Gold Dust Interview: “Success is forging bonds outside of a status quo that seeks to put distance between us.”

“Like an unexplained cactus in New England / We all want a life we can’t sustain,” sings Stephen Pierce on Whatever’s Left Pt. II: A Cactus in New England – the closing song to Gold Dust’s latest release, In the Shade of the Living Light.

Whilst it may be the first time a cactus is used in a metaphor in the world of indie-rock, Pierce’s honest appraisal casts a dark shadow over the world we live in. One that is enveloped in needless consumerism and instant gratification, these are just two of the many ominous aspects the songwriter explores on In the Shade of the Living Light.

What started out as Peirce’s solo project which saw the release of Gold Dust’s 2021 sparse self-titled debut and its dark, hard-edged follow-up, The Late Great Gold Dust a year later, the Easthampton, Massachusetts-based songwriter shifts the needle on LP number three, going into full-band mode.

Joined by guitarist Ally Einbinder (ex-Potty Mouth), bassist Sean Greene (The Van Pelt) and drummer Adam Reid (Nanny), the results on In the Shade of the Living Light are sparkling, immediate and dynamic. Take opening gambit, Whatever’s Left – arguably the best song in the Gold Dust canon, as the band smash ’60s folk reverence into college rock. Pierce’s guitar heroics, echoing the works of J. Mascis, which is ironic as he features on An Early Translation of a Later Work – a dusty jangle rock epic that concludes with the Dinosaur Jr. leader plinking away on electric sitar.

The Brightest Star: An Interview with Dean Wareham

Elsewhere, Gold Dust continues to broaden their scope. The AM radio-inspired Moths to Glow, radiating a new warmth, while Sympathy for Scavengers is like flash-blade folk that sees Pierce showcasing the kind of dexterity one would associate with Ben Chasny.

Then there’s the woodsy indie-rock of Germs Burn. An open-hearted exploration on mental health which sees Pierce moving into unchartered waters. So too with the raga-infused interlude, Traveler Stay, which provides a backdrop to more exotic climes, which is exactly where Gold Dust land on Last Call – a song that veers off from the dusty road the band takes earlier on An Early Translation of a Later Work. This time, though, Gold Dust head towards the sunset.

Self-released and accompanied by a 28-page zine-inspired booklet, In the Shade of the Living Light not only echoes DIY culture, but also, it’s Pierce’s shining moment as a songwriter. While he has spent a career moving from one sound world to the next (including his time in hardcore outfit, Ampere), under the Gold Dust alias Pierce has carved out the kind of honest songcraft that provides some light during these dark times.

Following the release In the Shade of the Living Light, earlier this week, Pierce answered some questions about the Gold Dust story, including the challenges behind his latest release, his influences, and much more.

Sun 13: Do you remember the first artist or piece of music that really spoke to you?

Stephen Peirce: “So, I grew up a kid desperately trying to fit into places I didn’t, in every case it being nearly immediately clear that I was barking up the wrong tree. I so badly wanted approval or acceptance, or whatever, and had no idea how to go about getting it. I had no idea how to be heard or understood, or how to understand myself, really. Naturally, being exposed to punk and hardcore at a young age was a pretty impactful and empowering thing for me: here’s this music that sounded as alienated as I felt. Here are a bunch of freaks championing community – and not just any community, but specifically one far removed from the cruelty of the middle school halls that I’d grown to fear walking down. It was the older kid of my parents’ friends who first made me a tape – a similar misfit who I admired so greatly because he carried himself with a sort of confidence that I’m still not sure I know how to harness. He had been involved for a while in the Boston-area punk world, and seemed to have carved out a spot in life which he could thrive away from the noise of the sort of kids that would look to put someone like him down. The first music I truly connected with was a tape he made me: It felt like a safe haven. It felt like home.

“I don’t know if that tape saved my life or if it ruined it, but it set me on the path I’m still on to this day.”

S13: You were recently in the U.K. up in the North East in Carlise. What took you to that particular part of the world?

