Image: Kevin Devine – supplied.
Author: Bradley Cork
When I call up American singer-songwriter Kevin Devine for a chat, it’s about 4pm his time, 7am my time. He is both amazed and complimentary while also approaching the interview with humorous trepidation. ‘How are you up? That’s an extraordinary amount of pressure for me to justify waking you up at 6:30am in the morning but let’s see what we can do.’ From my end, it’s a pleasure talking to Kevin. A prolific but humble artist, Kevin refers to his career in music akin to a little lemonade stand. If by lemonade stand he means 10 studio albums under his belt in conjunction with a multitude of EP’s, standalone songs and collaborations that delve into folk, pop-rock and punk, then it’s a pretty impressive stand. As someone who has been largely independent and coming from a DIY punk-rock work ethic, he has mapped out a blueprint for how other artists could seek a career without necessarily being within the mainstream.
Kevin will be travelling back to Australia from his home in New York City for his own headline tour this year. These shows come two years removed from his tenth solo record Nothing’s Real So Nothing’s Wrong, his most ambitious and eclectic album yet. The record was made like many albums during lockdown, in piecemeal and with time to stretch the recording process. It yielded a result that Kevin considers up there as a favourite of his catalogue. ‘I think it’s a bit of a cliché instinct for the favourite record to be the most recent one. like ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ is lovely but it’s not my favourite Radiohead record but I hope that it’s theirs when they finished making it. That’s how I feel about mine.’ With time on their side, Kevin and his long-time collaborator and member of his ever-changing God Damn Band, Chris Bracco threw everything at the process in order to get something new. ‘I didn’t want to play guitar which is a little bit like ‘I’m going to write a novel in a language I don’t really speak’… that’s cool but I needed to re-explore how to use it as the foundational instrument and then work out what to put around it. This record then had acoustic sketches but not extensive demos…it was building it one brick at a time for a long time…there’s a lot happening on that album and I love it.’
Speaking with Kevin is like being taught how to look at things from all sides of the equation in order to come to a holistic focus. His music can be mistaken for ruminative and reflective yet also cathartic and political. It is all these things but as he puts it, his songs culminate in a way where Kevin is merely stating what it is like to be a person at a certain juncture in life with a sharpness attached to his points of view that listeners can tap into. When I ask him about the role in which song writing has played in perhaps assisting with his mental health, his answer is both enlightening and well rounded. ‘I think there is bad mythology in popular culture around the role of art, especially for art that is involved in any level of capital exchange that can then play as a primary piece of one’s mental health.’
Talking about examples within popular culture, it’s clear that Kevin has thought deeply about how to navigate being a songwriter while not relying upon their work to function day-to-day. ‘I just wish someone like Elliott Smith had been able to get help and I say that because ostensibly he is a songwriter and there’s many other examples of people who die or who are dying in slow motion in public who are addicts or alcoholics or who have untreated mental health issues. I think that when I look at that, it makes it clear to me that songwriting or performing can’t be the only way you address your mental health. Otherwise it ends up being some weird circle where the more fucked up you are the more they clap? It can just be very complicated.’ Ultimately, one needs a myriad of supports in order to keep well in their trajectory. ‘There are practices that I would call behavioural, spiritual, psychological and physical that I’ve developed for my mental health and I fucking need them all! Because there are days where the squirrels are really loud up there or whatever they are and rabid seeming…but songs help and songs do a very particular thing but they can’t be the only thing.’
Speaking to Kevin about his upcoming tour here, he didn’t necessarily expect he’d come back to Australia. This had more to do with the climate of the music industry for an artist that doesn’t necessarily have millions of fans and the financial difficulty one faces with touring. ‘I don’t have a lot of infrastructure around me; I have a manager and a booking agent, I have people who help me achieve what I achieve and I’m infinitely grateful but for someone like me who sits in the independent music middle class, it has frankly gotten harder to do stuff like get to Australia and play a club tour and I just thought that the phase of my career where that was available to me was perhaps, if not over, then meaningfully on pause.’ It comes as a lovely surprise and feeling of appreciation for Kevin as it’ll be his first headlining tour here. ‘When I got the email, I was like ‘whoa, that’s amazing!’ I’m grateful to get to come back.’
Speaking of the infrastructure around Kevin, while he has had a myriad of collaborators, he has been able to endure by being agile with his career in part, simply through being a solo artist. Kevin was in what most would deem an emo/punk band called Miracle of 86 that broke up in 2003 and he has felt a sense of freedom that can come with being able to pivot in whatever direction he would like to go in without having a set of internal politics. ‘I do think that I’ve been able to make whatever record I’ve wanted to make in a way that’s a little more streamlined. It’s been me with collaborators but me driving it. I also think it has afforded me a level of agility as a touring act. I can either be presenting myself with a band or solo. It has made me get better and take more seriously needing to be dynamic with just an acoustic guitar or with a band. Whatever I’m presenting, I want it to be equivalently compelling to me.’ In other ways he can concede where it’s been a difficult road as there are strength in numbers through being in a band and also due to the pivots, his stylistic convergences haven’t always made his music easy to market. ‘In other ways it has made it challenging sometimes to market my music for certain people as people will just see a name and figure ‘singer-songwriter’ and I sort of am and I sort of am not. I’m sort of a bunch of things…Sometimes it feels like I run a lemonade stand but I’m proud of our lemonade stand!’
We’ll take Kevin Devine anyway we can get him. catch Kevin Devine on his Australian headline tour, details below.
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