Ryan Dahle Interview
Posted by RNS Robot on September 30th, 2009One of the last things I expected to hear this year was a solo release from Ryan Dahle, formerly of Canadian groups The Age of Electric and Limblifter. AoE disbanded in the late nineties, while Limblifter has been dormant since 2005. When I read that Dahle was dropping a new disc, love for his old material prompted me to check it out. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but somehow I didn’t expect Irrational Anthems to be a beautiful, addicting record. I had a number of questions for Dahle regarding the new disc, what he’s been doing in the past half-decade, and the “Canadian Rock” era of the late nineties. Our conversation opened up a few more interesting doors…
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RNS ROBOT: Thank you for doing this with me, Ryan.
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, no problem. Thanks for taking an interest.
RNS ROBOT: I kind of randomly stumbled upon the information that you were coming out with a solo album. It was this tiny blurb in The Province, and I checked it out on myspace, and “Chop Chop” was… I think I listened to it about eight times that day. Good song.
RYAN DAHLE: That’s cool, thanks man.
RNS ROBOT: It is kind of a surprise. I remember in 2004, Limblifter kind of resurfaced; yourself and Megan Bradfield were part of Matthew Good’s band, um, and then you kind of disappeared again, at least as far as being a recording artist. What have you been up to in the music business since that brief revival?
RYAN DAHLE: Well, I built a studio with my friend Jess Booth and I’ve been recording my record, as well as tons of more material. I’ve been mostly mastering other people’s records, a little bit of mixing, and quite a lot of producing. I produced the Manvils record, I just mixed the latest Hot Hot Heat record, which is a masterpiece. It’s super-amazing. It’s like everything Hot Hot Heat was at the beginning but on speed. It’s a pretty amazing record. That’s been the latest thing I’ve worked on, which was awesome. I was pretty amazed that they had chosen me, because they’ve worked with so many international producers and engineers and mixers, so for them to pick somebody local and for them to pick me, I was pretty blown away. So I spent a lot of energy on that in the last year or so.
RNS ROBOT: Nice. Just as a random aside, for people who don’t know, what are the differences between being a producer, an engineer, a mixer and a masterer?
RYAN DAHLE: Well, the engineer aspect is the technical job, it’s knowing the gear, how it all works together and what the hell to do with it. Being a producer is basically working with the band to help with songs, and the arrangements, and the structure, and the basic sound of the record, like the overall picture of the record. Being a mixer is… taking all that junk that you’ve recorded, up to a hundred tracks per song or whatever it may be, and putting it into a two-track stereo file, so it’s sort of like overseeing the big process at the end. And the very last step of making a record is taking those two-track mixes that somebody’s mixed and mastering it, which is the final EQ and compression and levelling of the whole record, and that’s what I’ve been doing a lot of. I like that part of it because I like finishing projects. Sometimes when you’re producing, a record can go on for six months to a year. It’s really a great thing for me to be at the end part of the process, it’s kinda good therapy for me because it shows you how everything just ends up.
RNS ROBOT: Now, you did all four of those things for yourself on the new record.
RYAN DAHLE: I know, it’s ridiculous.
RNS ROBOT: With that experience, were there things that were difficult for it… that you wish you had maybe somebody else doing it?
RYAN DAHLE: In all honesty, I’m a really… open producer. I really use the people around me. In this case I probably could have written twenty-five people down as the producers, because I constantly use my friends and people around me to bounce off ideas and see how they react to things. And the complex that my studio’s in is a complex of about a dozen studios, some of them really big, some of them smaller studios, with a lot of amazing and a wide variety of talented people in them. And so having them come in once in a while, you know, let them kind of criticize things was a good way of knowing whether or not I was on the right track you know? There’s certain people, where they’d say they hated something and it’d be like, ‘perfect, I’m on the right track.’ And some people who just gave really great advice. There’s some older engineers there who really know things that kids just don’t know. Techniques that were used in the sixties and seventies that they had been a part of. There’s a couple old studio owners like Allan Rodger, who used to own Crosstown Studios, Bruce and Roger Levens, and just tons of engineers around the city — John MacLean, Sheldon Zaharko, Jay Evjan, Douglas Naugler, Greg Toth — amazing engineers who know so much, so I’ve learnt a lot.
