“I’m everyone I know and everything I’ve ever done and that’s so much more interesting.”
Brady says when asked about being a solo artist. Living in New York and experiencing friends leaving, Brady becomes vulnerable in his writing, discussing the new life he has and the pleasures and curses that come with growing up. Poetry is meshed into lyrics becoming one on this record as well, lending well to the thematics of it all. death of a rabbit got to sit down with Brady to discuss more about A Dream, A Dog and what it means to adjust to growing pains.
DEATH OF A RABBIT: How does it feel to have your name attached to the project?
BRADY: Great question, and super strange. I’ve been in bands for as long as I can remember, and this is probably the first time I’ve ever really gone by my name at all. It’s nerve wracking. I can be pretty shy, but I did it just as a way to feel a little more free to move around and morph into anything I wanted, and honestly, during COVID, to be able to play shows alone and not work with the busy schedules of all my bandmates.
DOAR: Was it ever stressful, having that much control over your project and not having the collaborative aspect?
BRADY: It’s almost more freeing, and I feel more collaborative than ever, in a weird way! I don’t know if that’s because I’m getting older and changing, but I’ve been a control freak. I’ve been confident, and—maybe to my own detriment in the past—I think that using my own name has allowed me to chill out, hear what other people have to say and incorporate that into what this is, and feel like I’m not just myself. I’m everyone I know and everything I’ve ever done, and that’s so much more interesting.
DOAR: Absolutely, I like that! You also had influences growing up and I was wondering how those came into play in your work.
BRADY: My sister, for whatever reason, just fell in love with Axl Rose when I was growing up. We would drive around in her car, and she would just blast all these bands. I ended up really getting into Van Halen as a kid. I think to this day, Eddie Van Halen is an absolute genius guitar player. To me, he’s just the most incredible rhythm guitar player I’ve ever heard. The interaction between the rhythm of the guitar and the drums and the bass and the singing is so unique. It just depended on who was dragging me around that day. If it was my mom, then all day it was Dolly Parton or whatever was popular in modern country at the time, which I was less into. As someone who eventually was more interested in songwriting than anything else, I was obviously going to lean in that direction.
That’s because lyrics have always been important to me. Hearing a lyric that kind of blows your mind and makes you feel a way that changes your perspective… It’s unlike anything else in the world to me, even if it’s just a clever turn of phrase. It can stick with you and inform the rest of your day. That has more of an effect on me than the power of a riff, which I also love, but has a different purpose.
DOAR: How do you feel about the rising scene of indie folk with artists like Wednesday, Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman? Because I feel like this album could be loosely attached to that scene.
BRADY: I love all those bands. I think, if anything, they’ve just emboldened me and made me feel comfortable in who I am. Someone like Wednesday shows that you can be obsessed with Lush and My Bloody Valentine as much as you can with any classic country. It makes me feel so happy to know that this isn’t just me. It’s okay to love country and noise rock at the same time and that there’s crossover there.
DOAR: Is this album a quarter to midlife crisis type of album?
BRADY: Full on crisis and kind of asking yourself, “Why are you doing anything at all?” You watch everyone around you change and you have an idea of what life is going to be like. You spend all this time finding friends, creating family and relationships, and feeling hopefully accepted, seen and happy. It feels like, just as soon as that happens, everyone starts to peel off, change and leave, and it’s just confusing. Some days, I wake up and I’m that person, and I want to change and want to leave and the next day, I’m like, “We had a good thing, what’s everybody doing?” But the fact is, not everybody feels that way, and change is natural, people move on, and hopefully you learn from that and change for the better yourself. It’s coming to terms with those ideas.
DOAR: I wanted to point out “Singer Sergeant” and “Luck Isn’t Magic” as those were my personal favorites. I also really love the lyricism on “Weak AC, No TV,” specifically the “enough” repetition and “It’s bad enough / That our parents don’t visit / Though I wonder, if they did, where they’d sleep.” What inspired the lyricism? Do you ever view your lyricism as poetry? Do you think everyone’s songs are poetry, or is it more so if you choose it to be?
BRADY: I love that question. Interestingly enough, that song was called “Enough” for a long time. It’s not a bad title or anything, but I just loved the way “Weak AC, No TV” looks. To your broader question, I don’t think the way words look on a page gets enough credit as it does in poetry. Maybe in poetry it gets enough, but not in lyrics.
In general, that song is really funny. I wrote it probably six times, and the only thing that kind of stayed constant was most of the lyrics, maybe a few details here and there. Honestly, right now, if you asked me to play it, I would probably mess up some of the words with some of the older words.
I think lyrics are poetry, and there’s a lot of bad poetry too. If you don’t care to think of your lyrics as poetry, that’s totally cool. I think certain genres lend themselves to poetry and others don’t, and they’re kind of just preconceptions we have. WE can choose to follow them some days and choose to think about them differently other days.
DOAR: What’s a lyric you’ve enjoyed recently?
BRADY:
Cause I just had a dream I was dead
And I only cared ’cause I was taken from you
You’re the only thing that I own
I hear my bell ring, I’d only answer for you
PinkPantheress, “Mosquito”
Click the album cover to listen to Brady Only’s new album!
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