During the course of my conversation with Dr. Dog’s guitarist/co-vocalist Scott McMiken, it quickly became apparent that he was one of the few musicians I’ve spoken with who was interested in having a conversation, rather than an interview. His responses about his band and creative process were lengthy and thoughtful and sometimes tangential (some of these asides have been whittled down for brevity’s sake) but always found a way to both answer the question posed while also providing a profound insight into what his band, city and Dr. Dog’s latest album Fate have meant for him.

To start off, I wanted to talk about the band’s hometown, Philadelphia. It seems that the city has garnered this strange reputation of eating its young. When its bands hit the national stage, those in Philly get somewhat resentful and immediately nonplused.

In a very blanked kind of way, that seems to be true. I think it might stem from this weird, underdog pride syndrome…this notion of the perpetually underappreciated city. That leads to a really large kind of pride and once you dig your claws into something much larger in this city, people start turning their back on it. It’s something that I’ve been forced to think about over the course of doing interviews- about my ideas of Philly. And I don’t know. We stick to a very insular community here but I do have a very clear, larger understanding of the music scene in this town, knowing that there’s so much going on of really any kind of thing you could imagine. And there is a very strong DIY ethic in Philly, for sure. The idea is pretty much ‘if you can’t get a show, build a show.’ There’s that kind of conviction and passion within people and that’s great. But like any really town, your city will turn its back on you when you’ve received a little success outside of it. That’s fundamental bullshit, ya know? People who think like that are so off that I immediate discount them from my understanding of the city I live in. Unless I’m forgetting someone, we’re kind of the biggest band in Philly right now it seems, with the exception of Man Man. I know they’ve been out there and doing their thing and that’s awesome, they deserve it. I can sort of understand it, but I guess that’s why I say that I immediately discount this shit because I understand it to be fundamentally bullshit. I remember being a kid and claiming to really love some band that I found about only because I knew that nobody else knew who they were so I could claim ownership of them. Like for instance, I remember there were a bunch of really hardcore punk dudes in my school who I was really enamored by and they had green day patches on their jackets long before Green Day was…

Green Day.

Yeah, exactly. And then I was like ‘oh wow, these guys are great!’ And then in my school, like overnight, they were on Mtv and all the punk kids had to paint over their Green Day murals on their leather jackets. It’s that kind of thing. Obviously there is the enjoyment factor that comes with music but there’s also that social implications of music and what it means about the individual to like a certain band. If you’re fickle and take a lot of stock in that, you’ll bat around your tastes depending on what best suits your sense of self. I just don’t have time for that type of bullshit in my life anymore. For us lately in Philly, we had a free, outdoor show at Rittenhouse Square and there was an amazing turnout and the City Paper and XPN were doing so much for us. There’s really been a noticeable jump in the Philly awareness of Dr. Dog and all of the revelry around the show. But in that sense, I’ve never heard more from friends of mine who are in different little sects of the city, saying that there was this backlash. It’s just part of it and it’s interesting to see it. It’s a small town in a lot of ways. Things kind of get filtered through the grapevine and when it comes back you’re like ‘What? This guy thinks that I slept with the drummer of Man Man’s girlfriend?’ And most importantly, Dr. Dog has never been a band that is going to win anyone any social graces. We’re kind of the perpetual un-cool band. I don’t leave any sleep over that. Coolness is a very relative term and rarely do we ever resemble that to which is deemed cool.

Dr. Dog really appeals to numerous and disparate types of music fans. As someone who writes and reads the press coverage while noticing the types of places you play and whom you play with, it can vary pretty wildly. Does the band approach different crowds in different ways? Do the differing expectations of certain audiences influence or affect how you’d approach a live show or a record?

