Story by Ben Bye
Photos by Alex Stoltze
What would you ask the members of your favorite band? I had to ask myself the same question when Dr. Dog played at WOW Hall on Halloween. Dr. Dog, an indie rock outfit from Philadelphia, stopped in Eugene on tour for their fifth album, Shame, Shame, an upbeat album pulling from ’60s pop influences and recorded to translate perfectly into live performance. Ethos sat down with keyboardist Zach Miller before the show to talk about Dr. Dog’s current tour and life in the band.
Ben Bye: How has the Shame, Shame tour compared to your past tours?
Zach Miller: Yeah, it’s cool. These past two times we’ve had a light show which really kinda enhances the experience for us and the audience too … I think. It kinda transports you into another imaginary world when you are playing.
BB: I read that Shame, Shame was written more in the format of a live show than past albums. Does it feel that way when you perform?
ZM: It was definitely less of a worry about translating it to the live setting because we more or less wrote [the songs] with that in mind and tried to record them live, all together. While ultimately that didn’t really end up happening most of the time, it informed our playing a lot and we thought of it more as a live thing. So, they were a lot more natural to translate than some of the other stuff.
BB: What music has the band been listening to?
ZM: We’ve been listening to the new Ariel Pink record a lot, which I love. There’s a lot of music trading. I’ve been listening a lot to this Excavated Shellac. He’s a 78rpm record collector and he goes and collects international 78’s. So he’ll have music from literally all over the world, from North Africa and from the Mediterranean and from Vietnam and has all these really incredible 78 sides. The music is incredible. It’s music from eighty to ninety years ago that’s so well-executed and every one is different.”
BB: Do you get to see many live shows yourself?
ZM: We don’t have much time on the road; we just see the bands we tour with. We get really familiar with them. It’s tough too ‘cause it always happens that a show that I really want to see is the day after we leave for tour or the day before we get back. You know, Ariel Pink is playing with Os Mutantes the day before we get back home. You know, it’s constant. This constantly happens so, bad luck.”
BB: Are you working on any new recordings besides the four that you just came out with?
ZM: We’re going to be going back into the same studio and do some more songs in the same fashion. For those four songs we went in, recorded one day, and mixed them the next day, that same song. So it’s a very concise vision of the song. Whereas normally we would go in, record, get a lot done on a song one day, and then start on another song, and then come back to that song, going back and revisiting stuff. It was kinda nice to sit down and say, ‘Today and tomorrow, we’re just thinking about this song, and then after two days, it’s done.’ It’s been a good way to do it and I’m really happy with how it came out. That’s the plan, right now for the next album, to do a bunch of those over the course of months. That’s the record itself.
BB: Are you all good friends outside of the tour?
ZM: Yeah, yeah we all live within one block … it’s hard to avoid these guys, as much as I try.