RNS ROBOT: So you’ve been able to just soak it up like a sponge?
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, and there’s other great producers coming through like Warne Livesy, and the list goes on and on… Howard Redekopp, Chris Holmes. My brother (Kurt Dahle, AoE/Limblifter/New Pornographers), who’s a really good producer as well. And also Megan had a lot to do with the making of the record. She wrote a few songs on it with me and she has her master’s in music, and so for a lot of the orchestrated parts like the strings she had a big hand in all of that.
RNS ROBOT: I was actually going to ask you, did you arrange the strings, or did somebody else work with that. Megan, on the album, she performs cello, double bass, wurlitzer, bass and clarinet. I don’t know if I’m missing anything. How many instruments does she play?
RYAN DAHLE: And she sings as well. I don’t know, we’re not big instrument counters. A lot of people get out there and they count the instruments they play, and then they start bragging about it. I think she could play anything if she picked it up. She has her masters in double bass performance that she got from UBC, so she’s spent a lot of time studying and performing music. Previous to that, as a kid, she was a clarinet prodigy. She’d really been good and her teacher that had mentored her moved away, and she just sort of rebelled and then quit and picked up double bass. But she picks things up really easily. We kinda stumbled upon this 100 year old cello, and she’d always wanted a cello, and we stumbled on it and it was an amazing price [from] an old luthier that she had known. She’d literally practised about 30 hours when she played on Carl Newman’s record.
RNS ROBOT: Really.
RYAN DAHLE: She played like four songs on that record. She’s just a natural music talent, one of those people who pisses you off.
RNS ROBOT: Haha. I was gonna ask, are you ever jealous of that?
RYAN DAHLE: I try to make her think that I could always do better so that she doesn’t get too big-headed.
RNS ROBOT: When did you actually start recording Irrational Anthems, and how long was the project start to finish?
RYAN DAHLE: I think it took about a year. It took a long time because I wanted to combine the demoing process with the recording process, because I always felt like the demos we had done for Age of Electric and Limblifter were always better than the records in some ways – there was a certain charm about them. So because I’m a gear fanatic, I’m obsessed with old amplifiers, which led me to be obsessed with old microphones and pre-amps and the techniques of the people in the past who made great sounding records, I’ve accumulated a bunch of gear and made it possible for me to capture things at the highest quality possible right as they happen. So that’s why I kinda took a long because when you’re demoing at the same time as recording there’s an editing process that you kinda have to go through. Is this good enough, is this TOO charming?
RNS ROBOT: You’re just knocking all my questions down, man, I was gonna ask did you have the songs ready to go, did they get shaped in the studio.
RYAN DAHLE: (laughs)
RNS ROBOT: Is there a song on the record that what songs kind of you demoed them, this is great, this is done, and were there songs that you just kinda went over and over and over again?
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, there’s a couple. “Awfulizing” was one of them, “Beta King Stilts” was one of them, they were songs I just couldn’t get right. And still to this day, I don’t like those songs as much as the rest of the songs on the record, but we’ve had really good response from those two in particular. So I guess those two were kinda the sore thumbs for me. There may have been one more that went through an absurd amount of versions.
RNS ROBOT: (pause) Sorry, I’m just… my list of questions is going out the window.
RYAN DAHLE: That’s totally cool, I’m kind of long-winded.
RNS ROBOT: No, that’s all good – I appreciate it. So essentially the writing process was, “we’re going to go in the studio, I’ve got some songs.” You were able to just do that as one thing. Most of the time that’s not the experience in terms of recording a CD, is it?
