Foto-© Shervin Lainez

Das neue Album Billboard Heart von Jessica Dobsons Band Deep Sea Diver stellt das Projekt in eine Reihe mit Acts wie St. Vincent, TV on the Radio und Flock of Dimes – Bands, die kunstvolle und magnetische Wege gefunden haben, Indie-Rock zu machen, indem sie Vorstellungen davon, wie er klingen oder was er sagen muss, über Bord geworfen haben. Billboard Heart wurde von Dobson und ihrem Partner, dem Schlagzeuger und Co-Songwriter der Band, Peter Mansen, sowie dem Elliot Jackson (Synthies) geschrieben und eingespielt. Mit diesem Album durchstößt Dobson ihre Vergangenheit. Wie sie in ihren Songs singt, heißt sie „die Zukunft willkommen, indem sie sie loslässt“. Wir sprachen mit Jessica Dobson an einem Freitag Abend, nach einer langen Woche, während sie gerade in ihrer Wahlheimat Seattle den ersten Kaffee aufsetzte.

First of all, how are you doing?
I’m good. I hope you don’t mind I’m still making my coffee.

Not at all. I wanna say that I was really impressed with the album. The album resembled somewhat a music box, quite complex and tightly wound, that produces this burst of melodies too big to fit on a billboard. Can you talk me through your sound and what you’re looking for in the music?
Thank you, that’s really nice to hear. It felt like there were such big themes on this album. And we have always had a history of… we embrace the drama in music. I sometimes get insecure about, in the way of, well I don’t know. I grew up listening to a lot of Arcade Fire where you have these grandiose feelings or emotions. There is a time and place to sing a quieter folk song, and then another time and place just to, like, to have this bombastic, arena-ready song. But, I don’t know, it felt like on this record it doesn’t swing any which way. Like you said it’s a music box, a different kaleidoscope of sound that all feels cohesive, and it’s just one thing.

The flow is really nice. And thematically it’s quite an interesting album too. There are a lot of moments of self-doubt on the album, and I understand this album was not the easiest for you to write at first. Yet, the lyrics on this album seem to ooze a certain insecure assurance and is ultimately uplifting, even though the last song is called Happiness is Hard to Find, for instance. Can you tell me a bit about what made you overcome the doubt in writing this album?
Yeah, on this album it was the first time that I really…It seems kinda crazy to say this out loud but as you become an adult at first you kind of discover that maybe you don’t know what anxiety is, and you’re going into your twenties and figuring shit out. And then you begin to realize that there are things that you haven’t dealt with in your life that are starting to kind of come in hot. And I think a lot of that stuff down internally, they just kind of were like: “You know what, we’re gonna hit you all at once” and you’re gonna have to either deal with them or kind of melt down as a person. Wait, sorry, I’m gonna pour my coffee. I think, like, so many times artists and songs, you’re singing to your own future self without realizing the things you’re about to learn. And, I had to dig really, really deep to find a place that was soulfull and artistic for this album, cause I was battling and fighting a lot of fear, a lot of self-doubt like you said. And, I think that meditation was one of those things that really helped ground me during this process. And looking through the barrel of my deepest fears, and deepest insecurities, like what is the worst thing that could happen, actually experiencing one of those events when I felt like a failure, when we tried to record this record in L.A. and came back with almost nothing to show for it. That was at the moment the worst thing that could happen, I felt like I let my band down, like I let myself down, and I had to kind of figure out why that happened. And meditation was one of those thing that I was able to embrace as a practice, that kind of allowed me to reconnect with that innervoice, that is basically inferior, your instinct, that little quiet voice that is the best voice to listen to, to tune everything else out. But, I had lost that somewhere along the way, and so I think that, the theme of Billboard Heart – I’m in love with that movie Paris Texas.

Oh yeah, that is one of my favourite films too. I really love it.
That had a huge influence on my writing over the last two or three years, and for this album. And actually, Billboard Heart is taken from a scene where Harry Dean Stanton is up on a billboard and says: “I’m not afraid of heights, I’m just afraid of falling.” It’s just such a good line, cause that tells I’m not afraid of being up here, but I am afraid of falling, and I really had to come to terms with that. I love that there are imperfections on this album. I love that there is a lot of dirt and grit in having to like shovel for some shit, like the song Shovel says, to really get to the bottom of things. And that’s all I really care about, like am I connected with myself, with others, with the people that I love and the music that I’m making, that’s all you can ask for on a record or else why not go home if you’re not looking for anything else, you know.

