you can. We had been doing it on our own for 6 or 7 years so it was a great opportunity when it came up. But we’re not really whiny people or anything, we’ll stick with it, we’ve been doing it for 7 years, just because we’re on a major label and they go slow on something, doesn’t mean we have to. We’re still going to be creative in how we promote ourselves. A good thing is that we’re playing 5 or 6 big festivals coming up.

Whats one of your favorite things to do while on the road?

Keith and I do gamble a little bit. I also run a lot and use the hot tub and pool. We were out on the road with Tally Hall and Carolina Wire and the whole tour went out and saw the new Indiana Jones movie. That was a nice family time.

Awesome De Novo Dahl hot tub (editor’s google rendering)

What did you think of the film?

It was ok, probably my least favorite of the 4 films. I didn’t understand what the groundhogs had to do with anything, I think it was just George Lucas’ way of having a part of it. I’m not too big on CGI honestly, I think the Spiderman CGI really turned me off to that franchise, in terms of how cartoony it was. All the monkeys in IJ just reminded me of Jumanji way too much. I liked how it was still kind of classic though, it was still good. I was glad they bought back Marion, although she’s lost a lot in the acting department over the years.

Do you have any book recommendations?

Joel recommends Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. We’ve been watching alot of Lost, 30 Rock and the Office on the road. I also recommend the Tim and Eric Awesome Show, on Adult Swim, made by the people who did Tom Goes to the Mayor.

30 Rock is hilarious

Come and see De Novo Dahl play Rock and Roll Hotel

W/ local darlings FEVER and Pash

Wed June 11th | 8:30 pm Show |$12

 Send to a Friend