Cross to Bear: In Conversation with American Motors’ Dustin White

Some bands exist to tell it like it is. No obfuscation. No subterfuge, just straight talking. Following their excellent 2024 debut album, Content, American Motors swiftly established themselves as one of those bands. Their messaging made things line up in your head. Those instances where you look to untangle the complexities with wordy explanations, American Motors delivered the solution: brevity. Why use a dozen words when half-a-dozen will do?

Following Content, how Dustin White and Alex Steward (now flanked by Andrew Krause who replaces Brad Williams on drums) maintain a creative alliance in a world where art is denigrated by capitalism is a minor miracle. White, living in the Pennsylvania town of Lancaster, while Steward currently resides in Austin, Texas, where Content was recorded. “Hopefully, at the end of the year he’s going to be up here,” says White via Zoom from his Lancaster home last month as we discuss all things American Motors. “I’m not holding my breath, but hopefully it happens, because it makes things very challenging.”

The pair have had a decorated geographical past. White, hailing from Nitro, West Virginia where he began playing music. “I would have been playing my first all ages shows at a flea market that you could rent space in to do shit,” he explains, pointing out that the town wasn’t named because of the chemical plants that were used to help make nitroglycerine. (The name references a different chemical, nitrocellulose.) Chemical plants were a key source to Nitro’s economy for many years, and places where White’s grandfather and stepdad had worked. “All those jobs don’t exist, but growing up that was the industry there,” he says.

White then went school in Pittsburgh, before living everywhere from Marfa, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle to Charlotte, Chicago, Florida and, currently, Lancaster. “I’m sure I’m forgetting places, but it’s been all over,” says White. (On paper, Steward has experienced his own nomadic adventures, having lived in Pensacola, Portland, Chicago and, of course, Austin.)

It’s this vastness that forms a vital part of the American Motors DNA. Like Content, their excellent sophomore release, Functional Music, leans in heavy on the current malaise. Reacquainting with producer J Robbins, American Motors’ songs are protracted downer laments at best; misery in slow motion at worst. “I like misery in slow motion,” smiles White, whose room is dominated by a poster of Polvo’s seminal cut, Exploded Drawing, which he says was peeled from the walls following one of their shows in the ’90s. Next to it is an old basketball screen-print, plus stack of old rub-on letters procured from an art store in El Paso – their current home, on top of a photocopier underneath both pictures.

White points out the comical element of nostalgia with these things. Ironic, considering the more sinister aspects of it are used by American Motors as fuel to burn. Functional Music continues White and Steward’s unique brand of songwriting, and through a singular strain of post-hardcore, American Motors are the architects of tales inspired by life in real-time. Those observations from the end of the bar, as dwellers undertake alcohol-inspired rants in putting the worlds to right.

Except it’ll never happen in American Motors’ world, simply because White’s tales are too real and forever sunken in gloom. (As he rightfully points out on opening gambit, Obvious, where he’s “Getting too old for this shit / It’s just that this shit is getting pretty old”.) It’s this residue that forms the lifeblood of Functional Music. Big Chord, quintessential American Motors both in sound and theme. And as White admits that “There are no good old days / There are just days”, it’s a slogan that burns deep into the soul.

Elsewhere, the one-two gut punch of No Horses and 5408 Big Tyler and later with Tragedy and Malboro Miles, American Motors provide snapshots of smalltown drama, enhanced by White’s deadpan, sing-speak drawl that gives these stories extra bite. On No Horse, he puts it best where he claims, “I don’t know which is worse / The way it is / Or the way it was”.

Then there’s Gold Star where you can almost smell the diesel leaking from the speakers, as American Motors continue throwing shade at this attention culture. (The song, inspired by a story that White recounts from his friend, Dan Davis who plays in Ryan Davis’ band.)

Sonically there’s some manoeuvring, too. Functional Music’s hallmark card, Margarita Pt 2., meandering rustbelt rock with country inflections that build before launching into the crescendo. Including the line, “Psychic on the telephone/ Tells me I don’t see a future at all”, it’s the most poignant moment American Motors impart on Functional Music. An album containing tales exclusively designed for these times in what is one the year’s best guitar-based releases.

“It’s a fucked up world… all I can do is exist,” offers White towards the end of our conversation. One where we talk about the his life in music and culture in the lead-up to American Motors, their journey so far, including the aptly titled Functional Music, and more.

Sun 13: Had you and Alex known each other for long before starting American Motors?

