Interview: Dale Crover (Melvins) on Solo Music, Structuring an Album, and 'Rat-A-Tat-Tat!'
Dale Crover. Photo Credit: Buzz Osborne
At the beginning of the year, Shameless SF had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Dale Crover, the drummer for renowned rock act Melvins. On January 15th, Crover released his second solo studio album, entitled Rat-A-Tat-Tat!, a sonically intriguing adventure through genre that features a healthy mix of instrumental and full-band tracks.
Crover has been a fixture in the punk, grunge, and metal world, having played on numerous projects and released dozens of albums (Melvins alone have released over 30 albums and EPs (!)), and having the ability to perform solo gives him a chance to experiment even more with style, lyrics, and sonic manipulation. We talked about working with longtime Melvins producer Toshi Kasai on Rat-A-Tat-Tat!, piecing together an album of this nature, and the conception of the music video for “I Can’t Help You There”.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity purposes.
The first thing I wanted to talk about, right off the bat, is that I noticed that generally the structure of the album alternates between lyrical tracks and instrumental tracks. How did you decide on the structure for Rata-Tat-Tat!, when you were putting it together and figuring out how you wanted it to be layered?
Trial and error, just listening to it and figuring out what songs worked good together. I had an idea and worked on it, and I sent to the head of Joyful Noise [Recordings] Karl [Hofstetter], who always wants to hear sequences and also has good input on stuff sometimes. I’m so close to it that sometimes I’m not sure about things like that. Having his opinion helped out as well.
Pretty much between myself and Toshi [Kasai], the engineer, we’ll just kinda sit down and figure out what we think sounds the best, and what songs work together. Sometimes I’ll have an idea and say, “Oh, this song will be a really good one for after this one” and so on. (laughs)
It’s almost like putting together a puzzle, in a way.
Yeah, like I’ve never really have any idea how it’s going to fit together before the whole things done, you know?
Your style on this record is very cool to me, with the utilization of all of the different delays on the guitars. I almost want say that it has a disjointed, yet coherent nature. What kind of effects are you utilizing on these songs? It’s almost like punk-meets-noise rock-meets…I hear psychedelia on this, even.
I wish I could tell you what each one was individually, but I don’t know. (laughs) At our studio, Toshi’s got this giant rack setup with every effect pedal that he has, pretty much ready to go. All you have to do is patch in a few different things and create different sounds. A lot of the effects are probably a variety of different things stacked on top of each other. He’s really good at that stuff. On some of the songs, especially on some of the weird drum songs, I’ll make him patch something in first and then play along to whatever he’s got going effect-wise.
That’ll influence me to play a certain way or to come up with certain ideas for patterns or whatever. It’s all kinds of stuff. It’s like a fun laboratory. (laughs)
That’s interesting. Generally when you talk to someone, they’ll say, “oh yeah, we recorded flat, and then we add in all of the effects”. It makes for a cool effect.
Yeah, and that would be more on the experimental tracks, I would say. The ones that are based on drums. Yeah, sometimes it’ll make you come up with ideas, that you wouldn’t try normally. I guess that’s the fun of recording, you know?
I really let Toshi come up with a lot of that stuff because, like I said, he’s really good at it.
How did you two start working together? How did you initially collaborate?
Melvins started working with him around 2000, I think? Whenever we were doing the Hostile Ambient Takeover record [which was released in 2002]. We met him through Adam Jones from Tool, and he had worked on one of their records. I believe he was their engineer, maybe doing some guitar overdubs with Adam. He worked at this studio in the San Fernando Valley called Hook. We were looking for somebody to do a record, and some place to do record, and we found a studio out there. He was the house engineer.
We showed up on the first day of recording, and he was like, “So, uh, whose recording?” And we were like, “…well, you know how to run this stuff, right?” He was like, “…yeah?” So we were like, “you’re recording it!” (laughs) He thought we were going to be bringing in a producer or something like that, you know? That’s probably what he was more used to. He was really good, right from the very start, we could tell that he was a really good engineer. And then we’ve pretty much made every Melvins record since with him. We’ve done a lot of other outside projects together, and this record as well. And now we have our own studio together, basically.
After the tape company called Ampex crashed and went out of business, studios started closing. People started doing more home recordings and stuff like that, so pretty much every studio that The Melvins have recorded in in L.A. is gone now, except for…well, it used to be called A&M, but now it’s like the Jim Henson Muppets Studio. (laughs)
But yeah, there used to be hundreds, if not thousands, of recording studios. Now, there’s hardly any at all. A few big ones are still left here, but we ended up doing our own thing, you know? It’s not a super professional recording studio, but it’s enough that we can get by on.
Yeah, you do what suits your needs. Everything has become far more digital, more D.I.Y. Everybody has their home studio now, but there are still some musicians who work far better if they can go to physical studio and work there. It has upsides and downsides.
Yeah, I like our thing. It’s cool. It’s certainly a comfortable environment to record in. We also do a majority of rehearsing there too, so it’s easy.
Did you record the last album there, too?
Yes, I did.
I feel like every artist, even if they’re in familiar environment, they almost always walk away with a new perspective or new knowledge, even if it’s just a small thing. Was there anything you learned or applied from recording that record to recording Rata-tat-tat?
Um, it was kind of the same way as the last one, other than there being a few songs that I came up with on GarageBand, and then I took those tracks and transferred them and built them from there. That was different. I had originally planned that I was going to replace everything, as it was more like a demo. But the stuff in GarageBand sounded really good, so we ended up using a lot of it.
We replaced some things, but I kept some of the guitars and vocals on a few of the things. Recorded right on my iPhone, so it’s pretty crazy what you can do with technology nowadays.