No, I think if there’s anything that ever affects what comes out of our live shows or a day in the studio, it’s very insular. Everything is always a little reaction to what’s happening in our own little world, I can say that with confidence. The way we view a show of ours is almost never consistent with the feedback I get with people who are in the audience. We’ve got our own level of expectations for ourselves and it’s very much unaffected by a sense of audience, let alone a specific kind of audience. I have noticed that as we’ve grown as a band and kind of gotten out there a little bit more, it’s become harder for us to focus on that kind of insularity. But in my opinion, it’s absolutely instrumental to us and probably a lot of other bands to stay true to the original vision of the band.

One of the things that I’ve consistently enjoyed about the band is that you manage to toe a very thin line between taking a modern approach while utilizing old, familiar sounds. Has the band ever gotten to a point where you feel you have to be careful about overdoing certain styles or sounds as to not come across as something of a tribute act or mere revivalists?

This is where we really step into the quagmire because it’s a very complex issue regarding what can be considered modern, especially at this point in history. For starters, we’re not scared. We’re not scared about being who we are, whoever that is at that moment which is something I think we’ve proven to ourselves time and time again. To be perfectly honest, there’s a big part of Dr. Dog that I’m aware of and even manipulated to a certain extent, which is to cultivate an idea of ourselves that is not self-serving. But because I think there’s a dissipating idea of humility and a certain sort of simplicity that gets lost in this kind of Byzantine conduit and the shifting conceptualization of everything, with nothing ever being what it seems. Everything is constantly in flux, progress is always that which comes about to take away what came before it, that kind of rat race. We are trying to look at these kinds of things…I mean I feel so weird talking about this shit because it sounds like there are so many contradictions but there’s really nothing that meaningful about what we do. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t mean everything to me in my life but it’s just one way of being. It’s just one way of looking at the world around you. The problem is that people take that and then say that ‘you guys are saying something.’ We’re not asserting anything. If we wanted to be doing that, we’d be activists or trying to make a real change. But this is like a mood piece, a simple coping mechanism. It’s nothing else. It’s music…its rock and roll music.

That’s always the bottom line.

And I understand that. I appreciate that. But I have a greater understanding of what it all means and how much hot beef these people inject this stuff with. You really have to fight for everything you’re going to say and I’m totally willing to. But it’s kind of a complicated point. All we are really offering is ourselves and hopefully anyone else is to just feel relaxed about things and feel as though things aren’t as complicated as they often seem. And that’s not because I don’t believe that things aren’t that complicated because I know that they are. It’s more of a spirit more than anything. There’s no dictionary for how you ought to make your decisions…it’s not what we as a band are trying to get you to see. It’s a certain lens. We’re not defining the world around you, our music aims to put up a lens which hopefully gives the listener something else whether it is a little bit more self-respect or self-control or freedom to be yourself. Frankly, when it comes into a cultural context, then everything gets really quickly defined as ‘Beatles sounding’ or ‘retro’ or ‘rehashing.’ Whatever. If that stuff is not relevant, all we really focus on is the song. We feel like there is still a lot to explore still within these types of parameters. A strict sense of harmony, a strict sense of texture and dynamics and rhythm…All of the things that we’re really obsessing over have been around and have been obsessed over for a really long time. And at no given point, have I ever felt constrained. I feel as though there is equal amount of potential in making an album with one instrument and one microphone as there is in making a record on infinite tracks in pro-tools. It’s all relative. And we’ve always been a band who can look at our context for purely what it is. And honestly, what it felt like making a recording in my 4 track in my bedroom and whatever pile of crap I had available to me as opposed to now when we have a fully functional 24 track set up with pianos and pedals…it feels exactly the same. It’s just a filtering of the same sense of aesthetics into a different context. One thing that I think is important to point out is that Dr. Dog’s leanings towards all of this analog stuff, which makes it very easy to lump us within this retro scope, is not really a moral platform or a resistance towards what’s going on, but just a choice. We’ve got a history with this certain kind of technology and we’ve built up our abilities and our scope on this kind of stuff and it’s always made sense to build upon that instead of just throwing it all out and getting into something new. To be honest, the way our records have sounded was not a conscious decision. That was literally the only type of recording we were capable of making. I think it might be a little frustrating for me to be involved with this kind of thing for so long and then for it to be so easily panned. But the weirdest thing, at the core of what I’m trying to say, is that getting panned has been in many ways a validation. As soon as we got our first Pitchfork review for Easy Beat and they absolutely destroyed us, it made absolute sense to us that they would destroy us because what they represent to me is such a problem in our culture. Had they liked us, something might have seemed inconsistent in what we were doing. Maybe this is just me coming up with rationalizations, keeping myself guarded from any sort of real critique but why the fuck not? This is not a culture war; we’re just five guys going through everything. It ought not to be seen as something so fucking important.