Dustin White: “Not in the slightest. It’s interesting because we met whenever I was in Austin, and I was trying to get loud and weird again because I’d spent a bunch of years… if you were a singer / songwriter and needed a weird guitar guy, you could call me. I could mess it up a little bit and throw some curveballs in there. So, we met, and what was funny is as we were talking, we realised that we’d been in the same room a few times over the years, and not in cities that either of us lived in! For instance, we were both at the same Fugazi and June of 44 show in Louisville. Neither of us ever lived in Louisville, Kentucky.” (laughs)

S13: Wow…

DW: “We both just happened to randomly be at that show, which was a pretty wild coincidence. And actually, I went to that show with Brad, who played bass on the first record. So, we had all been in the same space before. There’s a handful of other times, too. I think there was one where I used to do front of house sound for Times New Viking, and there was a show in Birmingham, Alabama, with Wild Flag, he was at that show. Discovering that there’s these weird random times where we’ve both been in the same room makes it feel very kismet.”

S13: With American Motors, I sense that life is a bigger influence than music or any artist…

DW: “If you want to think about it as life written at large simply by living, you ingest more things. Unless you’re someone who wants to purely exist within and not do that. I can’t not do that. I’m constantly digging for whatever I can. Even within the world of listening to stuff, like all of those NTS radio shows. I permanently have a tab open because it’s like, ‘Oh, I can’t think of anything I want to put on’. I don’t know what Czech tearoom music is, but now I’m going to find out. (laughs)

“But at the same time, doing stuff… wanting to experience stuff, for me at least, is a huge thing. The group of friends that I grew up with back in West Virginia, we had this thing where we were all under 21, so you’re very limited. Where at least in the U.S. we would go find weird stuff and just drive around. There was actually a game called Good Place to Die, which was where we would drive through industrial weird zones, and it wasn’t that it was a place that you would want to die. It would be a place where you had a possibility of dying based on the vibe. Like going really deep into the woods, or some horror movie setup where there’s a couch by the road and you’re thinking, ‘Why is this here?’”

S13: Were there any clear contrasts between recording Functional Music and Content?

DW: “It was quicker because we had a workflow down. Both records, we really demoed hard. How we write is by demoing and then whittle ideas out of that more so than anything else. You take ideas, figure out how they work, move stuff around, build a thing, and then go and do that. That’s our stock way of working. But this time it was quicker because we already knew how working with J Robbins was. That’s part of why we worked with him in the first place. Between Alex and I having done this for many years, there’s a lot of people that we both have worked with. (He was lucky enough to make a record with Steve Albini.)

“We thought for this to work, we wanted someone that neither of us have a relationship with. A whole new thing, so it could enter as a new entity completely, and not with any pre-existing friendships, relationships or modes of working.

“Fortunately, it was amazing because J is just an absolute wizard, a sweetheart and total gentleman. Anyone who says don’t meet your heroes just has shitty heroes. In the world in which I exist, there have been very few times when I’ve met someone and they have not been at least what I thought they were. Maybe that’s the world in which I’ve chosen to spend my time. It was easy this time with J because we knew how to do what we were going to do. It was a day less this time because of that.”

S13: Right…

DW: “The first time, there was a little bit of, not coaching, but there were a couple times where I needed a little helping hand where I started doing vocals because I just hadn’t done that in a long time.

“He was amazing because when he first started doing vocals on Content, I was trying to find my footing. He’d basically stops after a few takes, and says, ‘I can hear when you’re thinking about the pitch. What you need to do is just think about the vibe and the story here. It’s like when you listen to Jeffrey Lee Pierce, you don’t think about hitting the note. You just believe every fucking word he’s saying. That’s what you should shoot for’. And for whatever reason, at the time it was the most perfect reference. I had to have him say that it was okay to just not worry about it.”

S13: It feels like he’s really embodied the spirit of what American Motors has set out to do…

DW: “It’s been amazing. He really gets it. A lot of the things that he throws out are things that he really loves. For all the associating him with recording the Get Up Kids and that whole wave of stuff that really, in his wake, did well. Let’s not forget that he’s a dude with a Neubauten tattoo, you know? (laughs) That along should tell you something. We started talking about stuff, and I mentioned The Chameleons. He talked about going and seeing them in the early ’80s in New York, and kind of joked that he’s a secret goth. A lot of the time, when those things come out that I didn’t know about going in, it was very helpful in getting the thing together.”

S13: Obvious is one of your largest tracks. Was it the first one you’d written for the album?

DW: “No, I think the first thing out of any of these that we were playing that made its way to the finish line was 5408 Big Tyler. Those are the only two that are in standard tuning. The rest are in this alternate tuning that I got from a Van Halen song called Top Jimmy. I stand by it being pretty terrible. Alex will defend it, but that’s just his sensibility.

“I was driving home one night after getting a drink, and it comes on the radio, and it opens with these weird harmonics, and I’m like, ‘Those intervals are not possible like that’. I assumed it was some sort of Eddie Van Halen wizard technique that I didn’t know about. When I got home and looked it up, it was just a weird tuning. Then I immediately put the guitar in that tuning, and just start writing in it, and it worked. Almost every song on the record, except for those two are written in that tuning. A lot of these demos were floating around for a while in pieces. Pretty quickly after doing the first record, they were Margaritaville Pt. 2 and One Chord, which was probably the second one that we finished because we played that one live early on.