RYAN DAHLE: No, usually you have a bunch of people filtering it, whether it’s a band that’s criticizing one another, or a producer or an engineer in your way. Being alone in the studio with a bunch of old gear and all the best modern gear… I kind of have a state of the art place, so it’s a combination of all this great stuff. Having that luxury was pretty amazing because it’s the shortest distance between my idea and the final record. Like in the case of “Eek, it’s Hallowe’en,” I just kind of jotted down some basic lyrics. I hadn’t played it or sang it before, recorded the guitar and the vocal at the same time, without ever practising the song, so that what you hear is like the very first idea I had of that song. That’s what the my intention with the record was, and that’s basically the only time I succeeded completely like that. I’d read this article years ago, I think the early nineties, about Bob Geldof. He hadn’t written anything or written down any ideas or anything and basically went into the studio and just played. And that’s what they used as the final record. So I always kinda strive to try to do that, because I have a tendency to take a year to write a song.
RNS ROBOT: Just perfecting every little aspect of it.
RYAN DAHLE: Mm-hmm, and definitely the combination of those two things happened on the record – absolutely spontaneity and absolute pre-meditated… whatever it is.
RNS ROBOT: One question I’d like to ask is, with Megan and your brother Kurt also playing on the album on drums… it’s a Limblifter line-up. Was [Irrational Anthems] every going to come out as a Limblifter record, or was it always intended as a solo record?
RYAN DAHLE: I wasn’t sure. We had submitted a FACTOR grant as Ryan Dahle. Megan kept saying that if you’re ever gonna put your name on a record, it should be this one. Just because it was more acoustic driven, with strings, a little bit more intimate than what your normal Limblifter record was. Kurt’s role in the record, basically, was coming in after I’d set up a bunch of drums. I’d just recorded a band the day before and I had a bunch of drums set up. So Kurt came in, put his cymbals up, started playing, and played for the better part of a day and then went home. That was his input into the record.
RNS ROBOT: That was the drumming recording?
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, that was basically the seven songs that he played on. That’s what he did. And it was pretty amazing too because we started with “Sixes and Sevens,” and he said ‘how many bar count in?’ And I said ‘two bars.’ And he said ‘Okay, roll it.’ He’d never heard anything, right? So we’re all there and the first thing he played was what was in the verses of “Sixes and Sevens.” He knows what I’m going to do for the most part, and he knows what’s going to happen, usually. I had all the demos kind of recorded and he just kind of played along with them.
[In words off of Limblifter's first album, 'I screwed up - I screwed it, I screwed it, I screwed up.' At this point in the interview my old pawn shop microcassette recorder... stopped. It took me a few minutes to notice. Fortunately, only a couple minutes of conversation were lost. Unfortunately, Ryan's entire answer to my questions about the album's lyrical themes are gone. The salient points include: Dahle is not really a "message" lyricist, but he likes his lyrics to be memorable and continuously unravelling. Layered, "the gift that keeps on giving." He's not a fan of the vague lyrics found on much radio rock. Also, yes, there are lyrics in "Lion Piano" that mention Alien and Predator. As in, the movie monsters. But it's not purely silly. My apologies to Ryan Dahle for screwing up.]
RNS ROBOT: That’s kinda why I asked you about some of the more technical [aspects], because one thing I really dislike is reading any review that says ‘this album’s overproduced.’ Because what does that mean, you know? Is it a mixing issues, an engineering issue, a mastering issue, at what point did that happen… it just seems like a term that people use without knowing what it means.
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, they know nothing if they say that about this record. This record is chockfull of real vocals that were sang with a ribbon mic and room mics. I made it impossible for me to tune vocals on this record, in some ways, so that I wouldn’t. So to say that this record is overproduced just deserves a punch in the face, really, because I’m doing something that is counter to what that is. Everything you hear on the radio is plastic, it’s completely not real. It’s a complete lie. I strove on this record to make things that were real and natural and spontaneous. So that’s ME singing, you know what I mean? So for people to say it’s overproduced while they listen to the latest whatever is ridiculous. I hear independent rock records, I hear tuned vocals all over independent rock records. I really didn’t want to hear that sort of tuney-ness sound.