I really like the Paris, Texas connection, because that film, especially at the end, is such a smorgasbord of open ends and unfinished emotions. You know that they will continue, and this album feels similar, I get that.
Oh wow, I love that.

Well, my favorite song on the album is Let Me Go, because it has such a peculiar progression and the greatest melody on there, I would say. Can you tell me a bit about what made your write this song and what you collaboration with Madison Cunningham was like?
Thank you. Yeah, so Maddie and I have been friends for a few years now, and we’ve gotten together a hand full of times to play music just because we’re … We have completely different styles in our guitar playing and our songwriting. We’ve admired each other for a while, and so we said: “well, let’s try and write a song together.” So, she was up here in my house, for a weekend, and we had set the drums up here, and played for three days straight. And some cool things came out, but nothing completely concrete. And then, in the eleventh hour, ended up at my co-producer Andy Park’s studio. This is what I love about being open, cause it was almost as if we needed all of this practice time to be ready for a moment when we were least expecting it, cause I was just sitting on the couch, we were not even planning on recording anything, and I played a riff that I wrote in high school, and kinda mindlessly sitting there on the couch, and Madison being the always open and kind of antenna up artist that she is just started playing immediately, and Andy picked up on this, cause we had this kind of duelling, jangly, quilted guitars thing going. We weren’t even talking, we were just playing together. Andy brought out a drum machine, and it’s oftentimes just the best thing to do when you’re writing, just, don’t stop, don’t think about it, and it’s especially awesome when you’re in a studio and someone else is pressing record for you. I just saw in the corner of my eyes that he was setting up microphones, and plugging in the drum machine, Peter, my partner, he plays drums, was messing around on the mellotron, and it just was like this moment in time where nothing was discussed but everything was written, basically in one sitting. It kind of had this driving … I listened to a lot of PJ Harvey, and even old Nine Inch Nails, and I have some early Radiohead influences, those are the jangly, Brit guitars that I have in there. Singing with Madison, it was such an equal collaboration. And, like I said, we have such different styles in the way we write, I’m more percussive and she has longer phrases. But when we sing together, I love singing harmonies with her, and there was just something very guttural and powerful about that song that wanted to come out, so.

Yeah I really love the progression, cause when the chorus hits, it soars really.
Yeah, amazing. And it’s a really untraditional song too. It’s not like a verse-chorus-verse-chorus.

It’s Roy Orbison almost. You mentioned Shovel already, and I can tell that’s a song you really like. And I have seen that you are really involved in the direction of the music videos for the album, such as the one-taker you made for Shovel. Can you tell how that came about.
So Shovel was a song that also came very unexpectedly, through a writing exercise that I happened to be doing at the time, where you just choose an object and you write about that object for ten minutes straight. You don’t stop, you don’t think, you’re not trying to write a song, you’re just describing it, with the five senses. What happened out of that exercise, my partner Peter read it afterwards and he was like “This is an entire song, why don’t you put this to music?” So, I was kinda messing around with, in the early stages of the song, I had this very dry-cleaning Sonic Youth, Nick Cave spoken word kind of language, or what’s the word? It was like, not a waltz, but it had this same exact arrangement, but kind of more swung. And when I brought it to the band, I had this idea of marrying, I call it my Nick Cave-meets-Robin song, where its like, does this song wanna be a bit more pop in the choruses, and a little more angular in the verses, cause that is literally who I am. I’m like split 50/50 in so many ways. I have my dark, gothy side, and then I like pop music, like, it’s very rare that I married those two so immediate like that. I think, with doing a one-shot music video, we tried a ton of different concepts but they were just not sticking, it was just like, I try to avoid doing the thing that it exactly is, it’s very obvious, I’m digging with a frickin’ shovel in the ground. I didn’t wanna do that. I wanted to be more quote-on-quote artistic with it. But in the end it is the thing that it just wanted to be, cause it has this like – a lot of our music videos from this record are kind of more in the cinematic inspirational, Paris, Texas, like, lot of Lynch themes and Coen Brothers. I think I was just watching a lot of movies.

I can tell, and a lot of road movies at that.
Yeah, exactly.

So do you also write songs with a particular vision or visual in mind and is this what you try to capture in the videos or is this more a separate process?
The one song that I can think of that I had a particular vision in my mind for was probably the title track. Because, Billboard Heart started with lyrics first, and, like you talk about, a lot of the songs, you envision or picture an open road in the music videos. There is great expanse and horizon and I wanted the record to feel like open road. So, Billboard Heart, when it showed itself, I think it was the third to last song I wrote, I finally felt like “Okay, this one is gonna open the record”, and even with the synths and the arpeggiations, it has this kind of dreamy, surreal kind of feeling. I think that’s how I feel when I’m on tour as well, you’re seeing all of the same things, but like, when you stop and think about it, your experiencing so much, day in day out, passing so many billboards, so many open roads, meeting so many different people, and what am I gonna remember and what am I gonna hold on to? Who am I now, who am I in ten years? All these things, but that one definitely presented itself much with a vision of what I wanted the whole track to be, and it has coloured the rest of the record.

