Midwestern Morose And Bittersweet Melodies

Dead, Dead Swans (aka Milwaukee, Wisconsin's John E Swan) play a blend of raw and world-weary American folk music, with some real tuneful edges. I first became aware of the band late last year with the release of their second album Even Still, We Were Together, on Punkerton Records. I’ve recently just heard and reviewed the reissue of their first album, 2022 Lenses (also on Punkerton) - so I thought what better time to track down Mr Swan for an email interview.

M[m]: What are some of your earliest musical memories?  And did any of these inspire you to make your own music?

John: This is one of my favorite questions because I have such a vivid memory to accompany the answer. I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember, but at some point, in the early 90s, I remember travelling to the hospital to visit my uncle. I was with my parents and my grandmother, and I remember sitting on my grandmother's lap and singing the melody of the guitar lead in a Monkees song and my grandmother said, “This boys going to grow up to be a musician.” I remember it being like a light bulb, this moment where I thought, “I hadn’t considered that. I think I’ll do exactly that.” Aside from that, most of my early musical memories are sitting in the backseat of my parent's cars listening to cassette tapes and later CDs and later still MP3s. My musical upbringing seemed very private that way. I discovered a lot of bands on my own and then listened to them in headphones. I don’t think anyone in my family really knew what I was doing or where I was coming from until I was in my 20s.

M[m]:So what was The  Monkees song you mentioned in your first answer?

John: I was actually thinking of what song it may have been. It’s really anyone’s guess, as I was a huge Monkees fan as a child. I’m compelled to say it was Last Train to Clarksville though. Hard to say for certain, though.

M[m]: Tell us a little bit about how and when Dead, Dead Swans came about?

John: Dead, Dead Swans started as a fake musical project in the midst of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. My grandfather had passed, and my way of paying respects to loved ones is often to listen to the music that we listened to while we were on the same side of the grass. So I was drinking whiskey and 7up and listening to Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, and I was reminded of the classic “punk to country” pipeline that I’d discovered in my 20s with artists like Avails, Tim Barry, Hot Water Musics Chuck Ragan, Lucero and Drag the River. All those sorts of things. Through reintroducing myself to all these guys, I became inspired, for the first time in years, really, and kind of spit out an album. The intent was to record it on an old Tascam 4-track cassette recorder and then tell my friends that it was a tape I’d found in a record store, and I didn’t know who it was. I did record that album, but when I took it to Josh Kristopeit, we decided we could make a better-sounding product in an actual studio and scrapped the original recordings as demos. They’re still sitting on a cassette tape on my desk right now, actually. We’d started getting ready to track for that album when, over the course of a weekend in October of 2020, I wrote the four-song EP October. Then the plan became, “Record October since the songs are fresh, THEN record the full-length album.” So, we recorded October and surprise-released it on Christmas Day of 2020, and by that point, the idea of being a “fake band” was kind of out the window.

 

M[m]: Any thoughts of releasing the original demo tracks you did?

John: If I ever released those demos, it’d be on a really limited cassette that maybe came with pre-orders of the album, but it’s more likely that I leave them to someone to release after I’m dead and gone, ha-ha

M[m]: What inspired the project name & is it your first sonic feature?. If not, please detail your previous projects'/ bands?

John: With the project being bred of the death of a loved one, its primary focus was, and still is, death and loss. I was obsessed with making sense of the loss happening around (and around almost all of us) in 2020. The point was for Dead, Dead Swans to be a homage to those loved ones lost, so initially it was supposed to be called Dead Swans, which is already a band, I believe, from the UK. I kind of added the second ‘dead’ out of stubbornness. It should be noted that I’m a big fan of the Canadian garage rock band Dead Ghosts and that I’ve always loved punctuation in band names like Against Me! as well. As much as the project was founded in country and folk roots, I think just about every aspect of my record collection has shown its face somewhere in Dead, Dead Swans musical history.

