DUANE DENISON of TOMAHAWK: Room To Breathe.
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
When Duane Denison answers the phone, he sounds happy and relaxed; it’s Sunday afternoon in Nashville, Tennessee and Denison is fielding interviews about Tomahawks latest album – their first in eight years – Tonic Immobility.
Formed in 1999 after Mike Patton first met Denison who was well known in music circles for his work with The Jesus Lizard, Tomahawk would go on to become a revered supergroup with a loyal fan following and a penchant for making their fans wait longer and longer for new releases. The wait however, always proving to be well worth it.
Rolling into the interview we shoot the breeze for a few minutes which is customary, Denison happy to discover that I am based in Auckland, a place that he has visited twice before in his lifetime, once with The Jesus Lizard and once with Tomahawk. He loves our vibrant little city and can’t wait to get back…
“It’s beautiful, it’s got a nice mellow vibe; I think to me the relationship of New Zealand to Australia is like Canada to the US. I don’t know if you have ever been to Canada, Western Canada, Northwest like Vancouver and Victoria, around there; very temperate climates, very green and lush, people there are very mellow, they’re not as amped up and over blown as Americans or Aussies [laughs] So its refreshing to go there”
Mentioning how New Zealand must currently seem like an oasis to the rest of the world during these times of COVID and Denison sounds almost wistful; “I haven’t gone anywhere in a year, so I am getting very antsy…”. Empathizing, I mention that their kiwi fans will be keeping their collective fingers crossed that a tour can soon be something Tomahawk can embark upon, especially if – selfishly – it leads to a visit down our ways…
Congratulations by the way on the new album.
“Yes, we put a fair amount of work into that thing and to have it finally come out, you know after it’s been what, like eight years since the last one? So yeah, I’m enjoying it!”
Well I would like to start off with the title, ‘Tonic Immobility’, what is the definition of the title in your eyes? As fans would certainly be feeling very reinvigorated by its release when you look at the definition of the word tonic…
“Mike Patton came up with that and to be honest, I had to look it up myself and apparently it refers to a state of stasis that can be induced by over stimulus. It’s been observed apparently in animals when they have been bombarded by too many things going on, the fight or flight and all those different things shut down and they become immobilised.
And so, it’s sort of a social critiquing of the mindset of a lot of people, especially at the start of the pandemic and during the pandemic. I think people are ready to come out of it now, and maybe its not necessarily applicable – but – at the time it sure was.”
I think it is still applicable, just to our day to day lives; we live in the technological age, we live in the information age, we are constantly bombarded with information and issues, even if you wanted to bury your head in the sand, its very hard to do so.
“Yeah…”
And I can imagine at some point, especially looking at your home of America, you guys have had to deal with a lot. You have had the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, you’ve had Trump… You’ve had so much hit you all at once, that is just like a big swirling vortex, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people did shut down and say ‘I literally don’t know what to do right now!’
“Yeah, it’s been exhausting the last four years. With Trump as a president its been exhausting and I think its all over the world really. Just this poisonous, venomous, guy in the white house just spreading it everywhere, I think we have all had enough. So, I think it’s kinda been a relief having a new president, having someone who isn’t tweeting every single day, and isn’t fighting for attention, every single day. Though [chuckles] I think still, he’ll be back doing his thing one way or another.”
Sadly, probably…
“And in between that, it just seems that everywhere you look not only are socioeconomic things happening, like the socioeconomic climate being difficult, but the physical climate is fighting us too, like all the storms and floods, and droughts and extremes of weather. It’s just been one thing after another.”
Most definitely, I’m not a religious person myself, but I certainly believe that Mother Nature has had enough and she is pushing back.
“Yeah, that is a good way to look at it.”
Funnily enough actually, just speaking of the title of the album and everything that you guys have been going through, it does make me think of the track ‘Doomsday Fatigue’. Where Patton sings the lines ‘Got a birthing coach with a COVID smile…we’re all fatigued’ because that’s exactly how you guys must be feeling…
“Yes, but it in a way we are coming out of it now. It’s spring time and so most people have this sense of symbolic rebirth, at least over here the weather is starting to get nice, we got a new president… But at the same time, we got all these other things kinda hanging over our heads.