SP: “I was fortunate to have the opportunity to play with and learn about interpreting traditional music from Martin Carthy and Maddy Prior, two icons of the folk revival and people I look up to very much. Martin is such an inspiration, so kind and humble and at 84 years old (happy birthday, Martin!) still such an incredible force in honouring and preserving traditional folk music. The songs that he plays, he tends to reinvent – though I’m sure he would see it purely as a stewardship sort of thing, and I’m humbled to have been passed some of that knowledge and experience.

“I stayed at Maddy’s place in the countryside outside of Carlisle. Maddy is such an incredible singer and has such a young person’s energy and excitement for folk music, even having been involved in that world since the ’60s. She’s also a lovely and accommodating host! The records that Maddy and Martin played on together in the early ’70s – Steeleye Span’s Please to See the King and Ten Man Mop – are watershed records for me, the sort of records that just feel so untouchably themselves. It was such an incredible trip.

“The day before I headed to Maddy’s place – which is called Stones Barn – I flew into London, rented a car, and drove up to Newcastle. I’d been looking around at what shows were happening either in London, Carlisle, or anywhere else between, and the one that seemed the most exciting to me was in Newcastle, a show by a traditional singer and uillean piper named Seb Stone. He was joined by friends on bouzouki and violin at times, and it was absolutely incredible. I was especially taken by the bouzouki playing of John Lavender, a total sweetheart. I was one of very few, and perhaps the only paying audience member, so we of course hung out afterwards, closing out the pub where they played, then walking to – of all places – an American-themed bar under a bridge. It was such a fun night, great conversation with such wonderful people. I hope our paths cross again soon.

“I’m pretty sure I’d played in Newcastle a few times, but this visit, it felt incredibly vibrant. I had a fantastic vegan burger, some great ciders, and everyone was so over-the-top friendly. Beautiful city, too. I’d love to return.”

S13: This is your first Gold Dust record with a full band. Was it always the intention of expanding beyond your own project, or was it more that the songs commanded it?

SP: “There wasn’t really any sort of intention for anything when I started writing these songs, to be honest. The first record especially, it was mostly just for fun, something I could make that wouldn’t really matter much if anyone heard it or not; something free-from expectation. It worked some magic in reminding me of what I’d loved about music from the start, which was the process of making something tangible out of the intangible. Doing it just to do it, you know?  

“But I’d been in bands more or less my whole life, and so being part of one, I imagine, will always make a great deal more sense to me than playing solo ever could – it was satisfying to make those first two records mostly on my own, rough as they were, but I think a lot of what excites me about music is the sort of dialogue and tension which can exist between instruments, or the way that forms can be transfigured into much more interesting new forms with the addition of bandmates and their own unique viewpoints and instincts. As one person, I guess I was just kind of pushing everything in the same direction. As a band, there’s a push and pull, an equilibrium or some kind of balance to be found. It’s much more exciting, and I’ve found that I write differently when I’m doing so imagining my bandmates playing the parts. I got the solo stuff out of my system: We’re a band now, and this record is every bit as much Adam’s, Ally’s, or Sean’s as it is mine. In that way, I sort of see it as the first of something new rather than the third of something preexisting.

“I was lucky as a teen to end up in a band that would take me into my thirties which never changed members. That felt normal to me, like a family. We laughed like a family, bickered like a family, forgave like a family, and that love for those bandmates exists still. I’ve also been in bands that didn’t feel that way at all. That dichotomy was front of mind when putting Gold Dust together, and I think because of that intentionality I’ve ended with a band of three great friends whose musical instincts I wholly trust.”

S13: There feels like a new warmth to these songs. A community spirit. Can you tell us the process behind In the Shade of the Living Light?

SP: “Oh man. It was an absolute rollercoaster to make, and it could’ve been any number of records that would’ve been completely different from the one that it is or could just as likely not have happened at all.

“Most of the songs on ITSOTLL were written and demoed shortly after the last record came out – end of 2022, early 2023. That spring kicked off what ended up being the most personally challenging period of my life so far, and I decided, ‘I can’t deal with these, they’re way too heavy, I can’t imagine a press cycle having to talk about them’ – that was 13 or 14 songs, all shelved, so I thought.