Dead Swans is far from my first sonic feature, and I don’t think that it could even exist without a lifetime of failures preceding it. I was in a litany of bands through my teens and into my twenties and thirties, but most of them amounted to nothing but memories. I played bass for a long time in a band called Red Cent. Ryan Dusthimer, who’s featured on October and Lenses, was the frontman of that band. He taught me how to play country and folk music. Later on, members of Red Cent, including myself, started the band Shining Nothing. I played bass and sang in that band until touring for Dead Swans got to be too much for me to participate in Shining Nothing. I still travel to their studio to do guest vocals. I think I’ve recorded something on every Shining Nothing track. In my twenties, I started a band called Hacked Nudes. We stopped playing music after I moved to Milwaukee, but last summer after 6 or so years, we reunited. We’ve been playing more and more, but the focus has been a lot more on having fun with our friends than on songwriting or recording. It’s been a lot of fun. Otherwise, you can usually find me doing something musical somewhere for someone.

M[m]: You have a real knack for blending often tuneful songcraft with stark and grim lyrics- is this deliberate, or did this mix come about in an organic manner?

John:  It’s deliberate insofar as I intend to say what I mean. I don’t purposefully lean into dark or depressing subject matter, though. I think a lot of people are alarmed to meet me and learn that, outside of my songwriting, I’m a pretty happy guy. I experience great feelings of joy and happiness, but I don’t feel any kind of responsibility to dissect those feelings. In those moments, I feel a stronger responsibility to put the pen down and live in those moments. It’s in making sense of death and unrequited love, and political turmoil that I feel a responsibility to sit down and dissect what I’m feeling and put it back into the world in a way that others may find useful. I’m not sure if that exactly answers your question. I guess I mean to say that it’s deliberate that I give attention to stark and grim subject matter, but it’s organic that I feel the need to do so.

M[m]: To date, the project has two albums to its name- 2022’s Lenses, and last year's Even Still, We Were Together. Please talk a little about how each of these came about? and how do you feel your sound has changed/ developed over these two albums?

John: As I’ve said above, the intent was to release the October Ep, and then focus on recording a debut full-length, which we did start doing. But much like October interrupting the process before, Lenses kind of interrupted it again. In the middle of working on that first LP, I went through a pretty messy break-up that resulted in the writing of Lenses, which felt really urgent. So again, I said, “Let’s get this out and THEN we can focus on that record that was supposed to be recorded in 2020.” Of course, by then I’d started writing Even Still, and after five years I still haven’t gotten around to recording that first full-length. At this point, I joke around that it’ll be my last record.

With October, the vision was extremely clear. I wanted to make an alternative country record that was a cross between something like Lucero and Drive By Truckers, and the things that GemsOnVHS was doing with artists like Lost Dog Street Band and Matt Heckler. I think that mentality stayed through the making of Lenses, although I think it was expanded on AND I would argue that it’s on that record that I first became interested in incorporating elements of artists like Smog and Real Live Tigers and other artists who were still using world and folk instruments, but were decidedly removed from country music. I think the songs “Advice” and “Used to You” are the best examples of that on that record. I don’t know that Even Still is wildly different from Lenses, but where it is different, the changes were made subconsciously. I didn’t exactly set out to sound different, it’s just that the music I was listening to was different. I think on that record is where I really began to abandon any desire to be strictly a “a country singer.” By that time, I’d started opening for lots of punk and emo bands to great success and was playing punk festivals, so I think it just started to bleed through a bit.

M[m]:  I was looking at your Bandcamp, and noticed you use some great old photos for your singles- are they personal photos, or have you collected them?