But ‘Doomsday Fatigue’, yeah it is about exactly that; you’re tired hearing about the end of the world, and I’m fairly political, I’m fairly involved, you know – I vote, I debate with people about this and that, but I can only take so much, you know what I mean? I have to turn it off after awhile and for me that is what rock music is. The rock n roll world, it has its own history, its own laws, its own rules, that change over time. And so, this has always been a good escape for me and that’s kinda for me the upshot of what ‘Doomsday Fatigue’ is, is that you can always escape into the world of rock.”
Exactly, music has always been escapism for me as well, and for I think a lot of people. It’s not just escapism – and while this is clichéd to say – it’s the soundtrack to your life. Songs you can refer to that denote, times of happiness, certain events and I think that is what the power of it is. It must be quite cathartic to create – as Tomahawk can – music that speaks to other people like that.
“It’s a great feeling to make something that actually connects with people on different levels and then to be able to go and perform it live, and have people show up. That’s what I feel when I see something that I really like, whether it’s a band or an orchestra or whatever; to be in a room with other people who are there for the same reason, it’s a great thing, it’s a communion of sorts isn’t it?”
Most definitely!
“And that’s not to say… you know I know that there are bands out there that have political leanings where the political side is a big part of what they do and that’s fine, but I can only take so much of that and I really don’t want to be lectured by someone who after the show is going to pop into their limo and go back to their four star hotel and then get on a chartered flight to a city and drink champagne and then do it all over again. You know what I mean?
I don’t want to hear it from them. I don’t want some rock band, some guy lecturing me – this has happened – about pollution and recycling and everything and then you go in their dressing room and there is a mountain of garbage, of empties and food wrappers and they have been running the air conditioning the whole time even when they are not in the room and their bus is idling in the parking lot. I don’t want to hear it! [sighs] Anyways…”
[chuckles] No, no I can see exactly where you are coming from there. A lot of my old school roots go back to punk and punk bands who are political, and they literally live the life…
“Yeah, absolutely, whether its Fugazi or Crass, you could see that these were people, they live it everyday and they are not the ones taking private planes to chartered trips to islands when they are not lecturing people… Anyway, I am with you on that Sarah!”
Now I understand that this album was actually created three to four years ago but with Mike just writing the lyrics fairly recently; do you feel that in a way it has given the album quite a unique quality, because it brought different time dimensions together?
“A little, a little bit, but it turned out perfectly. So, we started tracking and actually recording the instruments, three or four years ago and at the time I had already written most of the music, made the demos and circulated them. This is how we have always done it; I will make home demos for songs, I will send them out to everyone, will get some comments, whatever tweaks and then Mike will record different vocal parts and then send them back to me and then we will talk about it, you know, about what sort of approach to do. So, by the time we started recording for real for the album Tonic Immobility we had already gone through all the demos, that was all done.
So, with Mike, the vocal lines that he was going to do, the different approaches and even the melodies and things, that was pretty much already in the ballpark, it was just a question of just hooking words in at that point. Because of scheduling differences and this and that we started tracking you know the guitar, bass, drum and keyboard parts here in Nashville without him, and we said, ‘we are just going to get started; everybody knows what the songs roughly sound like, so we are just going to get started’.
And so we did, and that was kind of nice, we would take our time doing it, you know dial things in; and then the pandemic actually worked in our favour because it forced Mike to stay home and focus and finish the project, instead of like flying off to go play with John Zorn or any of his other bands you know what I mean?”
[laughs] Yeah, he’s not the sort of guy to stay still for very long…
“No, so this [the pandemic] actually helped us and then having the album come out now, is great because there is not that many other albums out – they’re starting to come out now – but there are not that many as there typically would be and people are ready right? People want to hear some more extroverted, aggressive, noisy music and here we come!”
[laughs] Yeah, no you’re right, it is perfect timing in a lot of ways. Your process of creating is very similar to that of Billy Howerdel and Maynard James Keenan of A Perfect Circle, where Howerdel creates the music before sending to Maynard who will then write the lyrics to accompany it, and all is done from a distance and works perfectly.
