Erik Tanner
Back when Kevin Devine was a teenager on Staten Island, around the same time he began writing his own songs and playing punk shows, he started hanging out with a guy called Freedom Tripodi. Freedom was, Devine says, “the first vegan I ever met, first straight-edge person I ever met, first socialist I ever met.” His home borough was thought of then, as it is now, as a conservative enclave in New York City. But Devine’s Staten Island, with guys like Freedom Tripoldi at its center, was different: “There was this weird little fist of fucking weirdos. They weren’t cool kids, weren’t percolating in Williamsburg or the Lower East Side, and weren’t the meathead jocks and wannabe mafioso kids that some might associate with South Brooklyn and Staten Island. It was DIY.”
In the almost three decades since then, Devine’s career has taken him further away from that scene in Staten Island than he could have imagined. After releasing a couple of records as the frontman of the emo band Miracle of 86, Devine went solo. He recorded his debut album, Circle Gets The Square, in 2000, releasing it on a tiny indie label in the U.S. before it was picked up in Europe, giving him the chance to tour abroad. At his first show in Cologne, Germany — pretty much 20 years to the day before Devine and I speak on Amp — there were 50 kids who knew every word to his songs. “I don’t think my family knew that record existed,” he says now. That show "meant something fucking ridiculous; it felt monumental.”
Soon enough, Devine was attracting the attention of a major. He was a smart, sensitive singer-songwriter with a left-liberal edge, and big corporations wanted a guy like that on their roster. After two more albums on his own, he signed to Capitol Records, who promised to make him a singular star. The relationship lasted long enough for him to record 2006’s Put Your Ghost To Rest and soft release it before being dropped, the casualty of a merger.
Erik Tanner
Devine, always suspicious of the music business, had been vindicated. “I don’t know if my orientation towards the industry shifted so much as it recalibrated and calcified to certain suspicions I’d held before attempting to dip my toes in a certain kind of water,” he says now, laughing.
Since then, he’s built a community around his music in ways that might even look familiar to the 14-year-old kid learning about punk from Freedom Tripodi. He’s toured the world on his own, playing small rooms in Northern Europe and massive stages at festivals like Bonnaroo and Coachella. He’s recorded EPs with John K. Samson and David Bazan for his Devinyl Splits series, offered fans music via his Patreon, collaborated with Manchester Orchestra on three albums as Bad Books, and, made music most major labels wouldn’t know what to do with. His latest, last year’s Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong, is quiet and psychedelic — he’s described it as “gently fucked-up” — a long way from the more conventional structures of an album like Put Your Ghost To Rest.
The two in-studio live albums he’s recorded with The Goddamn Band over the past decade, Matter of Time and Matter of Time II, are Devine at his peak, experimenting and dabbling in extremes as he reworks older material. Those albums showcase an artist who's never seemed afraid of pausing to look backward, even when the past might seem uncomfortable. So, while our conversation was loosely based on the 20th anniversary of his arrival as a solo artist, I figure we’d have ended up discussing everything from Staten Island DIY to label bullshit anyway.
The FADER: What do you gain from looking backwards, from these moments of commemoration?
Kevin Devine: Perspective. It’s interesting how we’re besieged by the moment we’re in, but it’s also so hard to be truly present.
I’m a niche public-facing figure who has cultivated a lemonade stand in the corner of a very particular subcultural playground. That Tour EP [first released in 2007 and reissued in 2021] was a really funny hinge release because we did it for that tour with Brand New and Manchester Orchestra. I had spent the better part of 2 years getting signed to Capitol Records, being put through that system, meeting Rob Schnapf who did all the Elliott Smith stuff, making the record that became Put Your Ghost to Rest, having it soft-released. We did very little press, very little promo, very little marketing, and it was supposed to set up a larger release in the spring. And then, Valentine’s Day 2007, I got dropped while in the van driving to play a show in Nashville. That EP came at a moment where I had just lost the label I’d spent two years uncomfortably cultivating some relationship with while also like making this record that was a huge step forward for me.
Between Put Your Ghost to Rest and Brother’s Blood, the band changed pretty dramatically. The direction of the band shifted. So when you ask me how I benefit from inventorying or commemorating, I think it’s that you can connect some dots without trying to assign unearned meaning.
“There was this moment where tasteful songwriter stuff with a slight idiosyncratic bent was having this real cultural moment. I think that was how I got signed: Capitol was like, ‘Well, we should get one of those.’”
Have you ever re-read what you wrote about your relationship with Capitol at the time, when the relationship was still going?
I remember the spirit of it. I was speaking through some of those misgivings and ultimately talking about why I elected to take a shot anyway. Does that sound right?
That’s there, and there’s a tension there too. You reference this perceived assumption that being part of a major label would stop you from writing politically. And then there’s this clear-eyed line: “I’ve seen plenty of bands that think that they’re going to be the one that doesn’t get screwed by the major system, and I am cautious and realistic.” You ended up getting dropped a few weeks later. Do you remember having written that bit specifically?
I’m laughing with and at myself but also having moments of semi-joyful communion with the fact that those things all still resonate with me. The reason I’m laughing is that I still talk about this all the time, and maybe I will forever.