“I ended up being convinced to reevaluate some of them, which is what the bulk of this record is – both iterations of Whatever’s Left, Early Translation, Germs Burn, and Last Call were all set to be forgotten, but these reworked versions allowed me to get past my hangups and build new associations with them, and I’m glad that we gave them another shot. The other three songs – Moths [to the Glow], Scavengers, and Traveler [Stay] – ended up being pieces that I wrote and recorded while working on the other songs, sort of starting with the idea of them being interludes or whatever. They became full-on songs of their own by the end of it all.

“The universe told us a few times along the way that maybe we shouldn’t make the record: The initial pressing plant I’d sent money to ended up going bankrupt, taking with them an entire LP pressing’s worth of our money, a misprinted first run of jackets (which was my fault), a scrapped first try at recording, the artist who did our first two records being too busy to take this one on – I don’t think I’m usually a stubborn person, and I feel like at a lot of points in my life, that all would’ve conspired to make me abandon the whole thing – that’s where community comes in, I suppose. Who knows what would’ve happened with it if I’d approached the record the same way I did the first two? I wouldn’t have been accountable to any other bandmate, so it would’ve been a lot easier to convince myself to not see it through. But I owed it to Adam, Ally, and Sean to make sure that their hard work on the songs wasn’t for nothing.

“Between the songs, the zine, self-releasing it, doing the art myself without any knowledge of computer editing (it’s all photocopier, scissors, and glue stick), not having any sort of support with booking shows or anything, it’s been a truly DIY experience: Everything was put together the hard way, and now that it’s done, I can see that it was all for the best. It was all working towards this thing that we’re all incredibly proud of. I think holding the record, interacting with it physically, it’s evident that we put everything we had into its creation.”

S13: Going back to community spirit, and a song like Whatever’s Left Pt II: A Cactus in New England feels like a response to the current political landscape in the United States. I’m not sure if that was in your thinking?

SP: “Only insofar as everything’s political. That was one of the 2022 songs – lyrics adapted, of course – but ended up more so being – to me, anyway – a song about reaching for a sort of life, a sort of acceptance or comfort or whatever, that seems perpetually elusive. The thought that a better life, a better world, could be just around the corner, if you just work harder. That’s the promise of capitalism, the carrot on a stick that we’ll spend our whole lives never being able to grab hold of. I find myself constantly over time ending up more or less in the same familiar spot, again and again, and I’m always telling myself, ‘I have to do XYZ differently next time, I have to put in X amount of hours more work,’ or whatever, but somehow, I’m always left with the same longing, or maybe it’s a disappointment that the version of ‘success’ that is available to me isn’t what I’d imagined it being. It’s about realizing that there’s a way out from under a shadowy grey sky but not being able to outrun the movement of the clouds.

“It wasn’t meant to be an allegory about the experience of being in a band that plays a niche style of music from an unfamiliar rural area, but it could be read that way. That wasn’t the aim – I don’t lament where we’re at as a band, nor do I think we’re owed anything. The work we put into this is truly in service of making noise we can be proud of with friends.

“But I suppose that’s where community re-enters the conversation: I think in a world being savaged by such hyperbolic cruelty and hatred, and especially one where the volume on that ever-simmering malaise of self-immolating capitalism has been turned up to the max, what even is success as a band anymore? I don’t think it has too much to do with records sold, money made, or good press; treading water in a stormy sea. Sure, all of that’s nice when it happens, and it tends to allow for new experience, but distilled to the essential, none of that is what success looks like to me these days. Success is forging bonds outside of a status quo that seeks to put distance between us. It’s lifting up the people you believe in amid the feeling that the world is otherwise working to push us all down and make us feel insignificant. It’s hearing deeply and deeply being heard. In the macro, if you look at the news, it can start to feel like there’s not as much ‘good’ around these days – we can create alternative spaces of mutual aid and support, though. We can be there for each other. We can be the world that we want to live in.”

S13: Whatever’s Left is a wonderful opener and one your best songs, I think. Was it an easy choice to open the album with?

SP: “My bandmates would say yes. At first, I wasn’t so sure and thought that something a little more ‘intro-y’ would be better leading into Whatever’s Left as a second song. I was, of course, wrong. I think it does a good job at introducing the record – we’ve been starting a lot of our sets with it for the last month or so, too.”