Many people refer to you as the brainchild of Tomahawk, so obviously it must be a process that not only works for Tomahawk but has many benefits for how you and your fellow bandmates work together?
“It certainly works fine in this group as you have four fairly independent people, all who play with other groups; whether it’s John [Stanier] playing with Battles, and Trevor [Dunn] could be playing with any number of people, Melvins, John Zorn, whoever and of course Mike with all of his different things, whether it’s a Japanese noise project, or a soundtrack project, or a Italian pop project…”
[chuckles]
“And so, we’re all fairly independent, we all have other things, I work in a library. I’m a god damn librarian when I am not playing with The Jesus Lizard, so working on things independently and getting things done is not that bigger deal. We’ve all been in bands where we did everything together all the time, and that’s a great way to do it too, but it’s kind of nice to do it the other way and we can. It works for us, for some reason, this group of people it seems to work fine.”
Can I just say, as an absolutely avid book reader, I love the fact that you are a librarian. I just think that is absolutely wonderful!
“Oh wonderful! Yeah, I worked in a library when I was in college and studying music of all things and then I moved down to Texas for awhile and then I was in Chicago and I was a full-time musician for a long, long time. It’s the only job outside of music I ever liked. I remembered how I just enjoyed being around books and ideas and there is always something to read, always something to look at, always something to listen to as libraries have music as well. And you’re serving the community in a large way, it’s free, people can have access to it from all walks of life and so it is a good thing. I am happy to be part of that as well.
And it’s funny, there is a certain personality type, certain types of musician’s kind of fall into this anyways, there are a number of musicians working in libraries; one guy I work with is a retired trombonist, played with the national symphony and with the different Broadway musical touring groups and things like that. You know I am kind of a nerd, I have a degree in music and read scores and sheet music and get ideas from that so that is always kind of important to what I do.
You’re far more likely to see me in a library or a bookstore then in say, oh I don’t know, say an auto shop, or working on an engine in the parking lot or stuff like that [chuckles]. Its funny, because I am from the Detroit, Ann Arbor area, I was born in Ann Arbor and that was the motor city USA, still is I guess. But I’ll let someone else work on my car thank you, I’ll pay someone to do it.”
[chuckles] Well I think nerds are great personally.
“Nerds rule in the end. In the end, nerds win!”
And as you said, you are providing something to the community, libraries are so massively important, and I think people that don’t read, or don’t spend any time in them, don’t realise that. But they are just so valuable for all members of the community…
“In many ways, for children, for education, just a place for people to go, for the homeless…”
…the elderly…
“…the elderly, absolutely. It provides services, you have programs, I even have – our library even has – you can download the Hoopla app on whatever device you are using and then link it to your library card, so I can check out fifteen albums a month through ours, they probably have it there [New Zealand] I’m sure and many people don’t realise that…”
No, I don’t think we do. But I will certainly be finding out!
“Yeah and so I can get fifteen albums a month and check them out and listen to them and if I like it I can renew it you know what I mean? Or you can go out and buy it if you really like it. But at least you can try it, you can sample things for free instead of blowing money on something that you regret later, so yeah that’s a great thing too.”
It’s fantastic; another great program I read about that was happening in the Los Angeles libraries, they are letting children pay off their library fines, by reading. So, if you’ve got twenty dollars’ worth of fines, you have to do ten hours of reading in the library, and I thought what a great idea.
“Right, really they should be making them work in the parking lot or something… nah I’m just kidding! We don’t even have fines in the national system, as long as you return it. If you lose something or damage it then yeah, you have to either pay for it or replace it. But if something is late, by a few days or a couple of weeks, its no big deal. It’s free, it’s still free.”
Ah yeah, no we have late fines in New Zealand when a book is overdue, and many have spoken about how outdated and off-putting that practice can be for some people.
“And studies have shown that people are less likely to return something because now they figure that there is no point, they have racked up too much of a debt. So, by taking that away, I mean really you just want to get the stuff back. Because the fines don’t do anything, the money generated by the fine collecting doesn’t add up to much and you can’t really do much with it. It just goes into a common pot, with the rest of the city so…anyway enough about that man. ROCK N ROLL! WOOOO! SEX AND DRUGS!”
