Five Minutes With Bryan Dunn

Bryan Dunn is a regular on the NYC music scene with strong connections to Austin.  Photos of his recent showbiz wedding are all over Facebook, and it looked like a great celebration.  So Indie Sounds caught up with the married man himselft ...


The Fallen Angel by Emily Rawlings

Indie Sounds: You recently tied the knot with Emily Rawlings.  How was the big day?

Bryan Dunn: I'm a little biased, but it was probably the best wedding ever.  We met at a karaoke night at Public Assembly four years ago, and since Larry Hyland (who works a lot with Local Correspondents) is one of the owners, it was the only place we considered.  Emily's dad did a short ceremony, then Matt Basile was MC for the rest of the night.

Most of the people we know are musicians, so rather than hire a band, we just had them perform.  The night started with features of some of our closest friends (Lara Ewen, Kelli Rae Powell and Flanagan Smith, Jessi Robertson and Andy Mac, Richard McGraw, Chris Cubeta, and Wakey!Wakey!), then there was karaoke in the front room (Alex Lowry did the Doors, Johnny Marnell covered I Believe In A Thing Called Love), and a backline in the back room for anyone who wanted to perform.

The back room gets a little hazy in my recollection, but I seem to remember Jeremiah Birnbaum, Shanna Zell, Shwa and a lot of the former "Late Night at Rockwood Music Hall" crowd having a good time. We even got my first NYC band (Simple Thing) back together for a tune, which meant a lot to me, since none of those guys live in town anymore.  I remember talking to Joseph King of Deadbeat Darling (he and I go back to when we both lived in Austin), but, according to Joseph, I wasn't making any sense by that point.  Casey Shea and Jeff Jacobson did a Sinatra tune that I danced to with my grandmother, which was a highlight of the night for me. In retrospect, I should have asked for an Undisputed Heavyweights reunion, since Wes was there, too.

Unfortunately, Kendall (of Kendall's Hit List) had to work that night, since most of the rest of the Rockwood staff were at the wedding.

IS: So you're from Austin but now live in NYC.  What's the story?

Bryan: I was living in Austin, playing in a fairly popular local band when the drummer and the singer decided they wanted to move to NYC.  They moved up here, and the drummer got a job at Farmclub (which was a music site for Universal Records) as an A&R guy.  He convinced me that this was where we should be if we wanted to take things to another level.  One of the first shows he took me to was Norah Jones at the Living Room (when the venue was on the corner of Stanton and Allen and a tiny, tiny place).  She'd just signed the deal with Blue Note, and took off shortly after, so I figured it was a good time for Texans living in New York.  I thought I'd give it a year or so.  That was nine years ago.

IS: What's your musical history?

Bryan: I started playing guitar in a couple of high school and college bands.  I began writing my own songs on the side, and they became sort of my focus, even though I didn't want to be the front man, initially.  I formed a band to do the songs I was writing with a couple of college friends, called 3 Penny Opera (or 3PO for short; I like Kurt Weill, but I'm also a Star Wars nerd).  I was at graduate school, but the band was taking off and I devoted more and more time to it, until I finally quit grad school and moved to New York.  The singer was writing her own material then, so I decided to start singing my own stuff.

I formed Simple Thing with a bunch of expatriate Texans.  We got some label meetings, but were turned down so we called it a day.  Meanwhile, we'd done a couple of shows as the backing band for Maggie Kim, so I kept playing guitar for her and doing a bunch of demos of new material at home.  I started doing some solo shows here for the Local Correspondents crowd and put a band together, in part with some of the people I'd met playing with Maggie.  Maggie got married and moved to Paris, so my focus again became my own stuff.  I still play guitar for some good friends of mine on occasion (Shwa and Kelli Rae Powell), and I did play bass for the Ramblers for one strange night, but we won't talk about that.

IS: You released Vicious Waltz a few month's back.  What's the story of that?

Bryan: I wanted to make a great sounding band record; a lot of the previous recordings I'd done were home demos, or live performances, or pieced together piece by piece.  I had a great band put together (Jeremy Goldsmith on guitar, Drew McKeon on drums, Jim McNamara on upright bass and Emily Helming on electric bass, although not both basses at the same time), and I wanted to capture that.  So we did three days of live tracking at Cove City Sound in Long Island, then took our time with overdubs at The Gallery in Brooklyn.  I added a lot of bells and whistles, and I think the songs themselves are pretty diverse in terms of style, but the core of the record, that live feel, is still intact.

Since I'd been meeting so many great folks, I tried to cram them all on the record; there's a duet with Lara Ewen, Andy Mac played piano with the lights off, Nick Ogawa played cello on a few tracks, John Atzberger did some banjo and mandolin, and Elizabeth! and David Luther played horns.  Then there was a choir recording with Craig Chesler, Kelli Rae Powell, Mandi LeBlanc (who's since moved back to Austin), Jesse Glendon, and my friend, producer, and former bass player David Cerequas.  And I can't say enough about Misty Boyce's playing on the record.  She saved at least one of the songs all by herself.

IS: What have you been doing to promote the album?

Bryan: Promote? I'm not sure I understand the question. We did an east coast tour earlier this year, and then had a great release at the Mercury Lounge.  Since then, I've been submitting to a lot of podcasts and internet radio, since it really is the future of music.  I have a friend who's turned releasing his music for free on his website into a lucrative career thanks to his fans passing it to each other and a lot of podcasts playing the songs.  If people like the music, they'll get you the money to keep doing it.  There's been a lot of musicians raising funds in advance to make records; I know Shwa and Andy Mac both raised enough to finish their most recent records that way, and I'm really excited about the next April Smith record, which she funded through Kickstarter.
 
IS: What's next? Is married life going to clip your wings?

Bryan: On the contrary; my wife deserves a lot of the credit for getting me playing my own songs again in the first place (and, in a literal sense for one of the promo pictures she took, she made my wings).  She's an artist herself; I'm the audio, she's the visual.  We encourage and inspire each other to get better and keep going. 

I'm doing a track again this year for Benjamin Wagner's A Holiday Benefit, Vol. III, which is a great charity project, and includes songs from Chris Abad, Chris Cubeta, Paula Valstein, Amber Rubarth, Andy Mac, Emily Easterly, Bess Rogers, Martin Rivas, and Casey Shea this year.

Speaking of Chris Cubeta, he's going to be producing my next record, and the plan is to get a single done before the end of the year.  I'm planning on going back to Austin at some point (and hopefully Dallas and Houston as well) to do some shows, either around SXSW, or just to go.  I still have a lot of friends in Austin, and there's a lot of connections between the scene down there and the scene up here (e.g. I met Shwa because Austin's own Johnny Goudie produced his record, and my friend and percussionist Su Walenta plays with both Guy Forsyth and Wendy Colonna).  It's a great town, and a great place to play.  I was there for the bachelor party, but I was in no condition to perform.