John: Those are all over the place, and anymore I’m not really sure what sure what’s up there anymore. The photo for Used to You sing was taken with a Polaroid on tour with a band I played drums for called Penknife. We were somewhere in Indiana on our way to Columbus, OH, when I saw a billboard that read “Hell Is Real” and I turned the car around to get a photo. That photo hangs in a frame in my living room. I’m looking at it right now. The photos for the Water’s Muddy and Civil, “Not Mutual” singles, as well as the album cover for Lenses, were taken by a wonderful mixed-media artist here in Milwaukee named Julia O’Brien. I still owe her $50 for her services. She even framed and matted some beautiful prints of those photos that hang in my bedroom. The photograph for the “I’ll Come Home” single was a Polaroid I took of my Christmas tree one night when I had a single to put out and realized I didn’t have cover art. The photograph for the 10,000 Miles EP was taken by Sylas Schaberg of the band Hemlock Chaser. I’m still really fond of that one. The photos for the single promoting of “Even Still” were actually screenshots from a music video for the song “I Reckon”. That video was put together with lots of old found footage and home videos, and things like that. I’d be interested in knowing if any of those people are still alive. The album cover for Even Still is one of the earliest pieces of coloured photography. It’s entitled Dinner During Haying, and it’s taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky in 1909. If memory serves, Gorsky was not a photographer, but a scientist, who had come across a way to produce photographs in colour. The Russian Empire had allowed him to come into their land and photograph the various goings on, and the results are really beautiful. I thought there was something really great about this innovation that’s bred of a marriage of science and art, and the result is that, through photography, you may be dead, you may be on the other side of the world, we may not speak anymore, but even still, we are together.

M[m]: I’ve seen pictures of you playing live with the project- how many times have you done this? Do you have any particularly memorable shows?

John: Last year alone, I played something to the tune of 85 shows. I was constantly on the road. Even before that, I was touring quite a lot. Most all of the shows are memorable for one reason or another. Either they were so good I’ll never forget them, or they were so bad I’ll never forget them. I think it was April 6 of last year that I released Even Still, and that release show sticks out quite a bit. Even Still was released on cassette in January of this year, and that show sticks out. I remember being asked by my friends in Mulva if I would open a show for them. They’re a pop punk band and had some other pop punk bands playing with them. That one stands out as being the turning point where I began to embrace my roots in the punk scene more. I remember thinking that show was going to go poorly, and it wound up going really well. Another one that stands out was a show I’d played with Wylie Jakobs, Constant Headache and Hemlock Chaser. I recall that one being a real turning point, too, but I’m not sure what I was turning away from or what direction I was turning to. Funny enough, all of these shows were on the same stage. If you’re ever looking for a show in Milwaukee, go to Bremen Cafe.

M[m]:  Please talk a little bit about your live set up?....is it just you on stage? Do you have any between-song banter?

John: The live set-up has changed here and there over the years. Currently it’s me on stage, sat on a cajon that’s used as a kick drum, and I switch between a standard tuned guitar and a banjo tunes to open D. In the past it’s been me with a standard tuned guitar and an open D guitar sat at a kick drum, I’ve had a fiddle player one stage, I’ve played as just a guy with a guitar…I suspect 2025 will present another stage plot for dead swans, but I’ve enjoyed living in this current iteration, and I’m not exactly in a rush to change it.

Stage banter is a huge part of my live show. Early on, I received a lot of comments to the effect of, “I’m sorry I had to leave in the middle of your set, I began to cry,” or one time a friend sent me a picture of her crying with the caption, “Listening to Dead, Dead Swans.” While I’m happy to connect with people, and while one of my main goals is to offer catharsis for people who may not have the language to express themselves quite as accurately as they’d like, I would like everyone to have fun and to come back. I spend a lot of time studying stand-up comedy and specifically crowd work videos in an effort to offer comedic breaks between otherwise generally very depressing songs. This has been a relatively new development in the project, and currently my favorite part of the live show. I certainly understand the appeal of stand-up comedy to any comic who’s made a room laugh.

M[m]: : Would you be interested in touring Europe, Uk, and the rest of the world?

John: I’m very interested in international touring. Theres been some talk about my going to the UK. I have some friends in England and Scotland that I’d love to travel with.

M[m]: Have you had any thoughts of releasing a live album?

John: Yeah, I have actually considered that. The live versions of the songs are almost always quite a bit different and I’ve grown to love some of those versions just as much as their studio counterparts. Maybe this question will be enough for me to finally pull the trigger on something like that.

M[m]: I heard your two albums via the Punkerton Records release- how did you connect with the label?