S13: Moths to Glow has a sunny ’60s vibe to, also echoing the aesthetic from your last record. It got me thinking of your immediate surroundings, which – from afar at least – seem like they may juxtapose your songs. How much do you think your music is a reaction to your immediate surroundings?

SP: “For sure – New England can be an awfully grey place, and also a very green place. To me, this record especially is specifically pulling from our Northeast geography. I’ve done a lot of reflection over the past few years about musical traditions and how they vary from region to region. I think it’s fair to say that when prompted, most people wouldn’t think of New England when asked about any kind of ‘American’ sound: I’m sure they would think of somewhere like Nashville or the Southwest, Bakersfield, CA or even ’90s Seattle, maybe.

“So, why doesn’t there seem to be any defined sound of the Northeast, traditionally? So much music and culture stems from dance at its origin point. I’d imagine that since our corner of the world was initially colonised by the Puritans – for whom song and dance was a distraction from piety and generally looked at with suspicion, if not outright scorn – we missed out on a lot of the social and preservational storytelling aspects of non-commercial folk music. I’ve made it an aim over the past few years to lean into our region for inspiration, to look back at our complicated histories and imagine what musical choices would’ve been made had religious zealotry been less a guiding light at first.

“Geographically, there’s a lot in my immediate surround that is well worth drawing inspiration from, and one of the things that I truly do love about New England is how there’s this spectre of the macabre, this vague and almost implicit hauntedness that underlies just about everything here. I feel like it’s akin to certain areas of England in that regard.”

S13: J. Mascis features on An Early Translation of a Later Work – how did you two come to meet?

SP: “Through bikes, of all things. I was a bicycle mechanic and we would talk music or guitars when he’d be in the shop, and over time we became friends. He’s one of the smartest, funniest, and most generous people out there, and what he did with the electric sitar part in Early Translation was just mind-blowing. I think we got like six or seven takes, and it’s a shame that there’s no way of using them all.”

S13: That song has some poignant themes, too. What were the inspirations behind it?

SP: “There’s a piece called Translating a Person by Alejandro Zambra that ran in The Believer which a good friend posted online years ago when I was still active on social media that resonated with me. I would find myself thinking about passages from it often, which led me to reflect on how meaning can vary based on how a work (or a person, or an experience, or a landscape, or etc. etc. etc.) is read, how it’s received, the context that the reader is coming from, all that. How sometimes, there’s no clean, direct line you can draw between the source text and the translation, and that sometimes something is lost or added in the process.

“I guess it’s kind of meta, in that it’s a creation about creation. One of the things that I truly feel when reading the lyrics back is the bit about how ‘it’s not so much creation as it’s something finally being laid to rest’ – when you make a record, or work on a manuscript, or prep your paintings for an opening, all of the creation is happening well before it finally ends up being presented as a “new” thing. For me, I’ve wrestled with these songs now for years. They weren’t ‘born’, per se, when the record came out – it’s that they’re finally out of our hands. They’re everyone else’s problem now.

“There’s been a sadness, a directionlessness that I’ve experienced through the years when a record finally comes out, and this song gets at that sadness. I’ve usually tried to quell it by, like, learning covers, demoing new stuff, you know – just keeping the engine idling in the driveway. For some reason, I don’t feel that this time. Ironic enough, it doesn’t necessarily feel that the release of ITSOTLL is laying something to rest – for whatever reason, I’m still very much invested in these songs, and feel like I’m still getting better and better at playing them. That’s a cool thing, that maybe these songs will remain fluid, remain ‘in creation’ or whatever – All of the best traditional folk songs continue to evolve and adapt themselves to new experience and surroundings – maybe these can, too.”

Four Five: An Interview with Sweet Williams

S13: Germs Burn is centred on mental health. Us an older generation have perhaps been more inward on the subject, but it feels like this younger generation has helped ease the stigma, thus making it more approachable to talk about. How hard was it for you tackle the subject through this song?

