Fashion
Luella Bartley
Hui-Hui
Peter Jensen
Katie Gallagher

Entertainment
Alan Ball
Summer Bishil
Dr. Dog
Nima Nourizadeh
Chuck Palahniuk
Anthology Recodrings
Marina Zenovich
Zimmerman/Berg

Artists
Desireé Holman
Corndawg
Matt Furie
Molly Landreth
Matthew Lock
Nikolay Saveliev
Christopher Schulz
Darren Sylvester

Fiction
24 Hours on L16
Nobody Eats Oranges...
Some Mornings

Imagine a scruffy group of adorably shy hobos taking the stage in a smoky speakeasy. Giving their unwashed button-down shirts and straw boater hats a quick once-over, you spit your tobacco on the floor, passing them off as a second-rate bluegrass act, and you return to nursing your moonshine. Suddenly, the band’s come alive, churning out the most deliriously charming pop music imaginable. You’ve never been so tempted to dance to such lo-fi sounds, but the band’s guitar-plucking and piano playing is so infectiously upbeat in its temperament and so sincere in its dedication to just having fun, you find yourself on the dance floor, shimmying and shouting to songs about trains, time, and fate. Dr. Dog has seduced you. Before long, they’ve melted your icy heart, revealing the lover and dreamer you’ve been hiding all along.
        On the verge of their fifth album’s release, I spent almost an hour and a half in palaver with one of the band’s two lead singer/songwriters, Scott McMicken, who a dazzled fan once aptly referred to as “a psychedelic wizard.” Our discussion included ruminations on the prospect of a Dr. Dog musical, McMicken’s collection of Bazooka Joe comics, and the unnerving doom of widespread social mind control. Unfortunately, none of that stuff could fit into the piece, so here are a few gleaming excerpts from a gloriously rambling conversation, dealing with optimism, fate, spirituality and train-hopping.

It’s interesting to hear that you’re so disheartened by the state of the world, when your music is so consistently optimistic and hopeful. Is it hard for you not to write songs that are completely cynical?
Oh, I do it all the time. It’s becoming sort of a problem, actually. When we started the band, there was a lot of intent behind it, to make it a world that we could build for ourselves that was free from all the things that might be destructive or bothersome in life. From the start, we filtered out material that didn’t work with that. But the more life progresses, the more things become complicated, things stack up… it gets harder and harder to leave that stuff out.

A lot of songs that are on Dr. Dog albums, when I wrote them, they were late night, dark, at the piano, slow—they come from this point of real isolation, letting myself go to places that are darker, just because that’s the mood of the moment. But, I know that those are only moments. I think if there’s one thing about Dr. Dog that keeps us consistently upbeat, it’s the recognition that although everybody gets to those points, all you have to maintain through those moments is an awareness that things will change. So when you do sit down to express those kind of feelings, it’s important to either find a way to write into it some open-ended resolution, where it’s like, “This might be the case now, but things are going to be moving on, and with faith, and with trust…”

I won’t even touch a song after I’ve written it if doesn’t at least have some element of that in it, because that’s truly my belief. I can’t go out singing to people or make a recording that I would expect anyone to listen to, or that I would want to hear, myself, that just says some shit that’s sad or depressing and cuts it off at that, you know?

At the same time, you can take a song that’s just the ultimate dregs of emotional insecurity into the studio and go, “Alright, click it up ten beats per minute, and let’s put some of these pianos on it, and some sleighbells in the background,” and suddenly you’re recontextualizing it. That’s a nice thing to realize about songwriting, because then you have more freedom to make a song feel like you want it to feel, even if it comes from a dark place.

Where does the title of the new album, Fate, come from?
We were looking for a name for the album, and Toby suggested “Fate,” which is the name of one of our songs on the album. I started to think about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked it, because I found that I was being challenged—what do I even think fate is? What is the practical application of belief in fate into someone’s life? How does it dictate your decisions? How does it affect you spiritually? How does it affect your ambitions and where you’d like to go? Do you resign yourself to the fact that no matter what’s going to happen, it’s already slated to happen? Or is it still within your control? Are we headed towards some inevitable goal, or are we able to choose our path?

After that, everything seemed to fall into place, thematically, just through all these minor decisions and chance operations, we wound up with something that was very cohesive, and all we did was help it along and allow it to come together. There were times during the writing of the album, where—I’m not a very superstitious or mystical person—but there were times where I felt I oughta be, that I needed to start accepting some stranger truths about life, because I couldn’t believe how much I was getting back from these inanimate objects, these sounds, without me telling them anything.

Do you think of yourself as an atheist?
No, not at all. Firm believer in God. That was sort of another avenue to explore—this notion certainly has a lot of religious undertones to it, and I certainly enjoyed that about it, too.

Are you part of an organized religion, or just spiritual in general?
I’m spiritual in general—in a very general sense. To me, spirituality’s prime exercise doesn’t really come through prayer or specific doctrine—it’s more a way to get even further outside your own limitations. It’s a way to separate yourself from your ego even further. I feel spirituality is about practical, day-to-day minor events. Small interactions, or talking with you, or just sending off energy in a small way—like smiling at someone versus not, or getting impatient with someone versus not. Your general attitude towards yourself, and your ability to feel confident in your sense of self. Those are all things that sound very broad and relational, but they’re also very common, mundane things we all have to deal with, just being alive. It’s the grandest and also the smallest of things.

Have you ever hopped a train?
No—I want to. My friends do that. I have a few friends who live that way, riding around on the rails, and there’s something about it that’s very romantic. The three people I know who do it, it’s not a big social thing—most of the time they’re on their own, so it seems kinda cool. Dangerous—very dangerous. Probably very uncomfortable. In truth, I’ll probably never ever do that, but I certainly like the idea of that. All I can picture are horror stories of getting sucked under and your legs get chopped off.

What’s the headline for this article?
“Love yourself, love others, and be well.” Those three statements—not that those are things that I feel I have a grip on very much—encompass a way of being that I think is the goal of life. I got it from this kid the other night. We played in Minneapolis, and I didn’t see this happen, but after we played I was packing everything up and there were two drawings on my keyboard. The sound man said, “Yeah, this big dude in a black trenchcoat put these drawings on your keyboard.” They were kind of creepy drawings, like, they were really aggressively made, lots of scribbling, with these dark characters—but I flipped it over and I realized it was just an envelope from a piece of mail, and it said, “Junk Mail Art.”

I thought, “What a great idea! This guy just takes junk mail and makes art on the other side, that’s cool.” And then it said, “Love youself, love others, be well.” It’s such a simple statement—and it’s obviously hokey, and so far-reaching—but it’s a good place to begin. I’m not afraid to say something that corny. You can’t be afraid of the obvious, you now? A lot of times in life, everything’s gotta be so unrecognizable, the truth’s just gotta be strange. I don’t feel comfortable presenting anything that isn’t obvious. The obvious things in life seem to be the most important.