RNS ROBOT: The strings in particular, I think, sound amazing.
RYAN DAHLE: Thanks, you know, they’re all real, right? And our friends who also play with Megan in this other band called Attics & Cellars, Kim and Lara, they just put down all these amazing violins, and Megan really spent a lot of time with double bass and cello.
RNS ROBOT: So overall the response to the album has been pretty positive?
RYAN DAHLE: It has been. I think at first people weren’t sure what to make of it. We had some negativity from Chart Attack but I mean the writers there are usually really inept. I just want to get as far away from Chart Attack as possible (laughs). And then we had an Exclaim! review that gave it the mark of excellence, which I guess they don’t give out all that often. It’s kind of funny because the strange thing is that they keep on bringing up my past like I was super-successful in Age of Electric and Limblifter. And I don’t really see it that way. We were never really super-successful. We were always an independent band, we remained independent through Age of Electric and Limblifter, at least in Canada. So it’s kind of a strange thing that they’re talking about my past so much as being this deep, dark, horrible thing that I was ‘so popular in the nineties.’ We were always an independent band that never really had too much success. Age of Electric’s record [Make a Pest a Pet] went gold after we broke up.
RNS ROBOT: I personally find there’s a lot of… maybe it’s just the hipster thing…There’s like this snarkiness. It’s like [some] people want to like Ryan Dahle’s record, not all, but in order to do so they have to kinda put down Age of Electric, which I find kind of perplexing. What do they have to do with each other? I’ve grown a lot since I was listening to music in the late nineties but I still really enjoy a lot of that late nineties Canadian rock. Maybe I’m wrong, but I enjoyed it and I think there was a lot of good stuff and was a lot better than it is today.
RYAN DAHLE: Well, in a lot of ways I don’t feel very aligned with that era in Canadian Rock. I feel like we were total outsiders and I feel like — if I had a nickel for every time some famous Canadian band came up to me and said ‘you guys really influenced me,’ from Dallas Greene to Hot Hot Heat, to Hawksley Workman, because ‘you were different from anything else Canadian.’ So when somebody says we part of the nineties CanCon [CRTC's "Canadian Content" laws]… again, I feel like punching them in the face. Where were you? You definitely weren’t there. Maybe your older brother was there or something like that. We did not have a lot of support from Canada as far as like the mainstream goes. We weren’t Our Lady Peace. But even they [OLP] helped us, they put us on big shows. I shouldn’t say we didn’t have a lot of support from the bands, but we didn’t have a lot of support from the mainstream press in Canada. We were always on the outside.
RNS ROBOT: I mean I’m a little younger, I’m 28 this year, I was coming of age in that era. I mean I loved Bush, I’m not going to knock Bush too much but I eventually expanded my horizons…
RYAN DAHLE: We played with Bush at the Maple Leaf Gardens once.
RNS ROBOT: Huh. Really?!
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, we played first… and then Veruca Salt was next, and then Bush. It was the day that they had gotten their the ‘x’ taken off of ‘Bush X.’ [Ed. note - In Canada, Bush was required to be called 'Bush X' due to the existence of a Canadian group already using the 'Bush' name.]
RNS ROBOT: Wow. If it was 1998 I would have been all over that show with my buddy Brent. It’s ridiculous.
RYAN DAHLE: It was a fun show, they were really awesome to us.
RNS ROBOT: Age of Electric wasn’t even really together that long, were they?
RYAN DAHLE: Not really, like, we didn’t really have… we were together for seven years but most of that was really in the trenches, like playing horrible prairie towns for six nights a week.
RNS ROBOT: The band was from Saskatchewan originally, wasn’t it?
RYAN DAHLE: Yes.