And what do you attribute that to? Here I am as an interviewer and someone who writes reviews, etc. I am implicit in the very issue and critique you’re talking about. What do you attribute this kind of over importance of these kinds of things? It does seem that there is something going on in our culture where more is hinged on taste making, personal opinions on arts and culture, than there might have been previously.

Well, that’s an interesting question. There are two things to look at it…What we’re really talking about can’t be pinned on one thing. Essentially what we’re talking about is this cultural dialogue that is always going on. Information gets thrown around and reacted to which leads to people building these kinds of dichotomies. Maybe it’s sort of at a heightened point because while that dialogue has always gone on, 100 years ago people were engaging in it at opposite ends of the football field. Now we’re all right up in each other’s faces. The line between our thoughts and feelings into that larger cultural dialogue is nonexistent. We’re all out there. I think it’s probably just the ease of communication, it’s so much easier for people to exist in a public forum than it ever has before so we’re seeing this flood. It’s cool in the sense that it’s inspiring people to create more on their own but it also sort of has a backlash because it s floods everything with so much information that people, myself included, have lost the real sense of meaning. Too many choices is no choice at all which is why, coming back to the band, we’ve always been so comfortable within these certain parameters. This is why I’m fearless about what we do. I don’t feel that we need to use and exploit all that is modern in order to do something modern. I feel that idea ought to be embraced more now than ever because that is what post-modernity is. But ultimately all of this explosive information revolution we’re going through is leveling the playing field. People are regaining a sense of control, really. Right now, it feels like kind of at a clusterfuck but everybody’s trying to figure out where the next dollar’s coming from and more and more it’s right there in front of you. I think what it’s coming back to is a lack of meaning.

Hearing all of this, I think it sort of illuminates a lot of the, in your words, ‘humility and sincerity’ that the band gets at it in its lyrics, specifically on Fate. At a time where most bands aim to be obtuse and seem to be reticent in showing straight forward emotion, I think Dr. Dog is one of the few bands I can think of that tackles very basic issues and concerns.

Or of making people feel alienated which is what I hear a lot of. There’s so much pomp and circumstance. The last thing that I want to feel or do is to give off the impression that whatever it is I’m singing about has nothing to do with you, the listener. That’s not the world I want to inhabit. Whatever conclusions I’m going to draw are not unique to me. That’s not some highly enlightened idea…that’s life. I do think that’s a big part of our music because it’s a big part of who we are as people. We don’t see ourselves as unique in any sense. I don’t know that the belief or a sense of uniqueness in any self-righteous way is at all righteous. We try to embrace our shared experience as opposed to ‘look at me and how intense I come across. Look how my feelings are so much more compelling.’ It’s just the same kind of crap, an immaturity. Once again though, we’re getting very close to these issues but there is a function to all of that stuff and it certainly has to do with where you are in your life, where you live in the world, etc. Ultimately, I would rather people pick up a guitar and sing a song even if they’re going to be all self-indulgent about it than do something else they don’t like doing. In fact, I think it’s really important they do that, actually. I know what joy that can bring and how hard that can be for some people.

Contrasted to We All Belong, it feels like Fate has a running feeling of both hopefulness and melancholy. I was curious about what was going on for you and how it plays for you now.