SP: “It’s funny – I didn’t grow up in a family that was particularly adept at expressing the full range of human emotion with all its nuance, and resultantly I kept my struggles to myself, mostly. I felt that they would somehow make things harder for me if they were known, that they’d not be understood, that I’d be judged or thought less of, or worse yet, that I’d be given some bullshit advice of just ‘thinking positive’ or ‘powering through it’ or whatever – things that I’ve come to learn aren’t viable solutions. I used to feel so incapable, so lesser for not being able to work through my depression via will alone. That’s not all on my family, of course – they’re loving and kind and have always meant well. It’s more a reaction to the entirety of my childhood: the bullying, the fear, the loneliness – I learned that shutting up and keeping to myself was probably the safest way to navigate through life unscathed. But I can’t imagine that any eventual good comes when those sorts of thoughts are internalised and become the bedrock of one’s life experience. It becomes a lens you view the world from.

“But music and writing lyrics has been such a pressure-release-valve for all of the stuff that was hard for me to talk about or engage with others on. A lot of what I’ve written over the years has had a sort of vague sadness, darkness, or cynicism behind it, and I’ve not really tried to engage too much with how those lyrics could be read. I figure, that’s none of my business, right? But obviously, I was trying to say something, trying to be heard, trying to maybe save myself from something. I think with Germs Burn – and with this record as a whole – this is my first time trying to turn these sorts of narratives around and to emerge from the other side of them. The song was written as I was starting to get my life back on track after a mental health crisis and subsequent hospitalisation, and ultimately, I think the overarching story told is one of identity and rebirth, or redefinition. Like, if I have to rebuild a new me from parts remaining from an outmoded version, what new parts do I swap in? Am I still the same me afterward? Does it matter?

“It’s the whole Ship of Theseus thought experiment thing. Identity, as I think younger generations are navigating really well, is much more fluid a thing than I think our parents thought it was, and to me, I think there’s a whole world of empowerment that comes from taking control of becoming the person you were meant to be, to not be scared to break from what you were at birth or who you were raised to be. But even ‘meant to be’ is a fluid concept – that can totally change with time, right?

“In my case, the song applies to deconstructing those cynical and self-loathing thought patterns I had about myself and trying to rebuild into something better, something more in line with the hope and love that I want everyone in my life to feel from me.”

S13: By opening new doors in your songwriting such as approaching these subjects, does it give you more confidence to explore more unchartered territory in future releases?

SP: “In a way, I see this as kind of taking my foot off the accelerator a little bit. …Late Great was certainly a dark fucking record, and my hope is that while this one is much more overtly and clearly engaging with that same darkness, that at the end of it all, it doesn’t feel as hopeless or bleak as before. That there’s a new sun coming up from behind the mountains and the clouds which promises at least a little light.

“To again go back to traditional folk music, my obsession with the mode of writing and with the stories being passed through time by it had me thinking, ‘what sort of stories do I want to tell? What around me is worth keeping alive in song?’ The answer that I landed on didn’t feel totally in line with what I’d been doing on previous records, or even the demo versions of these songs. I think more than anything, those questions will inform a lot of what’s to come. The songs demoed for the next one are engaging heavily with them, anyway.”

S13: You’ve been in bands prior to Gold Dust and toured the world. Do you envisage a future that may make it easier to go back to that way of life, or do you think it’s gone too far now?

SP: “It’s of course harder to navigate that sort of lifestyle when you’re in a band with folks with careers, bills, families, etc. – it was easy to just, like, ditch your shit job and hit the road for a month as a kid when no one was depending on you for anything – looking back, that was a type of luxury, but also a pretty stressful way to live in between tours. But, like, rent was always cheap then and we could afford it when we got home, the tours paid for themselves, it didn’t seem to matter much if I let my bills go to collections, and people seemed genuinely excited about seeing the bands I was in. It was the life I wanted.

“The world is different now. Music is different now, and how a band navigates that world is by necessity much different now than it was before.

“I’d love to take Gold Dust on longer ventures, and if opportunity arrives for us, we’ll absolutely do it. We just finished a short little run around the release of the record, and it reminded me of just how much joy I feel in those moments on the road, even in the dull ones in the van or waiting for something to happen at the venue – how happy I felt to just be able to engage with something so meaningful to me, to make new friends and see old ones, to just be part of something so vibrant and alive. I love it all, and I would jump at any opportunity to do so in a sustainable way. Hell, I’d also do it in an unsustainable way.”

In the Shade of the Living Light is out now. Purchase from Bandcamp.