[mutual laughter]
Now many fans have called this album ‘one of your most accessible’ and it is quite interesting reading some of the comments of fans, many are stating that the album is so similar to Mit Gas where many others are adamant that Tonic Immobility is far more like your self-titled debut. What are your thoughts on that?
“There is a certain affinity to the first two albums, and to be honest we are almost deliberately referencing them. There were a couple of times when I said to Mike, ‘you know this is similar to this’ and then we’re like there’s something to this and then we were like yeah, we know, let’s reference it! It’s been a long time, those albums are like from twenty years ago, so why not?
And that’s who we are, and that’s what we sound like, so let’s do it.
There are also some things that I don’t think are anything like what we’ve done before. For instance, in general the arrangements and the overall pattern in the music itself on these songs; there is a lot more space on this album, then previously, it’s a lot more spacious. There aren’t as many samples, and keyboard things, Mike is just doing straight up vocals and vocal overdubs and there is more guitars on it. So sonically it’s a bit different, it’s a subtle difference but it’s there.
And then there are other little things that just reference things, even events from like twenty years ago that weren’t on any record; for instance, the song ‘Sidewinder’, where the music stops, and Mike yells the word ‘WHISKEY!’. That was based on a story I had woven twenty years ago about a country music guy I knew here called Johnny Paycheck, he had that song ‘Take this Job and Shove It’, you remember him? Anyway, I used to play with Hank Williams the third and the pedal steel guitar player of that band was a guy that played with Johnny Paycheck and he used to say that when they were famous, they were making so much money, that between songs Johnny would just turn to the side of the stage and yell ‘WHISKEY!’ and people would just bring bottles out on stage. And I thought, well that’s brilliant, you’d know if you had made it when while you were playing you could just turn and yell out a word of something you want, and people run and get it for you!”
[mutual laughter]
Well that’s certainly one definition of making it!
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Going back to what you were saying before about space, I actually had that in my notes, as I have listened to the album several times and while the whole album is beautifully cohesive, there is still room there to allow each of the tracks to breathe and have their own personality.
I love the single ‘Business Casual’, but my three personal favourites are ‘Sidewinder’, ‘Howlie’ and ‘Predators and Scavengers’…
“Ok, huh. Those are all sort of… they’re not typical straight forward rock songs are they, so I see where you are coming from. I like those, but I think my overall favourite song is ‘Tattoo Zero’…”
Oh, that has got some great lines in it…
“Yeah, and just musically it starts off slow and heavy and creeps along. It has like a beefy sort of chorus and then its got sort of a long instrumental middle section that’s kind of expansive, somewhat different from what we have done, and then it slows back down and goes into the last verse and of course, any song that talks about the proliferation of unnecessary tattoos [Mike Patton is believed to have no tattoos at all] in the world is good” [laughs]
[chuckles] With ‘Predators and Scavengers’ – because you have now released a video for that – I love the frenetic pace of the visuals in it, and I wanted to ask, how much influence do you have over the videos? Or is it something you prefer to hand off to somebody else?
“A little bit. So, I think there have been three for this album, the first one was just a fairly static thing – the one for ‘Business Casual’ – and it was just based on the artwork with the clouds kind of moving, so that was more just like a placeholder really, but in a way, it was effective in its own way.
And then the next one, ‘Dog Eat Dog’ was fairly violent slapstick, with the two men fighting and the dog shows going on and then they become friends. They overthrow their masters and become friends. And it was very bloody, I had people tell me ‘Man I can’t watch it’ and I was like ‘Dude, it’s a comedy, they become friends at the end, get over it.’
So we had input on that, we definitely had to keep telling them, ‘Look I don’t want it to be so relentlessly brutal, I want to have something funny, put in more dog show footage and silly things, and then I want them to stop beating eachother up, turn against their handlers and then they can hang out and have ice-cream and throw balloons around together’ And they did that, they did it…”
[laughs]
“But this newest one, it just kind of happened as we were doing other things and I had seen a rough version early on, and said ‘Yeah, that looks like a cool concept, go with it.’ So honestly when it came out that day, it was also the first time I had seen it in its final version.
