The Dandy Warhols Singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor Details the Making of ‘Distortland’

Matt Matasci

It is has been over 15 years since The Dandy Warhols’ “Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia” left a major impression on alternative music. The quartet from Portland, OR, is back again with “Distortland,” their ninth studio album and first for Dine Alone Records. These 10 tracks find the band recreating the magic that made “Bohemian Like You” such an inescapable hit. Lead singer and founding member Courtney Taylor-Taylor spoke with Entertainment Voice about the band’s writing and recording process, how he came up with the title “Distortland” and the serendipitous addition of mixer Jim Lowe.

What have the members of The Dandy Warhols been up to over the four years between “This Machine” and “Distortland”?

We just kind of lived our lives and the music is this omnipresent byproduct of life. So, I don’t know… Everything? Nothing? We travel. We tour. With The Dandy Warhols, there is no part of our lives it doesn’t affect, that’s for sure. It’s like a disease we all have or a marriage we are all together in. I can’t really tell what it’s like; it’s like being in a band for 22 years, I guess! (laughs).

Were the songs on “Distortland” written over a long period of time or was it all concentrated sessions?

We don’t sit down to make a record, you know? After I get two or three rough things that I’ve started, I’ll take them and load them into the studio computer and fool around with them down there. I can have louder guitars than I can in my basement; we have real deal drum rooms down there. And then Pete [Holmström, guitarist] will come in, Zia [McCabe, keyboardist] will come in, [drummer] Brent [DeBoer] is over here and we’ll bang around, do a party recording where we are just eating and drinking and [have] friends over and record for days at a time.

And that’s where it gets serious. Pete will come over and take a hard drive, suck all the info out of it, take it back to his basement and load it into his computer “brain.” He’s got a ton of bizarre equipment in his basement like ancient electronic things from the military in the 50s and shit like that. So he can make a lot of weird textures and sounds. If things need to be chopped around – [some pieces] are like active remixes, half-remix-half-song – he does that at his house and then he brings it back [to the studio].

Was recording on an old-school cassette recorder and having the band members fill them out in the studio a new approach for “Distortland”?  

I start on an old cassette four-track recorder that I’ve been working on since I was 13 years old. So I am fast; I don’t need to plug shit in. I don’t need to install software updates before I get this song off my chest. I’m fast at it. I get it into a rough song form in minutes before the inspiration is gone. I can make it feel like I feel. And that’s the important thing.

My chemistry lab is an interesting place of analog-to-digital – from flesh and wood and steel strings to magnetic tapes and plastic [and finally] to the digital/virtual realm.

You brought on producer/mixer/engineer Jim Lowe to mix the album. Was his strong pop background an important part of the decision to bring him on?

You know, as it’s been four years since we put anything out and we’ve been putting stuff out on our own label, and we don’t really know what the hell we are doing as a label . . . Jim was, I think, the only mixer who called us back! I remember thinking that what I’d say in an interview was ‘Yeah, we knew Jim was the man, it just had to be Jim, because he’s the only person who called us back.’

So we released [and] I mixed a song myself with some help from several friends over time called “Chauncey P. vs. All the Girls in London.” And I just hired an English radio promoter guy to just do a minimal amount of work, just get it out there. He did the best he could with it without a big label budget. So it worked out well that this very interesting and very remarkable mixer randomly just got a hold of our manager and said ‘I didn’t realize The Dandy Warhols were still so cool!’

I listened to what he did [as a mixer] with Taylor Swift and the Beyonce stuff and I thought that this is definitely an odd and daring mixer. He understands the intensity of just pure noise in a way that is interesting. Also, he is a guitar master and I knew this because he mixes and produces for Stereophonics and [Stereophonics guitarist Kelly Walsh] is a guitar hero. He has amazing guitar tones and he’s an incredible guitar player. So I knew that I liked [Lowe’s] treatment of guitars and that was very important. And sure enough, when we got the first mix back it completely blew my mind.

Is there any particular significance of the title “Distortland”?

Yeah, it started because I was putting a lot of distortion on everything and really hitting the cassette tapes super hard to create tape distortion. And somehow I just thought, ‘Distortland.’ I’ve never heard anyone say that before.

Then, I was looking at a photo I took of Portland buried in fog, which became the cover. And I just thought ‘Oh my god. Portland. Distortland. What has happened to this city?’ We are one of the top 10 most traffic-congested cities in America, the single most culturally relevant city on earth probably five years ago. 

You are releasing another album in April. Tell me a little about how “Live at The X-Ray Café” from Voodoo Doughnuts Recordings came about?  

Voodoo Doughnuts owner Tres Shannon owned the coolest nightclub in the world called The X-Ray Café. It was an all-ages room that was eccentric beyond belief. Just incredibly bizarre and exciting and artsy and cluttered with velvet paintings and Nixon Now paraphernalia – you name it, it was in there. And Dean Fletcher who was an older kook, part of the freak scene of the dark, empty Portland days managed to get a digital 8-track in there and run it through the mostly-broken mixing board.

So yeah, that was a recording that just managed to survive and Tres has started culling Dead Moon, Napalm Beach, The Wipers – legendary stuff from that pile that Dean Fletcher managed to record. He’s been mixing it and putting it out on his label so we are super excited and that was just total luck that those two separate labels [Voodoo Doughnuts and Dine Alone] plan on putting out stuff within two days of each other.

The Dandy Warhols‘ “Distortland” is out April 8 on Apple Music.