Living in Abundance with Cafe Dewanee

Where are you right now?

I'm in LA. I just got back here. I was in New York for 24 hours.

What were you doing in New York?

I was playing a little party for Thom Browne, so I just took a redeye there and a redeye back, but it was great. They’re really nice people. They feel less cliquey than a lot of fashion people I've met. They feel like this Gryffindor in a sea of Slytherin in the fashion space, you know. It was really sweet.

I love Thom Browne. If you have a bunch of teddy bears on the runway, I can't imagine you'd be anything less than a cool guy.

Yeah, he's really nice, and I love a short suit. There's nothing like being able to dress up while having some ventilation.

So, how did you start making music?

When I was a child, I was very shy and not very good at sports, so I decided I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write books. I carried a journal everywhere and wrote stories down — little things I was thinking about. I was that kid in the corner at recess by myself, writing. In second or third grade, a teacher of mine told me that I would need a publisher to put out a book.

So, right around then, I had gotten into music — my parents got me a Walkman, and I realized that there was writing in music as well. It occurred to me that this three-minute format of songwriting was a quicker way to share literature, so I started writing songs. When I finished high school, I turned a storage closet at my high school into a recording studio. That's when I started really recording and, and putting together the ideas for Del Water Gap. I moved to New York City and then, you know, off to the races.

When did you move to New York?

I moved to New York in 2012 and I lived there for about seven years.

Wow. So you left right before the pandemic started?

Yeah, exactly. I left right when the pandemic started. I had an apartment in Greenpoint and I got out of my lease. I spent a couple of months outside of New York. I hadn't really lived out of New York City in a long time, so I moved to Maine for a bit and I never really went back.

I ended up signing a record deal and moving to L.A. I really only intended to spend a few months in L.A. to make my album, but then I owned a car all of a sudden. I spend most of my time touring, so I’m really in New York as much as I am in L.A.  but my home and all my things are in L.A.

New York, Maine, and L.A. — those are three totally different vibes. Has that affected your sound at all?

Yeah — I'm sure you get it. As a creative, we really are what we eat. What we read, what we watch, who we’re around, where we spend our free time, how much we’re sleeping — it all really affects our art. New York is where I learned how to be an artist. I showed up when I was 18, I bought a leather jacket and some boots and an electric guitar and decided I wanted to be just like The Strokes. [Laughs].

As I spent more time in New York and as I became more confident as an artist, I started to become something different than my heroes, and naturally, when the pandemic happened, I had that big existential check-in that we all had. I really started thinking about what kind of an artist I wanted to be — or if I even wanted to be an artist. The pandemic was a big moment for me, as far as thinking about stepping away from music. Ultimately, I didn’t step away from music, and I doubled down and started touring and making some albums. I was moving around as life was happening.

What made you want to step away from music?

When I was living in New York, I had made some records that I really loved, but being an artist was not affording me the life that I wanted. I was working really hard, and I was working a few different jobs. I was doing Photoshop help for old ladies. I was working for a photo booth company, I was painting, and I was doing a lot of things just to make life work in New York. I had a couple of unfortunate record deal situations and an unfortunate management situation, and I got my first real break right before the pandemic. I DMed girl in red and she offered me an opening slot on her US tour. So, I finally had something to look forward to, and then of course the pandemic happened, and that tour as well as every other tour in the universe canceled. I was feeling very frustrated, as I’m sure a lot of us were, and being the storyteller that I am, I took that as a sign from the universe to step away.

I called some friends saying, “I think I’m done. I think it’s time for me to figure something else out.” I really thought about becoming a CPA — which is kind of funny in retrospect. But, just as I stepped away, things started to change more. People started finding my music and I got a new manager who basically told me, “Give me six months and we’ll see what we can do." We're still working together today, soo I'm really happy I didn't leave, but I needed that gut check. Sometimes you need to imagine the other side of a big decision in order to realize you don't want to make that decision.

That’s deep. You should put that on a fortune cookie.

This existential dread you're talking about — is that the story behind the new album?

Totally. A lot of the album is about transcience and what it feels like to be in the world, our post-pandemic political landscape, where every day we’re forced to think about the realities of an environmental crisis, the wars, the general unrest and instability that’s present in the world right now, and amidst all that, trying to figure out how to be good people, taking care of ourselves, opening up to loving and being loved.

I had a real moment of reckoning that a lot of our lives — a lot of the time that we spend in life is the time in between high-highs and low-lows. I think that feeling is very magnified on tour. You have a lot of explosive highs — you play a show, you have a lot of adrenaline. And then you spend a lot of time alone, sitting and waiting, eating hummus, and wondering what to do — that is just a lot of life. It's like doing the laundry and doing the dishes and spending time with yourself in your head– thinking about where you are.

When I listened to it, there’s this obvious emotional transience that comes with being a touring musician, but there’s also a lot of physical transience that can have an emotional effect. On tour, you never really sleep in the same place twice. It can get really disarming.

Oh my God, yeah. Especially when you're in a hotel every couple of nights, they really do all blend together and it’s something I call this “Holiday Inn Malaise,” where you just forget where you are because they’re all the same.

Once while I was on tour, I needed to order something from Amazon, and when you order something on tour, you order it to a couple of cities away from where you are, so you don’t miss it. I don’t know where we were — we must have been in the Midwest somewhere — but I get to this hotel, and I’m in the lobby saying that I’m looking for a package that’s supposed to be there. They don’t have it, but I show them my app, where it says it’s been delivered, and the guy looks at the app and says, “We’re not in Texas, we’re in Illinois. That package was delivered to a hotel in Texas.” And I was like, “What? I could have sworn I was in Texas right now.” And he’s like, “No, you’re really confused.”