John: I think it was early in 2021? The pandemic was still in full force and venues still weren’t able to put on shows and still no one was helping them to stay afloat. I’d seen a guy named Brandon Lewis post in a Facebook group that he was putting together a compilation for the National Independent Venues Association to benefit venues negatively impacted by COVID. I absolutely love compilations. I grew up finding most of my favorite bands on compilations, at one point I co ran a cassette label whose primary focus seemed to be compilations and I even wrote a column for a blog about compilations for a year before dead swans. I just happened to have a song recorded that didn’t go on October and I sent it in and the rest was kind of history. I got the impression that Brandon was starting a record label and was intent on quickly building a roster. He was interested in punk rock, but he came from Texas, so he was stranger to Americana music and in fact, I think that was his initial vision, but you’d have to ask him about that. I fit in pretty well with what he was doing and then when his focus shifted more to punk, I didn’t totally fit in, but I was excited to be the odd man out. I grew up in punk rock so I feel at home there, but I also find that I stand out a lot more for not having a drummer ha-ha 

M[m]: I believe there are cassette versions of the albums coming out, could you tell us a bit more about these?

John: Yes! Both full lengths have finally gotten cassette treatment via Bleeding Gums Records out of Philly. Melody originally is from Milwaukee and I guess saw me play a million years ago, long before Lenses was ever released. She’s apparently kept an eye on the project for some time and was particularly touched by Lenses. I have some friends from Buffalo, NY called Smitten for Trash who were one of the first bands on the label, so I’d kind of intended on reaching out to Bleeding Gums at some point. Then one day I was sound checked with Hacked Nudes and when I went to empty my pockets, I saw the dead swans account had a message from Bleeding Gums asking if I’d be interested in working with them. They’ve been absolute sweethearts. It kind of feels like we’re finally closing the chapter that is Lenses. I’ve loved cassettes for a real long time and the project never really felt finished if it only existed on CD or streaming. That being said, if anyone is interested in working on a vinyl release, I’m more than happy to reopen the case.

M[m]: What’s next for Dead, Dead Swans- have you written any new songs?

John: I’ve always tried to follow dead swans as an entity separate from myself. I try to be curious in whatever it is that the project seems to want me to do. From what I can tell, from what I’ve been writing, the project is going further and further away from country and folk music and spreading roots in something more inspired by 90s emo bands like Braid or even very early Modest Mouse. I’m not sure anyone can hear those influences in the songs, but I can feel them in the direction. It’s hard to say what a record is until after you’ve given it to an audience. I trust dead swans though. Whatever the project wants from me will be something worth my time, I’m sure.

M[m]: What has impacted you in the last six months- be it sound, music, film or art?

John: Well I think our current political climate has influenced my possibly more than any record I’ve heard or movie I’ve seen, although I’ve heard some pretty good records and seen some pretty cool movies. Currently, I’m exploring current events on a small scale. I’m looking at how differing political ideologies affect our relationships, and I guess I’m trying to decide how much strain I think a relationship can take within this particular context. We have our convictions and we owe it to ourselves to stand true to them, but what do you do when your parents or your spouse or your coworker has voted in favor of genocide and authoritarianism? I’m still not sure. Everything this project has done has been a commentary on relationships, how they change, and how to respond to that change. Dead swans haven’t answered any of these questions, but it’s given me a place to ask these questions, and I think that’s gotten me through a pretty tough past five years.

M[m]: I take it from your last answer you are far from a fan of Trump- do you think this dislike will appear in Dead, Dead Swans lyrics?

John: I’m not sure that I would ever write a song about Donald Trump per se, but I would certainly write songs about his followers. I may write about the disparity between American citizens and those who claim to lead them. Whether or not my disdain for the man would specifically be brought onto record, I’m not sure, but we can be certain the sentiment will still be present. That I can say with utmost certainty.

Big thanks to John for his time and effort with the interview. The project's Bandcamp can be found here, and you can also purchase the two Punkerton reissues from MVD

Photo credits: menu pic Ben Swank, first pic Leap Photography, second pic Rhea Fogle, fourth pic Xavier Fraire.