Q&A: Dr. Dog

(Credit: Chris Chrisman)

With its guitar buzz, sitar pings and conga pops, the new Dr. Dog album, “Be the Void,” sounds like a pawnshop being used as a giant maraca. Singer/guitarist Scott McMicken attributes the aesthetic to something the Philadelphia sextet actually found in a pawnshop, two years ago in Bristol, Tenn.

The talisman: a ’60s Peavey Vulcan guitar amp. Dr. Dog’s fondness for its fuzzy and dark sounds led them to seek out more vintage Peavey gear, including a mixing board, through which the group ran virtually everything while cutting “Be the Void.”

“It just had this perfect line of grit and the music fighting against the gear recording it,” McMicken says, pacing back and forth between his kitchen and bedroom. “If you had a button on your stereo that would remove the influence of ’60s Peavey gear and you hit it when you’re listening to our new album it, it would sound like wildly different album.”

Dr. Dog’s sixth LP, “Be the Void,” drops on Feb. 7. The band’s lineup includes bassist/singer Toby Leaman, keyboardist Zach Miller, drummer Eric Slick, guitarist Frank McElroy and multi-instrumentalist Dimitri Manos. And if you were wondering what McMicken’s cellphone voicemail greeting sounds like, it’s a snippet of Bob Dylan singing “Idiot Wind.”

After working with a producer on the last album, “Shame, Shame,” Dr. Dog went back to self-producing for “Be the Void.” How did that impact the record?
I did find it to be true that out of a respect and an openness to be working with someone, oftentimes you will set aside your own ideas or impulses to see where someone else will take you. And then oftentimes you’ll find out in the end, “That really wasn’t motivated by anything particularly interesting.” On our own, there’s none of that kind of distraction. We’ve all worked with each other for so long and communicate real easily about things, so there’s no real friction in our ability to understand where someone’s trying to take something. So all kinds of ideas are allowed to flourish.

What sort of ideas?
Using a lot of demo recordings and overdubbing on top of them was something we became really excited about. Every musician knows about that: There’s just those times you can’t beat the demo. The song “Turning the Century” is based on a recording I did in my kitchen with a handheld recorder and it was just vocal and guitar into the built-in mic, and it just had the right feel because I wasn’t thinking too hard about it. So we worked from that.

There’s a lyric in the song “Over Here Over There” that says: “I’ve never been a fighter, never been in a fight.” Have you really never been in a fight?
Oh no, I’ve been in a fight. [Laughs] I guess it’s more of some kind of lyrical, poetic license. I’m talking about the very necessary commitment to being honest to yourself. It’s something I think about a lot. And that line helps me get across the idea: I don’t need to push someone over in order to feel like myself. Or I don’t need to be beaten down to be convinced there is no winning and losing in those external forms. That fight turned inward will create the results.

You and Toby have been friends for a long time. What albums did you guys initially bond over?
Toby and both got really into that first Ben Folds Five album. We were driving around listening to [Philly radio station] XPN one day and this song came on, and it turned out it was “Philosophy” and we were both just stunned. We were mostly into the Beatles, really melodic stuff like that, with harmonies. I had a tape with [Jimi Hendrix’s] “Axis: Bold As Love” and “Electric Ladyland” on it, and we were both really into that. He got me really into R.E.M. and he gave me “Murmur” and “Document” and “Automatic for the People.” And he was really into They Might Be Giants. This was 1992 or 1993 or something like that. I remember we were really into the Lemonheads, but just that one album, “It’s a Shame About Ray.”

One of the “Be the Void” YouTube trailers shows you recording a guitar part with studio lights dimmed and a mirrorball going. Did the band do anything else to set the vibe?
Pretty much everything about our studio is vibe oriented, whether we turn on lights or not. The whole place is really colorful and we have total run of the place. Our buddy Forrest [Reda], we signed him to film pretty much every day of the recording process because we were hoping and probably will eventually make a movie about the recording of the album. So a lot of that stuff came about because of self-awareness that it was going to be a movie. Like, we didn’t turn off the lights and turn on a disco ball just so I would play a better guitar solo. We definitely just did it so it would look cool in the movie.

How often does Dr. Dog rehearse to get ready for a tour like this one?
We usually practice every morning from 10 to about four or five or so. Pretty much every day. Because we don’t have a ton of time and there’s a lot to do with the album coming out. Get these songs road ready and stuff and also build the set and all the other things you like to do for a tour.

Nicknames are part of Dr. Dog’s lore. Have you guys given the band’s newest members, Dimitri and Eric, nicknames yet?
Yeah, definitely. Anyone within a 10-mile radius of the inner sanctum gets a nickname, so they got theirs right away. Dimitri is “Tucson” because he’s pure Arizona, that guy. A desert creature. Eric is “Teach.” He’s just an incredibly talented musician, far and away a more technically proficient musician than anyone in the band, and whether he knows it or not he’s really pushed us to be better. He’s totally unconscious to it though.