“It’s funny because originally, I thought Obvious was going to end side one. But I have a really dear friend, Bryan Parker, who I sent the first batch of mixes and track order to. He’s someone whose opinion I really trust who was in a bunch of bands and does audio for TV shows and movies. He called me a day or two later, and said, ‘I don’t think this track list is right… you got to switch a couple things around’. He was completely right because he was the first person who said Obvious goes first. In my mind, I thought about how we played it live and that it was a good kind of end.”

S13: Like A Half Finished Wall of Glass Blocks, Big Chord sees you putting nostalgia under the microscope. Do you think it’s come into focus so much because of how we are pushed up against the observational glass with social media and so forth?

DW: “Yeah. The nostalgia loop that we’re in now is just insane. Very few new things are happening because of it. The loop that was always 20 years has become much tighter, where it’s almost like a five-year window. I was thinking about it a bunch this morning because there’s this early 2000s nostalgia thing and the whole discussion of what is and was not hipster of that era. There was a new podcast that I saw yesterday with Bethany Constantino discussing 2004 in particular and how it’s not even… it’s just old. In a way that podcast is crazy because it’s not even new interviews that she’s doing. She’s just narrating and then taking old footage, so it really is like a nostalgia loop.”

“It’s interesting and especially even the way that all this 2000s nostalgia where people are pretending like it was some amazing time and everything was rosy. You’re like, ‘No, I can assure you that you’re seeing like a weird version of it’.”

S13: I think that way too, because it wasn’t pre-internet, but the internet was quite young for so many people. There was generation of listeners exposed to the likes of Can for the first time and completely having their minds blown. Not just because of the music but the fact it was written so long ago. It’s hard to compare those moments now with everything so readily available.

DW: “In that 2000s era, I really got obsessed with anything older like that. Basically, if a new record didn’t sound like it was recorded at the bottom of a well on a tape deck on drugs, I didn’t care about it. (laughs) But anything older, I was obsessed with.

“I will say forever that Can is my favourite band. I first heard them in ’97 when I started college. My friend Brad did this college radio show and left his crate of records in my apartment. We went out to the bar, came back, and at the end of the night, before I fell asleep, I dug through for something I hadn’t heard before. There was a copy of Tago Mago in there, I put it on. I’m 18, and I don’t go to sleep. I listened to the record three times, and thought, ‘What is this?’ I was playing in crappy punk bands at the time, and thought, ‘This is what I want’.

“From there in the ’00s, I was so obsessed with not just kraut-rock, but Italian prog and anything like that. So, it’s interesting for me that people are having this nostalgia for a version of the 2000s. I saw these bands because I was working in venues and record stores, but I didn’t give a shit about any of this in real time.”

S13: Interesting…

DW: “There was enough incredibly fucked up stuff happening. I’d go and listen to a Il Balletto di Bronzo record or something. Which is then inherently nostalgic for a thing that I wasn’t obviously a part of. But also, it was because that stuff sounded so interesting. If you listen to the first two Tangerine Dream records with Klaus Schulze in the band, they have drums, and it’s super bonkers. The self-assuredness and bombast to be doing that in ’72 is otherworldly, and I think, more than anything, that’s what blew my mind.

“One of the things that happened to me in the aftermath of hearing Can and things like that, was that you realise there’s always been weird and underground stuff. As soon as that switch happened, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s not happening right now. I don’t care about it’. And then think, ‘Wait, there’s always been weirdos who put out a record that only has 100 copies that was too fucked up for anyone else to care about’. It’s existed since the beginning of time, essentially. And once you discover that, it’s limitless at that point.”

S13: The start of many of your songs place you in a specific moment. The Jane’s Addiction poster on 5408 Big Tyler, or being in the elevator with the cowboy on Marlboro Miles. Is your writing process about picking out different moments or ideas and marrying them up?

DW: “There’s a lot of keeping notes. Both of those bits are playing from a pre-phone time period. Marlboro… has that party scene where there would have been phones. But thinking about all of that and I do have a running list in the phone or a notebook that fits in one’s pocket to try to keep tabs on weird things that you see or think about. So much of it is just wanting to hit a level of specificity to where you really see it. But also taking a step back enough to where you can see yourself in that moment as well. I think that’s really the thing there.

“The Jane’s Addiction poster thing. If you were of a certain age, there was a brief time period where every bedroom of someone that you thought was cooler than you had a Jane’s Addiction poster in it. There are three different ones, and you would see them in any bedroom of someone’s house and you were like, ‘I am not cool enough to be in this space’. (laughs) At least in my weird little part of West Virginia where I grew up.”

S13: With your songwriting and the way your stories play out, it feels like you’re constantly observing. Do you always feel like you’re in writing mode and never switch off?

