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Red Stick Sounds: Q&A with Toby Leaman of Dr. Dog

Photo of Dr. Dog above, courtesy of -ANTI Records.

Dr. Dog performs Tuesday, March 31, at The Varsity. MeWithoutYou will open. Tickets are $20 in advance and $22 at the door. For more information, click here

Dr. Dog had humble beginnings in the Philadelphia suburbs. Friends Toby Leaman and Scott McMicken met in eighth grade. They made home four-track tape recordings together. The duo was largely unknown, even in their native city, until one of their demo tapes reached My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James in 2004.

James liked what he heard and invited Dr. Dog to open for his band on tour. The duo hastily pulled a band together and hit the road. The band hasn’t slowed down in the 11 years and seven LPs since. Staying true to his band’s reputation as one of the hardest working acts around, songwriter/bassist/vocalist Leaman was taking a break from installing a heater in his bathroom when I caught up with him.

You and Scott have been working together since you were kids. Do you think your approach to recording is different now than it was in the band’s early days?
Back in the day, there weren’t really any records to consider. The approach to the process is still there, but the equipment and the surroundings are very different. Now instead of two of us, we have seven guys involved, eight including our engineer. Back then, as we were writing a song we would start recording it, and it took a day. From the time we started a song until the time we finished in the wee hours of the morning, and the song was done. It never got messed with again. Maybe it eventually got mixed and ended up on something, but the recording was done. For years, that’s the only way we approached it. There was no sitting on a song for four months waiting to get a demo out beforehand to figure out if it works for the next record. So the equipment and surroundings are different, but the approach is the same.

Do you guys ever write together, or is it still mostly an individual thing?
By and large, writing together is not something we’ve done much of, but we assume ownership as soon as someone puts something on the table. Unless it’s a whole part like a bridge or a chorus that one of us is stuck on, I don’t think either of us really work like that. As soon as you say that this is a song were going to record, you have to stop thinking of it as your property. When someone else brings a song in, you have to start thinking of it as your own even if you had nothing to do with it. It’s the only way we’ve ever worked.

Do you think having two primary songwriters and lead vocalists helps your music appeal to more people?
I’m not sure. I think its kind of confusing for some people who are used to one singular voice. It’s easier for some people to follow when there’s a frontman with one consistent personal narrative. Scott and I aren’t the most public people, and the narratives in our individual lives can be drastically different at times. I’m sure there are people who listen to our band and like Scott’s songs and hate all mine or vice versa. Although our personal experiences might be very different, we’re usually singing about the same sort of things. We’re not too dissimilar in the themes we take on.

Having a guy like (multi-instrumentalist) Dimitri Manos in the band, how does that open up possibilities, either on the road or in the studio?
It’s great. To have a guy around who’s open for anything, it’s huge. Dimitri is not the type of guy who’s going to chime in and lay an opinion on you. He’s more the kind of dude to let things get as weird as anyone can possibly feel comfortable with. He’s never going to say “let’s not do this.” He’s unique in the fact that he’s constantly recording all the time. We all do, but he records an insane amount of material, It’s just part of his life. It’s kind of nice to have someone who is not actively writing songs in the band to be a spark plug like that.

I personally think some of your non-LP recordings through the years are up there with your best album tracks, do you still have a bunch of awesome stuff squirreled away somewhere?
I’ve thought that before, too. We definitely have a lot of material. Sometimes after the fact we’ll be playing something and say, “Why the hell didn’t we put that on the record?” Or you can push hard to get something on the album, and hear it later and say, “What were we thinking? That isn’t that good.” There seemed to be a clear reason for it at the time, and then you forget what that reason was and scratch your head. But, we pretty much finished a record of new material in November and we’re about to start recording another new one in May, and so we’re not slowing down at all.

Listen to “The Pretender” below