The Brightest Star: An Interview with Dean Wareham

Whether it be via one of indie-rock’s most precious jewels from crown in Galaxie 500, to the equally beguiling Luna and his solo material, Dean Wareham has always found unique pockets of space within the rock ’n’ roll paradigm. It’s why Galaxie 500 – formed in 1987 by Wareham alongside Naomi Yang and Damon Krukowski – have appealed to so many since their 1988 debut LP, Today, and as they celebrated the 2024 rarities release, Uncollected Noise New York ’88-’90, the band still maintain a relevance like few others of their time.

“Yes, it’s true. They’re strange sounding records,” says Wareham, during our conversation over Zoom on a late February afternoon ahead of his U.K. tour in support That’s the Price of Loving Me – Wareham’s excellent new solo release. “Some of the drum sounds, they don’t sound like they were made the late ’80s. They were made sort of in between decades, and I do think that’s part of it. And also, credit to Kramer… he was doing something different.”

There’s another facet that Wareham rightly points out. “The internet enables things to have a second life that, for all the damage it may have done, it also enables people to discover music,” he says. “There are always new teenagers coming along to discover Galaxie 500 and clearly, they’re still connecting to it, which is cool. From this music that is 30 years old and teenagers still getting into it… if I went back to the ’50s, you wouldn’t find teenagers getting into jazz very much.”

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Still performing Galaxie 500 songs alongside those from Luna’s catalogue and his own material, it’s one of the many alluring facets of the Dean Wareham story. “Yes, it is a lot. Sometimes it feels like I’m juggling a bit much,” he admits. “I figure people can stomach about five new songs, and then I’ll just do a bunch of Galaxie 500 songs and a couple of Luna, I think.”

Songs of the past are always intriguing, and by revisiting them in the live setting, I often wonder whether their meaning changes over time? “A lot of that first [Galaxie 500] record is about my girlfriend at the time. So that’s kind of interesting to me, singing love songs about a former relationship,” says Wareham. “But I really enjoy playing those songs. There’s nothing in there that’s embarrassing. Well, maybe on some of the Uncollected… material. There are lyrics that are slightly embarrassing, but that’s why we didn’t release them at the time, and that’s okay,” he smiles.

Shortly after Galaxie 500 disbanded in 1991, while Yang and Krukowski would form their formidable alliance as Damon & Naomi, Wareham formed one of his own in Luna – the band that would later include the singer’s future wife, Britta Phillips; the pair marrying in 2007. While Galaxie 500 is the focal point for many, it can be argued that Wareham’s career beyond is the most intriguing. Luna, having its own decorated career, and while Wareham also authored the 2008 memoir, Black Postcards, it eventually led to his solo endeavours.

Wareham began releasing music under his own name in 2013, with the mini-LP, Emancipated Hearts. Released at the same time as Wareham and Phillips’ move to Los Angeles, memories of those jangling guitars flooding from the speakers feel like it was just yesterday. “I really enjoyed making that,” says Wareham. “It was going to be a whole album, and then I got busy doing another record with Jim James [My Morning Jacket], but it was fun. I like working with Jason Quever from Paper Cuts… he played on it. I always like his ideas… he never plays something that I don’t like.”

Wareham’s self-titled debut LP (the aforementioned LP, produced by James) followed in 2014 and proved equally thrilling, reaching a crescendo with the wonderful closing track and one of the best songs in the Dean Wareham canon, Happy & Free. “I like that one, too,” says Wareham. “We were wondering whether to do that on tour or not? I don’t know… not a lot of people know these records, those words.”

Wareham’s next solo LP, I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A., followed years later in 2020, released during the COVID pandemic. “We mailed out 400 copies of the album from our basement,” says Wareham, who for That’s the Price of Loving Me has made the move from his own label, Double Feature, to Carpark Records. “It’s actually really nice to be on Carpark and have them do so much of it, because I was always playing catch up,” he says. “I think when you only put out a record once every year or two, there’s always like, ‘Oh, Spotify requires this, or Apple Music needs that’… all these things that you’re supposed to be doing that I wasn’t really doing properly.”

Then there’s other administrative tasks that suffocate the creative process. “We work on crap every day, social media, booking hotels, things like that. We don’t work enough on music, and that’s just part of the way that the world has changed, I think,” says Wareham. “Not just for musicians, for all of us… that work has been thrown back on us to be your own travel agent, to be your own accountant,” he says.