I was a kid who got into punk and indie rock as a preteen through R.E.M. and Nirvana. Later, I got more properly into hardcore shows and punk rock shows — the wave of emo that included Sunny Day Real Estate, but also Superchunk and Sonic Youth and Pavement and Helium. And the next big bang was Elliot Smith. There’s a pretty short list of bands from those formative years that somehow managed to sign to a major label. They snuck into a life where they were never really selling a ton of records, didn’t seem to have any interference or heavy duty involvement or investment. They were just themselves. It was almost like the job of a band like Built to Spill on a major label was to bring in another cool indie rock band that might actually be a bigger commercial concern, the way Sonic Youth brought Nirvana to Geffen.
There was a difference between that and whatever was happening in the early 2000s with the Long Island emo scene. It had an unapologetic careerism. Those bands wanted to be rockstars, and that’s okay. And the bands that were happening in New York at the time wanted to be cool stars, some continuation of the Talking Heads, art-damaged stars. But in both instances, their ambitions were pretty grand with respect to the public part of it. I never thought that far or that hard about that. My internalization of the shit that happened with Kurt Cobain, and to a lesser extent Elliott Smith, was that it’s pretty dangerous up there. Those were smart, willful, creative people; those were not pushovers, wilting flowers. But they were in some conflict about a whole bunch of things. They wanted people to pay attention, but they also understood how abhorrent and perverse pain and celebrity were.
How did that manifest at Capitol?
I couldn’t believe it when Capitol Records was interested in signing me. I love what I make, but I think it was so much more a sign of the times. There was this moment where tasteful songwriter stuff with a slight idiosyncratic bent was having this real cultural moment. I think that was how I got signed: Capitol was like, “Well, we should get one of those.” I remember the president of Capitol calling some meeting at the Foundation Room at the now-defunct House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, and I played a set. After, he silenced the room, put his arm around me, and said to the room, “Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan…” and then tightened his grip around my shoulder and said, “Kevin Devine.”
I remember 98 percent of me thinking, “This is all such horseshit and I want to dissolve like Nightcrawler from the X-Men.” But then two percent of you thinks… “Maybe. Maybe I’ll be Built to Spill and just tuck myself into a corner here and have a 15-year run on a major label. Maybe I’ll be the exception. Maybe I’ll be Neil Young.” I remember telling Rob Schnapf that story and him looking me straight in the eyes and going, “Man, what an asshole.”
I’ve been to some laughable extent trying to figure out how to have a career in the music industry while like not being in the music industry for 15 years since that time. It’s a very particular path, but it’s the one I’ve got.
Erik Tanner
I wonder how much that experience has influenced the community building you’ve done since. On Patreon and through the Splits series releases, you’ve cultivated this circle of disparate musicians and devoted fans. It seems like you’re calling back even further, to the DIY ethos you started out with on Staten Island.
I don’t literally want to be at The Join on Staten Island today, but I think there’s got to be a part of my mind that can see the breadcrumb trail from that place to now. The Capitol thing was like an attempted detour to see like how much of that could I bring with me and be in this space. It gets harder and harder to live in the middle. But to this point, I’ve been able to figure out how to make a living as a lemonade stand operator, and I have adherents who are really committed and devoted and seem to get it. Yes, there’s of course parts of me that are like, “I wonder if I could’ve been like artist X if I’d had this amount of infrastructure, but then the other part of me steps back in. I can’t fucking believe everything we’ve managed to do for as long as we’ve managed to do it. And I’ve always felt the weird sense of joy when we’ve done things like played at Coachella and Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, or had sliding-door relationships with industrial things or had a record chart on Billboard. I could ask, “Why didn’t I become Sufjan Stevens?” But there’s another way you can look at it that’s just like, “Holy shit, how cool.”
How has your relationship with your old songs changed? Are you able to be kind to the version of yourself that wrote a song like “Just Stay?”
I’m grateful that I had the tool of articulation and expression to, as best as I could at that time, try to make sense of the feelings I was having. I’m grateful to no longer be in those exact same spaces. I do still feel. I can identify the person in those songs. It was an endless, anxious stream back then. I just couldn’t stop. I was so uncomfortable. I want more than anything sometimes, especially with some of the songs from 2002 to 2005, to put my hand on that kid’s chest and say, “It’s alright, slow down.” I know too that you can only get there how you get there, and this is how I got here. But I’m also glad that the serrated nature of those feelings and the things I was doing to invite the more chaotic executions of those feelings into my life are not a part of my daily diet today.
I was thinking about “Protest Singer,” your very early song, and a line that sticks out, where you say, “So you call me a protester, I’m only protesting myself.” I wonder if over the years maybe you fulfilled that lyric in ways you couldn’t have foreseen back then. Did collapsing the personal and the political in your songs feel natural from the beginning?
It did not feel natural or intuitive to me. I literally wrote that song the spring of my freshman year of college. I’ve maybe written a dozen or so songs that could be considered political, and I’ve never really thought my music was very good rallying music. “Another Bag of Bones” doesn’t really work in a protest environment. But I do recognize that I go to certain places in my songwriting that other artists don’t because there is something alienating about them. I’ve had people outright tell me they don’t like my music because of that, and I’ve had people in the industry tell me they don’t know how to get my music on the radio for that reason. There’s that Elliott Smith lyric: “If it’s your [decision] / To be open about yourself / Be careful or else.” Another way you could say it is, “If it’s your position to write about a personal experience of social issues, be careful or else.” I’ve never known how to write about social issues from any other place than as an extension of personhood. But ultimately, I would argue that I’ve probably protested myself more than anything else.