DW: “If you’re always watching and just paying attention, for me, I feel that it’s more than writing. It’s paying attention and looking for the weird thing in the back of the room. That’s just kind how my brain is wired to whatever is going on. I might try to look at it out of the corner of my eye and act like I’m not, but to put yourself in those situations more so than writing, it’s observing.

“I worked in bars, mostly venues for 20 years, so just by sitting there in the sound booth, you see a lot of behaviour. Some of it’s more obvious. Like the line on the first record about the O’Douls sign, which is not actually what it says. But in Koreatown in L.A, there was this bar that I loved to day drink at with my friend Vug. It’s just a Koreatown old man dregs bar, and when you first went, there was an O’Douls sign on the wall. It made me laugh because of all the places for O’Douls to advertise was this place that is a pit of alcoholism.” (laughs)

S13: There’s so much out there, and people are always vying for attention in a metrics culture. Capitalism has basically silo-ed art into streaming platforms. You guys are living a long way away from each another. Just how hard is it to make music these days, or am I getting too much into existential crisis mode?

DW: “No, I think about it. But at the same time, I can’t not do this, at least in some capacity. When we made the first record, we didn’t play any shows, we didn’t do anything. I didn’t want to slog it out live before there’s a thing. I’ve been doing this shit in some capacity basically since I was 15. When Alex and I started working on this, I was like, ‘I don’t really want to play a bunch of shows. I would rather just make a cool record because at least that’s a thing that can exist’. Whether or not we wrote songs and played 20 shows in Austin on a Tuesday to five people. I’ve done that plenty.

“So we just hunkered down and worked on that more than anything. Because also, there was a weird thing where we couldn’t find a bassist who got it. Immediately, Alex and I really connected musically, but every bassist that we tried just didn’t quite work, and we having to show them what to do. So it was like, ‘Let’s just write everything ourselves. We’re going to have to show this to somebody, and I would rather not show them in real time while we’re working on it’. So, we wrote everything like that, and so that’s what was really important to me. To make something interesting that I cared about.

“Honestly, my guiding light through everything that we have done is, ‘Do I think it’s cool?’ I’m extremely self-critiquing and criticising and want to make sure that it’s actually cool and interesting. So even doing the recent video stuff has all been not to try follow some trend on Instagram. But do I legitimately think this is cool? But also, there’s this thing that I come back to all the time. Years ago on tour, there was a story on NPR about sustenance farmers, and they’re talking about how hard it is to be a sustenance farmer, because of all the myriads of reasons of why that’s a bonkers thing to do in today’s world. The interviewer asks him, ‘Why do you still do this?’ And then his response was, ‘Well, guess I don’t know no better.’ (laughs)

“From that moment forward, it’s been a joke and mantra of why do I still do this? Guess I don’t know know better! It comes down to what I care about or whether I want to do more than make cool shit? No, there really isn’t. At the end of the day, making cool shit I feel for anyone with an artist’s brain is the entire reason why you exist. Regardless of what that medium is or how you do that, at the end of the day, you’re here to make cool shit.

“The metrics shit is fucked up. I’m following some of that stuff and paying attention, and you’re trying to push the needle. But at the same time, it’s fucking dumb. I don’t want to sit and talk into some fucking fuzzy mic or try to convince you of something. I just want you to see something and think, ‘This is cool, I like this’. Or not because there’s plenty of reasons to think, ‘I don’t need to have this fucking weird old man tell me bummer tales over the top of feedback’. That’s fine, too. I actually keep joking about it. That’s even why the first record was called Content. It was a fucking joke!” (laughs)

S13: Of course.

DW: “It was funny because there have been people who asked if it was supposed to be Con-tent or Content. I thought, ‘Sir, you just showed your age with that question, even though they were the same age as me.’” (laughs)

S13: Margaritaville Pt. 2 feels like the centrepiece to the album. That lyric, ‘The psychic on the telephone / Tells me that I don’t see any future at all’. It might be a shitty cliched question to ask someone who deals heavy in bummer tales… but is it going to get better?

DW: (Laughs) “I don’t know. I like to joke that I just long to live in precedented times again. Every day you wake up and it’s an unprecedented event. Can we just have things be precedented again? (laughs) That’s awesome to hear that you think of Marg’ that way because that was the most laboured-over song out of any of these. It was a really long time to get that right. We actually ended up using the glitch sounds that are at the beginning from the ones from the demo because the weird device that I used to process the guitar with died, so I couldn’t use it anymore. Fortunately, it worked to bring in the version from the demo.

“I don’t know if anything will get better. It feels like it should, and that we’re due for something good. But at the same time, we’ve got how many centuries of us all just being assholes? So maybe this is repercussions for that.”

Functional Music is out Friday via CBCV Industries. Purchase from Bandcamp.