Oh, America. You, our curiously brash neighbour. Land of innovation and fear and mistrust and good and pain and Burger King. Everyone looks to you as a leader, mostly because you always talk about the fact that, when it comes to countries on this planet, you’re the leader. And you’re having this presidential election right now and it’s vexing and fascinating and we can’t look away.
And so, when lively, popular electro-punk Dan Deacon named his latest LP America, he did it so we would look at you even longer and contemplate what it is you are and what it is you do. We must solve you, America.
“There’s an infinite number of ways to interpret, internalize, relate or distance yourself from that word,” Deacon says over the phone from the road, which brings him to Vancouver’s Biltmore Cabaret on Oct. 26, Toronto’s Lee’s Palace on Nov. 9 and Montreal’s SAT on Nov. 10. “So it just seemed to make the most sense since the record is a lot about confusion, anxiety and a mixture of pride, shame, guilt and celebration. Especially since, the influence musically is largely based on the geography of the United States and driving across country on trips over the past eight years. Also, the lyrics come from my growing disdain and awareness of the corporatism and the massively fraudulent democracy that is the United States.”
A Baltimore native, Deacon is one of many Americans stepping back and scrutinizing their nation as objectively as they possibly can. Deacon describes the U.S. as a media conglomerate and military/police farm, beholden to corporate interests. A champion of civil action, he feels that America may serve as a key marker for the angst-ridden, empowered mood of the world right now.
“I think it exists in that same sort of fabric or collective consciousness of realizing that we can’t expect anybody to change anything for us,” Deacon says of the LP. “We have to change our own realities for there to actually be change. That’s much easier to say than to practise, but that’s the confrontation we need to have to realize that the reason Bank of America is such an insanely rich, powerful bank is because we give them all our money. The reason why the practices that we’re seeing in our government exist is because we’ve allowed them to occur before our very eyes. Granted, there’s deception, corruption and conspiracy but, at the base level, individual change cannot be thwarted.
“Change within one’s self can only be thwarted by one’s self,” he continues. “That’s a theme within my record. My constant battling with food, my body and my mind and realizing that nothing’s gonna change this for me, but me. That’s what makes this both a personal record and a protest record.”
To hear the full conversation, you have two options. You can download an MP3 if you right-click and “Save target as.” Or to stream it, press play.
See Dan Deacon live at Vancouver’s Biltmore Cabaret on Oct. 26, Toronto’s Lee’s Palace on Nov. 9 and Montreal’s SAT on Nov. 10.
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