With That’s the Price of Loving Me, Wareham delivers his magnum opus. Alongside Phillips, the songs are harnessed by touchstone producer and multi-instrumentalist, Kramer, who joins forces with Wareham for the first time in 34 years. “I feel like that might in the Guinness Book of World Records for most time between records with the one producer.” he laughs. “It was surreal to go back in the studio and see Kramer sitting at the board. His way of working is much the same. It was like, ‘Go, go, go, let’s just work!’ We did not waste time… eight-hour days, which I like. Some bands go into the studio, and they’ll book out 12 hours… you can’t do that day after day. It just kills you, and you wind up wasting a lot of time when you do that.”

Tracking 10 songs over two days, the following days were spent on vocals and guitar solos, as well as cellist, Gabe Noel, who recorded parts on four songs in one afternoon. From the outside at least, it seemed to evolve quickly. “It’s all about the time frame,” says Wareham. “I said to Kramer, I had some songs half ready, but the moment I booked a date, I thought, ‘Okay, let’s do this. I can’t sit around and just watch TV. I actually have to finish these songs’.”

Releasing the excellent 2024 collaboration alongside Mark Nelson’s Pan-American, Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road, the Kramer sound is evident on That’s the Price of Loving Me. “Obviously, he’s all over this record,” says Wareham. “It’s nice to have someone in charge. There were times where I was said, ‘Are you sure about this?’ But he is very sure about it. He’s always got the song mapped out, like, ‘This section is going to need this… this is going to need this… and here’s what we do.’”

The results sparkle with a beautiful cadence. The title track, skewed exotica pop that lands you in your favourite holiday destination, despite the burning professions that underpin the song. “I guess I just wanted to write a song about the price of pursuing somebody as a musician or as a writer,” says Wareham. “Something that’s not a guaranteed income. It sounds sort of like a country music title, doesn’t it?”

And not just in song title, but sonically, there are bright country echoes all throughout these songs. Opening track, You Were the Ones I Had to Betray, a smattering of strings and chiming guitars, creating vivid colours behind Wareham’s sleepy vocals and Phillips’ sun-dappled harmonies. It evokes a clear image of the pair’s Los Angeles locale. “For a while I blamed Los Angeles for the fact that I hadn’t made a record for about six years, it’s too sunny here! But people find a way to get to write. I don’t know… does it sound like a California record to you?” he asks.

Admittedly, I’m not even sure what a California record is which Wareham finds amusing. “There are a lot of people in bands out here who just want to be like The Byrds or the Grateful Dead. I’m quite resistant to it,” he says.

Elsewhere, the blissful Dear Betty Baby – a cover by Mayo Thompson of Red Krayola – continues Wareham’s lust for reimagining songs from the past. “It’s a fun little story about a sailor out on a ship and he’s worried that the captain is mean, so he pretends to cry so that the captain won’t punish him,” he smiles.

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Politics play their part as well, led by the illuminating dream-folk of Yesterday’s Hero. “I think about politics a lot,” says Wareham. “Song is not necessarily the best place for working things out, but I think song is a fun place to inject some politics if you can do it with a bit of humour or not make it too obvious or preachy. I appreciate the people who write protest songs, there have been some great ones [and] some great anti-war songs, but oftentimes they just sort of fall flat, I think.”

A perfect example of Wareham’s cross-pollination of humour and politics arrived during I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A.’s closing track, Why Are We in Vietnam? “That line, ‘Why are we in Vietnam? / Why are we at Hooters? / Who does this better?. … We need to stop the looters’. I’m just questioning,” explains Wareham. “Why does the United States have 90 military bases around the world in every single country. Why are we in the South China Sea? We’re always being told that the Chinese are being very aggressive in the South China Sea. It’s called the South China Sea, and they’re being aggressive? Maybe we’re the ones who are being aggressive?”

Then there’s The Cloud is Coming. Originally written for White Noise – the Noah Baumbach directed film based on the famous Don DeLillo novel, Wareham and Phillips deliver something that glistens like a gem. “Britta and I performed it in the movie. There’s a half a minute sequence where we’re sitting outside on a car playing these 1980s hippies, and we’re playing the song about what’s going on and all the rumours that are swirling,” says Wareham.