RNS ROBOT: I spent the last six-seven years in Grande Prairie and Edmonton [Alberta], so…
RYAN DAHLE: Oh wow, it must have been the longest twenty years of your life.
RNS ROBOT: You know, actually I made a lot of good friends up there, but I certainly wouldn’t move back by any means. My wife was down here and that’s just where we ended up.
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, we’re from Regina originally and Todd and John were from Lanigan, Saskatchewan.
RNS ROBOT: You know what’s so random, I remember when I lived in GP I worked with somebody who was from Lanigan, and remembered AoE playing really early shows… anyways, I’m sure you don’t want to talk about the past too much. Do you still keep in contact with the Kerns at all?
RYAN DAHLE: I do. I haven’t talked to John as much, but I’ve been trying to contact him lately, I’ll probably see him when I go to Toronto. And I’ve actually written some songs with Todd. We kinda started writing some songs a while ago but he’s since moved to Vegas. I don’t see him that often, we just kind of talk on text messages once in a while.
RNS ROBOT: And as far as Limblifter goes, is the band done, or if you felt like it hey, it would be back and have a new record?
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, I don’t discard it, it’s my band, it’s my band name. And I’ll do with it what I want, when I want. But right now I’m just really excited about this record, and the challenge of actually writing my name on a record, and saying ‘yeah, this my record.’ It’s the most ballsy thing I thought I could try to do.
RNS ROBOT: (laughs) And don’t forget you get your name on T-shirts now.
RYAN DAHLE: Exactly, which made me feel really uncomfortable. I think my mom likes them though. It’s a strange thing putting your name on t-shirts and things. Usually you can hide behind the band name and everything’s great.
RNS ROBOT: Big bold RYAN DAHLE. I have the pin on my bag right now and people just look at it… “ryeee—ad—” what?
RYAN DAHLE: What does that mean?
RNS ROBOT: What is it, it’s a mystery! The show at the Biltmore was really good, that was the first time I’d been there, it was a beautiful venue.
RYAN DAHLE: It is really nice in there.
RNS ROBOT: Really beautiful place, and both the opening acts were really good. Prairie Cat was fantastic.
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, I mixed both their records. Cary Pratt, Prairie Cat, he was amazing.
RNS ROBOT: Lately I find I’ve been going to shows and I just can’t handle the opening acts, they all seem to suck. So that was a real treat, to enjoy both the opening acts enough I’d like to listen to them.
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, that’s cool. It was hard for us to find the right opening acts. We wanted it to be like… well, that’s all I’ll say.
RNS ROBOT: Now the album is an independent release, it’s on some small label, what’s it called, Sandbox…
RYAN DAHLE: Sandbag Records.
RNS ROBOT: And they’re from Burnaby?
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah.
RNS ROBOT: So they just handle a little bit of distribution for you?
RYAN DAHLE: Well it’s distributed through Fontana. So with Sandbag, it’s an imprint that our friend has, he also released the Manvils record. And he’s putting some money into promoting us a little bit, so we put his label name on there too.
RNS ROBOT: I know it’s available in HMV as well as online on your website. Is the record available nationally in Canada?
RYAN DAHLE: It is on iTunes now, and it’s available in stores. It’s through Fontana and it’s in stores everywhere hopefully. And we just got vinyl made, so that’ll be available through the store at Maple. Actually I have to make it to Fed-Ex today to send the vinyl to them.
RNS ROBOT: I think I will be picking one of those up. And for people who want the lyrics, get the vinyl?
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, exactly. And there’s [an MP3] drop card in there so you can have it on your computer. It’s a really nice, it’s a double vinyl set. There’s four songs on each side and the last side is a track that’s called “11:11,” and it’s basically some of the music that is in the front sculpture. The sculpture that is on the front cover is by my friend Steven Shearer, and I’d helped him make all this crazy rumbling strange music for it, we used all these old synths that I have. So it’s now in the National Gallery of Canada, this piece, so we took some of the noise that that made and interspersed it with some of the ambient stuff from the record that’s in the background on the record and we made this really spooky track.