That’s another really great question because my relationship to that whole pile of songs is really complex. We don’t make records so that there is another record on the shelf. We make records because it’s a big part of what we’ve embraced as the solution and sometimes the problem for us. I have actually come full circle with Fate because coming out of the gate I was so filled up with this new attitude. Now again, I don’t want to portray anything too unrealistic…life was basically the same afterward but maybe with a slightly new twist on things. I was certainly wrapped up with the making of the album but also life itself- getting older, going through relationships. I found myself challenged on a lot of levels, with love, family and alcohol. It all kind of came to this fever pitch all at once. So it was this really good time to have something new. I used this record as a dialogue for all of this stuff. You can sit and talk with people and that’s great but I think I also use music as another aspect of having that dialogue. It also forces you to take responsibility for who you are if you’re going to bother to express yourself creatively. We went into the album with a very rudimentary idea of what was going on. Coming into this recording, we had more instruments and a larger budget so that was going to dictate how some things went. Where we are as a band is different from where we’ve been previously because of how the band has grown. I think we had something already when we hit the studio; we had something to reflect on aside from just songs. There was a little bit more pretense because we’ve evolved into a live band that we weren’t before. We didn’t have a list of songs to be this album and it was about half way through the album’s completion that this whole picture seemed to come out of what we had. I don’t like to go into an album with these big ideas. Instead, I like to add the meaning afterwards and reinterpret what we have. And that’s what happened with Fate because once we had those first 5-6 songs, this whole narrative seemed to come out of it. And that’s where the idea of fate came from and we got kind of romantic about it. In the end, I realized whatever it is I had thought fate to be before was a lot less lofty and mystical than I now think it to be. We had a lot of fun with this because there came a point in the studio that it was easy to convince ourselves that there was something larger to be addressed than just the craft. It sort of blurred the lines between what’s going on with your life and what you’re creating. It was just this exciting, open-ended thing. But since then, the initial reaction I kind of walked away from was almost this over confidence. Maybe it was an over simplification. And just like the making of the album, the tangibles and the intangibles all started to challenge me again. It was sort of like phase 2 for me, to kind of prove that I had really gained something from it. You can talk about these things and put it in writing and nail it down, but it’s not true understanding until you can gain control of it in your emotional life. It’s been weird; it’s sort of been a haunting thing for me. It’s a complex relationship but more than anything, it’s a beautiful thing because music means a lot to me and to be able to engage myself in this love of music to me is as good as it gets.

Do you experience this level of intense introspection at the completion of every record or is it that all of the circumstances you described had led Fate to have this kind of journey of self-discovery?

This is a very particular thing to this album. Like I said, there was a serious synchronicity happening. All of these things had conveniently wound up in my lap and all seemed to hold hands together in way that felt very inspiring. That has had not been the experience expect for our first, it’s called The Psychedelic Swamp. That was another experience where the lines of reality as I understood it and the lines of making art just did not exist. It had the same kind of engage where just because you walked out of the recording room that didn’t mean what you were doing had stopped. I’ve never been disappointed in any of my experiences in making other albums and they’re all a reflection of a good time so it’s not like I was ever like ‘well, the making of this album didn’t expand my consciousness.’ (laughs) I feel okay talking about all of this stuff but I don’t want to sound unrealistic about any of it because it sounds like I’m going way around the back door to get to the front. In no way is this an alienating kind of thing. It’s a natural, simple thing but I don’t have the means to make it seem that way.

I think that’s interesting because I find that to be the opposite in terms of the band’s music.

And that’s the other thing, sometimes I think ‘shut up!’ There are times where I think it’s ridiculous to listen to Dr. Dog and then think about it in the way I think about. That relationship is there. I just get excited at the prospect of being honest. Nothing feels better than when you can really step up with honesty and feel no repercussions regardless of the effects. Art is one way in which people can do that.

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