It’s not the first time the pair have collaborated with Baumbach. As Dean & Britta, they’ve provided music to the director’s other films, The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Mistress America (2014). “Noah suggested some lines based on the rumours about the cloud. A helicopter flew into the cloud, and it never came out. And there’s men coming down with German Shepherds from New Mexico, and then he looks at some tabloid headlines from the ’80s. So that’s what I was looking at. The East Germans put a human brain into a chimp. The song makes me laugh, but then it also really gets me too. Maybe that’s the cellos.”

The Cloud is Coming continues Wareham’s wonderful run of delivering excellent closing songs, and here it culminates in Wareham’s finest solo release yet. That’s the Price of Loving Me, an album that flourishes, revealing itself more with each listen. The light, reaching every corner of the room.

“The difference between writing songs on my own – well, I get some help and input from Britta when I’m doing these demos… if you do it with a band who all live in the same town, like with Luna… we would get together and practice and play every day,” says Wareham. “It tends to be more up tempo, and maybe a little more fun. But when you’re writing songs on your own, on a guitar, you go somewhere else with it. So maybe the songs will be more introspective, or they’ll just be quieter.”

And that’s the charm with Wareham’s solo body of work. Each release, unravelling with a hushed, modest quality yet still capable of sounding dynamic. “A lot of these songs, the chord structures, are probably more complicated than things I’ve done in the past. I don’t know music theory, but these days with the internet, you can find songs that you like and dissect them. It’s a lot easier to do than it was 30 years ago in Galaxie 500. We couldn’t even figure out the second chord on Isn’t it a Pity?” he laughs.

“It was always just three, two, or sometimes just one chord. People would say about the Velvet Underground, ‘There’s only three chords!’ I’ve studied those songs, and some of them are quite complicated. There are all kinds of stuff in there, actually more than people realise,” he says. “Part of the appeal of rock ’n’ roll, I suppose, is to try and make songs out of very few chords.”

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One of those complicated songs on That’s the Price of Loving Me is its highlight, Mystery Guest. With wandering blues majesty, the tale, something likened to a character from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, is about the band’s tour manager, Kiko Loiacono, who passed away earlier this decade. “He was just wild, more rock ’n’ roll than any of the bands,” says Wareham. “He was also a communist. You’d propose to give him a tip at the end and he would say, ‘No, I don’t take a tip’. It starts with the line for Mercurio house. That was what he called his house, Mercurio house for his cat, Mercurio. He was a lovely, wild character.”

Born in Wellington, New Zealand then moving to Sydney, Australia before settling in the United States, Wareham has lived a life outside what many would consider the norm. And thematically, on That’s the Price of Loving Me Wareham captures this, reflecting on his own life as well as providing sharp observations beyond it. “I don’t think you sit down and say, ‘What is the important thing I want to capture with this album?’ Maybe writers do that, but really, I don’t have a plan,” admits Wareham “It’s just song by song and trying to make each [one] as beautiful as it can be.

“Just the struggle of trying to finish songs, it’s hard. It’s easy to start them, and it’s hard to finish them. A handful of these songs seem to come quite quickly and easily to me, and then other days, weeks, I struggled to do anything at all. It’s cruel that way, songwriting. It shouldn’t be that hard,” he says.

From Galaxie 500 to Luna where Wareham would meet his future wife, through to his solo body of work, it’s been a career like few others in the indie-rock stratum. The level of consistency in his songs, matched by few others. Our conversation ends with the question of life, and whether he ever envisages it without music. “Not lately,” he admits. “I suppose there were times where I was like, ‘Damn, there’s no future in this’. But somehow, I’ve made a living playing music. Britt and I were just talking. It helps that we’ll sit under one roof and can do a lot of music and create things at home. I mean, it occurs to me once in a while.”

Dean Wareham U.K. Tour:

• Tuesday, April 1: The Garage, Glasgow
• Wednesday, April 2: Band on the Wall, Manchester
• Thursday, April 3: Rough Trade, Liverpool
• Friday, April 4: The Assembly, Leamington Spa
• Saturday, April 5: Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
• Sunday, April 6: The Fleece: Bristol
• Monday, April 7: 229, London

That’s the Price of Loving Me is out Friday via Carpark Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.