RNS ROBOT: Like your “Revolution Nine.”
RYAN DAHLE: I guess so, it’s kind of like a Brian Eno thing. Like “Music From Airports.” Have you ever heard that?
RNS ROBOT: No, I haven’t.
RYAN DAHLE: It’s kind of like that.
RNS ROBOT: I just have a couple other questions here… any story behind Matthew Good co-writing “Agoraphobe?”
RYAN DAHLE: Well, we’ve written a lot of songs together. I co-wrote a song on his last album, called “Devil in the Details.”
RNS ROBOT: That was a good tune.
RYAN DAHLE: Thanks. And we’ve written just a ton of songs together…
RNS ROBOT: Have most of them just not seen the light of day?
RYAN DAHLE: Um, yeah, there’s a couple things that have [turned up] on the internet. There’s a song called “Seriously Serious” with myself, Megan, and him which is pretty amazing that I’d like to release some day. But there’s a whole handful more, maybe a couple handfuls more; we’ve had a good writing relationship actually. Whenever we’re both bored we’ll meet up, or he’ll just call up and say ‘what are you doing?’ And I’ll play him something and he’ll be excited and come over and help me finish it or whatever. And that’s kind of how “Agoraphobe” was, it was mostly finished and then he came over and kinda, you know, kinda helped finish it.
RNS ROBOT: Nice. That’s basically all the questions I had. Is there anything you’d like to be asked that you haven’t been asked?
RYAN DAHLE: Not really, I’m not the best interview. I sort of… I need to get all the slogans down or something like that. There’s people that train you for this kind of thing and I just kinda blurt out whatever I feel like it. Sometimes it gets me in trouble.
RNS ROBOT: But like your record, it’s real at least, right?
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, that’s definitely an important point. I appreciate that you kinda touched on a bunch of things that… you have the same opinion as me on.
RNS ROBOT: Well… I’m not here to kiss your ass but uh, I really enjoy the record. I wouldn’t call myself a professional journalist, but I love music and I think about it a lot and I think a lot of people… don’t think about it enough.
RYAN DAHLE: Yeah, I think a lot of people just want to be writers and they just aren’t, you know, they don’t put the time in, they don’t know enough or care enough about music. They just want to be a writer about music on a website because it’s ‘cool.’ Wheras you can tell when somebody puts thought and effort into it and I always appreciate that, no matter whether you’re writing for Rolling Stone or not. I think people get an ‘angle’ in their head and all they do is call up and ask questions that will support their angle. But that’s obviously not what you’re doing and I appreciate that.
RNS ROBOT: This has been great, and I — oh, one last question! ‘Awfulizing.’ It’s a word that’s repeated throughout the record, what does it mean and what does it mean to you?
RYAN DAHLE: ‘Awfulizing’ is when you take any situation and just think the worst, and therefore create the worst. Basically the opposite of positive thinking. Because if you’re constantly thinking of all the bad shit that can happen or the bad ways that things can go, then that’s what happens. So it’s just kind of a reminder to myself to try to be a bit more positive.
RNS ROBOT: Alright. I’d like to again say thank you very much Ryan, for doing the interview.
RYAN DAHLE: Thanks Ryan, I appreciate the interest, man, I do.
RNS ROBOT: Take care of yourself man, have a great day.
RYAN DAHLE: You too. Ciao for now.
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I want to thank Ryan Dahle for his time, as well as his publicist Jesper Kaalund for setting the interview up. Ryan Dahle’s Irrational Anthems is on sale now in stores across Canada, as well as on iTunes or at his website store. Visit www.RyanDahle.com or myspace.com/ryandahle to listen to songs and get upcoming show dates, etc.
Tags: Age of Electric, Canadian Rock, Limblifter, Matthew Good, Ryan Dahle, Vancouver