The technology is miles beyond what it used to be. When GarageBand and iPhone first came out, you would find no one who would even dare to try and record on something like that. But ten years later, it’s totally different.
It was kind of just an experiment, but then we were like, “yeah, this is pretty good.” It was also a different approach to writing the song, because I had started with using all of the instruments in GarageBand.
What drove you to put forth “I Can’t Help You There” as the first single and music video for the album? What made that the initial introduction?
Oh, I guess it was kind of the rocker [track]. (laughs) I mean, I really like that song, and I thought it would be a good one to start with. Actually, there was another one that premiered before that one, “Tougher”. That was the only song that was actually co-written with somebody, which was Toshi. (laughs) I mean, “I Can’t Help You There” was the one that we knew we wanted to push and do the first music video for, but I was going back and forth with the Joyful Noise people, I was getting their input on what they thought would be a really good introduction as well.
I think the video for the song turned out really good. And a new song just came out today, it’s called “I’ll Never Say”. It’s acoustic guitar. It’s kind of a mellow one, but it’s one of my favorites on the record. I just really like the way it came out.
With “I Can’t Help You There”, I also thought it might be a track that Melvins fans might be able to get into. One of the other songs that came out after that one was called “Sharklike Overbite”, and that one was like almost super jangly pop. And I saw some comments that were just like, “yuck!” (laughs) They were people who were obviously Melvins fans. But, you know, I guess I kind of expected that. For the most part, it seems that Melvins fans have been really into this kind of stuff. And hopefully we get to do a bunch of live stuff, because I do have a live band. But obviously, that’s not going to happen any time soon.
We’re hoping to do a streaming thing. The Melvins just did our own “Melvins TV” on New Years Eve that came out pretty good. It was like a seventy-minute show that we aired on New Years Eve that was like five bucks. Hopefully, we’re going to do more, since we’re still all at home and unable to tour right now.
The virtual show thing has been really cool. I mean, there’s still so many artists that are coming out with new stuff, so it makes sense to keep going and doing more of them if you’re able to do. They seem to be a lot of fun.
Yeah. There’s a lot of people doing full concert, and then after you do one, it’s like, when can you do another one? Our idea was more like us doing a show, an episode, a TV show. We had an opening band, so it’s possible that maybe I’ll be able to do something like that with a couple of these new songs live, for future episodes.
Going back to something that you said: you said that you have one single that’s more jingly pop, one song that’s more of a rocker, another that’s got an acoustic feel to it. There’s a lot of variety on this record. There’s even a couple of instrumentals that I want to say are almost a little exotic sounding. How do you go about constructing instrumental tracks? I know you said “trial and error” when constructing the structure of the whole album, but is that the same process when writing the actual instrumentals?
I mean, some of that stuff I definitely made in the studio, when I was messing around. I think the one that you said was exotic-sounding was probably called “Supine and How I Found Him”? (laughs)
Yes, that was it. (laughs)
Okay so that one…so we did this on the previous record as well. That’s actually how the Fickle Figure album actually came about. Joyful Noise was doing this weird limited edition, almost “pieces of art”-style vinyl. They have a guy that does a lot of crazy lathe cuts, and they’ll try to come up with something that’s never been done before with vinyl. The thing that they did the last time was a record with six spindle holes and tracks that looked like they wouldn’t actually play, but they do. Weird, little art pieces like that. That song was actually for one that came out right before this record.
Originally, it was just drums. Like on the weird lathe-cut vinyl, it’s basically just like a drum solo, with me playing along to pre-programmed Wurlitzer Organ-sounding drum sample. You can kind of hear in that song. I wanted to add to it for the full record, and keep it minimal on the lathe-cut thing, because of time restrictions and also because it’s in mono. The machine that they cut laivs with is from the 40s or 50s. So, now it’s in stereo [for the album].
Evidently, I had given Toshi a little extra money to buy something for the studio and told him that needed to buy an electric sitar. (laughs) Now, I don’t quite remember that, but we have an electric sitar now, and I thought that track would be really cool with it. Toshi did this really weird thing, where it’s like the drums are triggering a gate that opens up the sitar. With the way that it came out, it’s almost like it’s talking, you know? Like, whatever he did, it’s genius.
Can you tell me a little bit about the album artwork and what it means for this album? Was there a theme for the album as whole? What does it represent?
Mackie Osborne did the art. She did the cover of the last record, which I really loved a lot. I looked at the artwork for the last record, and I was like, “this is so good.” And I didn’t really give her any direction at all, and I let her do the same thing this time. I just gave her pretty much song titles and the record title and all that kind of stuff. I don’t even know if…I may have sent her the music to listen to, but it was her vision. I think we included photos of me this time, which we didn’t do before. I really liked the way that it came out. It almost reminded me of an image from one of the songs on the record, in a way, “Untrue Crime”. I really like her stuff; she’s done a lot of stuff for us for a long time, a bunch of Melvins stuff. We try to keep it all in house, you know? It’s really easy to work with people that you’ve worked with for a long time. Especially since the Melvins were very loyal to people; we’ve been on the same record label for a very long time, same booking agent.
Is there any kind of message, any themes, you want people to walk away with after listening to this album?
Hopefully, it’s an enjoyable listening experience for everybody. Hopefully, everyone gets something out of it. It’s a little bit of a dark record, but you know…strange times that we’re in. (laughs) What can I say? But yeah. I hope everyone really likes it, and I hope I can eventually play live again and do some stuff with that. That would be really fun. I look forward to that day.
Dale Crover’s new album, ‘Rat-A-Tat-Tat!’, is available now.
Dale Crover
www.dalecrover.com
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