So you describe the road a lot in relation to this album, and the feeling of travelling and being on the move. Yet, much of the album was recorded at home. Can you tell me a bit about what influence the recording environment has on the album?
The funny thing from coming home from L.A., recording ten tracks, and not knowing if I had anything to show for at all, it’s funny place that you get to when you’re defeated. I mean, it either gives you a ‘fuck-it’ moment, of ‘well, where do I go from here?’ or you quit, but I’m not really like that, although I maybe will mope around a few months about things and all. I began to see what I thought were demos in a new light, and its funny cause Peter kinda knew from the start, saying that “these aren’t demos, this is the record. You should just build off of this.” And I didn’t trust myself enough, yet. There is a song on the record which was pretty much entirely done at my house. It’s ‘What do I know?’ and its drums, bass, everything was done there. And for me as an engineer, I think at that time, I was listening a lot to the Smile record and their gushy drum sounds and I tried to capture that. I don’t think I’d done it well enough. So I those demos in a new light and I thought “This kinda rips” and I’m gonna work off of this. And I’m so proud, cause it’s one of the last singles before releasing the record, and it was all recorded in my basement, and I don’t that much gear but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. There’s Brian Eno records that I love, that sound like there’s just chaos happening on all of it. That’s imperfections galore, but that’s the thing, that’s why you love it. Cause it’s not pristine, it’s not perfect. There was a lot of first takes on all of the songs that I recorded here, Loose Change was a demo, that was all first takes. I think that’s all that matters, what you can tell on a record, is the spirit there or not? And you can rework songs to death, and I’ve done that before. I guess that’s the thing with L.A. We didn’t really capture the spirit. But then I started to sense that it was already in things, so it then became anything.

You mentioned a lot of influences already on this album, such as The Smile and Paris, Texas. Do you explicitly look out for out for music when writing the album or do you at one point try to stick to your references and eliminate new outside influences from the recording?
I do protect it a little bit, cause if you’re listening to new music, then you’re just gonna sound like whatever’s out there. I try to absorb the things that I love and reinterpret them, but no to only be submerged in new music. But I do usually have references that are like guideposts along the way. A friend got me into Tom Petty recently. I think I wrote him off when I was younger, too poprock music, I don’t know if I like this. I only knew his singles, and they’re really good. They’re amazing songs, so I don’t know why I didn’t get into it. And then I started getting into Tom Petty, and I wanted to write simply like that, and the heartland guitar hook on the opener Billboard Heart is my tribute to Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, like The River, a lot of those record I love, that are not like a 16-chord song, they only have three chords. How much can you do within that frame and so I definitely had a few record that I came back to. Some of the newer stuff would be Nick Cave’s Carnage, the first Smile-record. But I didn’t get too in the weeds with the records.

I was wondering, as a band you’re toying around with music, discussing music. Are there any artists that you can’t agree on if they’re good or not? That you feel like an artist is good and your partner for instance says “Fuck off, that’s crap”?
Hahahah, well. There is a record, that I simply cannot get into that he absolutely adores, and it’s Talk Talk, when they got more experimental. I don’t know why. It’s one of his favourite records, I can’t remember, Spirit of Eden I think it’s called. And every time I hear it, it’s not like I hate it, but I simply don’t understand the music and I feel lost in it. I feel like I should like it, but I also don’t get too uppity about that stuff, cause it’s simply not for me. Deep Sea Diver is not for everyone either. You don’t want to be for everybody. You have to do what you love, and the right people will come and connect and so. But for some reason this record, and a lot of musician that I love and respect are like “this is up there, top 10 for me”, and I’m like “Okay, I don’t get it.”

Thank you very much already. I only have one question remaining and it’s more to do with personal interest than anything else. Will you tour Europe at some point and when will this be?
We’re working on some dates, to come over for the first time, which is insane to me. I’ve toured in other bands in Europe. With like Beck and the Shins. We haven’t come to Europe before cause during our last record there was a pandemic and we had the opportunity to come over before things went south from there. We now have an agent over there, who’s amazing, and we’re working on some shows and festivals. So we’ll be announcing those soon!