It was such a funny moment, and there’s something so beautiful about constantly being in transition. It allows you to practice some avoidance, but it is really unsettling, being on tour and traveling — it breaks down a lot of the things that tie us to our sanity, whether it's cooking or being able to go on a walk in the morning, your routine of going to your coffee shop, of seeing your neighbor — all that stuff goes out the window.

I can imagine. Are you settled in LA, or are you about to up and go again?

I’m here for four days, I’m just rehearsing. I’m basically touring until Thanksgiving, so I’m really here just long enough to do some laundry and see a couple of friends.

I worked for this record for a couple of years, and there’s a really beautiful moment when the shows start. There’s this funny period of time between the record coming out and the tour starting because in between that, people are interacting with the album and you’re seeing it online. But for me, the release always really starts when tour starts. Because all of a sudden you're with human bodies– you’re in a room with people who are singing your music back to you. That’s a real moment of affirmation, that’s when you know the work has paid off. So I’m extremely excited to go tour.

I feel very lucky to be able to do it. It's the coolest thing. It's a good way to see the world. I've had the good fortune of seeing most of this country and we've done a few Europe and Australia tours. It’s a nice way to travel with purpose — going somewhere for a reason beyond just pure, touristic enjoyment.

The album itself is pretty upbeat, considering what it’s about. It’s groovy, even though you’re singing about transience and the depression that comes with it. What made you want to have the album sound that way?

A lot of that comes out of touring a lot. For the last three years, I’ve really thinking about making a record in the context of the live space — which I had never done before. So in the studio, I’m making songs and thinking about what a production would feel like live. I think there’s something really cathartic about moving around a bunch while you sing about wanting to leave the earth. And for the first time in my life, I’m allowing myself to make the type of music that I listen to.

I used to silo music into two categories — music that I like listening to, and the music that I let myself make. But for this record, I had the opportunity to work with some really wonderful producers and writers, and they pushed me to just make an album that I thought would be fun to listen to, and to not overthink it. Making sad bops has always been the dream, and it took me getting out of my own way to let myself do that.

A lot of people try to do that, having depressing lyrics over eighties synthy groovy instrumentals. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it feels purposeless.

That was my fear — I didn’t want to just be another guy thinking about depression over some eighties music.

It's cool that you're having fun with the album. Why you were relegating yourself only to sad music, or music that you didn't necessarily listen to?

I came up in the New York indie scene. And at the time when I was becoming an artist, a lot of the music I listened to had artists expressing themselves at arm’s length. I came up listening to Iron and Wine, Fleet Foxes, and The Tallest Man On Earth. That was the music I learned how to be an artist around soo I think there was always something very comforting about hiding behind my work a bit, not showing too much of myself, not trying too hard, or not letting people know that I was trying at all. I think there can be something inherently embarrassing about being artistically ambitious, or trying to have fun musically. I think I’ve really leaned on colloquialism in my writing and in my artistic output as a way to not have to show too much of myself.

I think that a change started happening in me over the last couple of years, where I decided that it’s okay to pose for a photo, it’s okay to swing for the fence a bit, and try to make something fun or make something that will allow people to dance. It’s okay to dress up and wear an outfit onstage that isn’t something you’d normally wear. When you try, it opens you up to embarrassment and failure. But I think you can really reap what you sow. I just got a bit more confident and realized it was okay if I wanted to push myself.

It’s cool to put in an effort now, which is nice.

Yeah, it's super cool. Not everything has to look like it fell into your lap accidentally.

Tell me about the title and your grandma!

I just saw her! I was struggling to find a title for a long time, and when I’m in New York, I stay with my grandma — her name’s Patricia. She’s 98 and we’re really close. She’s one of the only other artists in my family. She has this great old apartment that she’s been living in since the fifties, and the room where I stay used to be my grandfather’s study — he’s since passed away, so now I stay in his office. It’s floor to ceiling with bookshelves and poetry books, books about opera and Sen Buddhism — a lot of esoteric things. There’s not great internet at her house so when I’m there, I just spend a lot of time poking through the odds and ends I find in the apartment.

One day I was just rifling through some poetry books and I came across this William Carlos Williams book collection. He has a poem called, “This Is Just To Say”, and I flipped that poem because it was the one that I knew, and at the top of the poem, my grandfather had written, “Dear Patricia,” and at the bottom he wrote, “Love David. I miss you already and I haven't left yet.” It was a very striking moment of coming across a very private poetic anecdote, but there was something very funny about it too —something sort of lazy about turning a poem into a love letter, instead of writing your own love letter.

So I walked into her room with it and I was like, “What do you think this is?” She said, “I have no idea. He could have been leaving me or he could have been going to the grocery store. I really don't know," but I loved it and I held on to it. A few weeks later I asked her if I could use it as my album title, and she gave me her blessing. She’s been such a big part of my artistic upbringing. I've always had a ritual of showing her my music and my videos as they're in progress, so it seems like a nice way to honor her and honor their relationship. And it also just felt very topical. The phrase “I miss you already and I haven't left yet—” really does reflect transience. It’s like catching someone in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a step out the door. I imagined him scrawling it really quickly as he was running out the door. For me, this album feels a bit like that. I feel like I wrote it as I was running out the door.

In terms of being on tour?

Being on tour — sort of what we were talking about before — the ways that we try and center ourselves when everything is moving around us. I think of this record as a means of finding some stability, or bringing some meaning to the motion. I think sometimes we just need to be able to tell a story in order to get through a life experience. Being able to write this album has tied together a lot of the chaos of the last couple years. It’s made it all feel like it’s really been worth something.

And I’m going on tour soon, so come hang. Hope to see you in New York, or somewhere else.