Billy Dankert is unveiling a new album (All Eight) on May 18 at the Schooner Tavern. He was kind enough to answer 5 questions about the release and share a video. I can’t wait until everybody can enjoy the music. It is charming, clever and happy-making!
You have a successful solo career as well as success playing with bands (including Gear Daddies, Doug Collins and the Receptions, Institutional Green). How is working on your solo work different? Is it more freeing, more leisurely, more anxious…?
I really enjoy and feel like I need collaborative creative projects in my life. I’m also a visual artist (painted the cover of Charlie Parr‘s recent release “Little Sun”), but I never found a way to work collaboratively with other visual artists, whereas collaboration is pretty much the default for musicians. So, I’ve gravitated to music and I’m really gratified by the collective energy of being in a band. Working on my solo stuff can be a bit more like my experience with visual art, where a lot of the work is done alone. I tend to write and record songs alone at my home, playing most of the parts myself. It’s definitely more freeing and leisurely, since I’m under no creative or time constraints, I can experiment with ideas and take the time to build up the tracks in way that I couldn’t if I were paying for recording time at a studio and/or trying to wrangle a band for each take. That said, I do like to get my friends involved as guests on the recordings, and when it comes time to promote an album, if I can find musicians available to help me realize the songs live, I get to plug my songs into a collaborative framework, with me serving the songs in a different way.
Fine Programmer may be my new favorite video. Please tell me about the inspiration for the song and the video.
The basic inspiration was an attempt to twist together a few musical topics that I hadn’t heard in combo before. I’m not a programmer, but in my day job I work with programmers and I have friends who are programmers. Somewhere I read a headline to the effect that programmers are the new working class. I’m not sure I agree with that, but regardless, it prompted me to think about the topic of the working class that comes up a lot in music (Springsteen, et al.). It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard any songs (although there’s at least one, I’ve since learned) talking about this class of worker, even though programmers, or more conspicuously, the devices they work on, are so ubiquitous in our society. There are a lot of songs about having a crush on someone (I’m probably hyper-aware of this musical subject since Doug Collins has a fun crush song). And crushes at work are common. So, at some point I just thought pulling these topical strings together could put a sort of new twist on some familiar lyrical themes.
As for the video, I just wanted to make a funny and cheap “anti-video,” because I basically don’t like music videos, but I feel the necessity to make them in the attempt to get attention to my music. Since the song portrays a narrator (with my male voice) having a crush on a female programmer (I struggled trying to make the lyrics gender-neutral, but gave up), I thought it would be good to switch that up for the video and have the female programmer be the subject and me be the object programmed. And, since AI is a current hot topic, I decided to twist it up again and have the programmer be AI, with a downplayed gender identity (since, y’know, it’s AI). With that framework in place, I just filled the rest of the video with the AI making me do random stuff. So, I got a mannequin off of craigslist and called up my friend and musical collaborator David Krejci and asked him to shoot it on his smartphone at his house. As you can see in the video, Dave’s place is a Cabinet of Curiosities and Wonders rife with opportunities for random activities. Of course, Dave happened to have his own mannequin sitting around, so as we shot scenes, we added that into the mix as a second AI love interest and motivation for the AI programmers to program me out of the picture.
Liquor Store Lollipop captures a moment of life that is so specific, so charming and tells (what I like to think) is a universal story. I also found out that liquor stores had suckers with my kids! The lyrics are straightforward. The tune is nostalgic. I had totally forgotten about those lollipops. I’m so glad you captured the moment but what possessed you to write a song about liquor Store lollipops?
See the first sentence of my answer above. I make no claims of originality as a songwriter and I’m happy to write lyrics on well-worn topics if I feel like I can do it without falling into hopeless cliche. But I do try to keep my eye out for subjects that I have not heard before, and on one of my trips to Sharrett’s liquor store with my daughter in tow, it just occurred to me that this was a topic I’d never heard in a song. And it felt like a good topic to present in a country format. I would like to think that the rhyme “lollipop … candy shop” in this song is some clever reference to the same rhyme in “On The Good Ship Lollipop,” but it was unintentional. Still, I’m happy with the coincidence.
I’m going to be singing I Wanna Dance for weeks. The lyrics are funny, especially when the song starts, yet the consistent beat in the song runs the listener through a lot of emotions. There’s a little crazy-making in that beat that mirrors the crazy-making of wanting to dance but not with “you.” How did you create a beat that would have that visceral reaction?
This song started off as a collaborative writing exercise that turned into a song I really like. I am interested (although not knowledgeable) in what I think of as “electronic” music (Kraftwerk, DAF). My friend Jiropole makes “electronic” music (I’m not sure whether he’d use that term exactly), so I proposed we try collaborating on something. I can’t remember if I came up with the guitar riff or the beat first, but both were trying to be primal and danceable. The danceable beat led to me to chant “I wanna dance.” Then I just imagined a scene of the narrator on the dancefloor who can’t get away from someone who keeps trying to dance with them. I thought the lyrics were kind of funny, and could also work as a metaphor for any sort of unwanted or decaying relationship. Jiripole added a lot of crazy-making energy with his synth piano parts. I’m not sure if it’s punk or “electronic,” but I love how all the sounds came together.
Please tell us about the upcoming album release and maybe a little about the band.
The album release show will take place on Saturday, May 18, at the Schooner Tavern, 8-11 pm. There will be three bands on the bill: Billy Dankert Trio, Matt Caflisch Band, and John Magnuson Trio. In addition to the release of “All Eight,” Matt Caflisch will be celebrating the release of his newest album “Woke Up Famous.” The Billy Dankert Trio are three people who’ve known each other almost 40 years: it’s me on vocals and guitar, Charlie Varley on bass, and Andy Beckel on drums. Charlie Varley is a founding member of Box 10, a band out of Iowa that has played on bills with the Gear Daddies since the 1980s. He currently plays bass in a bunch of bands: Doug Collins and the Receptionists, Sons of Gloria, and Dave Rave and the Governors. Andy Beckel graduated with me from Austin High School. He’s an accomplished drummer who gave lessons in Austin MN before moving to the Twin Cities. In addition to the Billy Dankert Trio, he plays with Sweet Keys Dueling Pianos. I hadn’t seen him for a while until he turned up at a Gear Daddies show heckling the band, so I asked him if he wanted to play drums in my solo project.
Mostly Minnesota 