And I like it too, it’s fairly empty yet its busy and its fast. But its kind of empty too, I think there’s one character really, and you’re seeing things from the characters viewpoint and you know you’re kind of in these outdoor things and its kind of nice isn’t it. I kind of like the fact that it is still fairly empty, just like the first video. I don’t know but there is something inviting about that.
Just like with music if you leave space in the arrangements it lets people’s imaginations fill in the blanks and it kind of gives them room to participate and I feel like with visual things it’s the same. On the one hand yes, you want to make a point, you want to de-lineate your narrative, but at the same time, I think if you balance it out with things where there is not much going on and you’re not saying anything, people catch up and fill in their own ideas. You know what I’m saying?”
Yes, and I think it’s actually really clever when its your first single off an album – when you haven’t released an album for eight years – I think it was really clever to release a video that was quite static in nature because it gave the music, the lyrics and the composition room to spread themselves and be absorbed by the listener.
Because if you are trying to absorb visual and aural stimulus at the same time, one can sometimes outweigh the other.
“I think that too. Yeah, I agree, and that’s why… I don’t know if it was meant to be that at first, I thought it was just because we didn’t have anything ready in time for when that release was due, I really wanted that song to be the first single, and so we went with that and I think you’re right, you’re right how that worked, because you could really just focus on the music and the lyrics and not be distracted by visuals that to me often at times take on an unnecessary import when they are presented as a video.
A lot of times they aren’t really part of the song and it can be distracting. And to just reinforce the visual image of the album I thought was a good idea too. So good, I am glad you liked it.”
Of course, I now have to ask, why ‘Business Casual’ as your first single from the album?
“For one thing, that was one of the songs that seemed like the one that most people agreed with, whether it was the band, the label and then others pulled in to listen to it; ‘Which of these songs do you think would be a radio song?’
And so, there was that, and also the fact that business casual it’s sort of – I wouldn’t say silly, but its about something that regular people can relate to and know about and it has nothing to do with politics or climate change or any problems. Its more to do with the world of work, the world of people’s obsessiveness maybe with their appearances, with dieting and working out and all those kind of things, in, I don’t know, kind of a fun way.
And that word, that term ‘business casual’, everyone has their own interpretation of that and what it means to them, whether its something that they have observed or something they have had to do. So, it connected with us, we figured it would connect with other people too.”
Very much so, very much so.
I was just going to say, anyone who is a fan of Mike Patton’s projects, knows that he has a massive vocal range, but I personally think that on this album he has really outdone himself…
“Wow…”
Just my personal opinion; I have followed both of you for years, but I must say that on this particular project album he really has surpassed himself. On tracks like ‘Dog Eat Dog’, some of the falsettos he hits, the way that he can do that menacing whisper… for you who is writing the music it must be so wonderful to know that you have this juggernaut of a vocalist and lyricist that is going to feed into your music like that and give it such depth and range!
“Well that’s good, because he is a pain in the ass…”
[raucous mutual laughter]
“Good thing he can sing, because otherwise…nah I know what you are saying!
Yeah it is great, it is great, because you know you can come up with a riff or an idea or a chord sequence or a rhythmic pattern or whatever and he’ll have any number of different options or approaches that he can take with it.
Whether it’s a rhythmic approach or a melodic approach or whether you want to come at it from down low or up high or a falsetto thing. Its just ridiculous the number of things he can do and do well so yeah, it’s very liberating.”
Well the music itself is fantastic, as I said, I love how each track has its own personality and there are definite stand outs, but the way you have written it, the actual composition of the music itself is just brilliant. It truly lives up to that terrible old saying of ‘all killer, no filler’, and I know everybody loves to say that about their albums, but Tonic Immobility really does live up to it.
“Well wonderful, thank you so much. Writing anything cohesive is important to me and having some continuity and having a certain unified vibe with just enough variation to be interesting is a hard thing to pull off, so we always try to do that; whether or not we succeed, well that’s up to the listeners to decide. So, thank you.”
Tomahawk’s new album ‘Tonic Immobility’ is out now on Ipecac Recordings. You can purchase physical copies here, or from your favourite music retailer or you can listen to it on your online streaming service of choice. Or, alternatively, check out your local Library and ask them if they have a copy to listen to…
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