Osees’ John Dwyer: “Love songs should be left for another time”
The last few years have been a kick in the dick. War, a pandemic, the rolling back of human rights, totalitarianism, disasters, the list goes on. So it’s no wonder we are all feeling a bit cooked. Osees have just released their 26th album, A Foul Form, and it’s a snapshot of our current climate, fast and frantic. Speaking to SHANNON FOX, frontman John Dwyer explained he has had covid three times already, and that fans may notice his voice sounding more hoarse and guttural on this LP, as he recorded his vocals while sick, saying “I had to kind of learn how to do that live! Now I’m really good at it!” Ahead of their first visit to our shore in four years, with a Perth date at Freo.Social on Wednesday, February 8, Dwyer shares how all of the above affected his songwriting, and why won’t we ever find him on social media…
I hate social media.
Yeah?
Yeah 100%. I think it’s owned by terrible people and I think it does terrible things to everybody. I know a lot of people are just addicted to it so I kind of loathe it. I think it’s good for business. I think an entity can have it but I don’t agree with having it as a person. For instance our label has it for posting shows and shit like that but I don’t need another distraction in my life. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg give me the fucking creeps and I don’t want those guys in my life at all.
It’s interesting, because musicians are expected to be content creators now as well.
Yeah I wouldn’t do any of that shit. The nice thing about having your own label is you can tell people to fuck off all the time, so I do it constantly. I’m sponsored by Ernie Ball for instance, just like guitar strings and stuff, and I remember always having this uncomfortable conversation with anyone that was trying to hook up with me as a musician. The first thing I always say to them is “I don’t have any social media” and most of the time they’re like “Oh! Okay…” but there’s that initial shock of like, “I don’t know what I’m going to tell my boss.”
We do have a website and stuff but it hasn’t been necessary. I’m in no rush to get any bigger than we are. We have been doing this for a long time and I think I like the old school mystique of a little bit of word of mouth. I miss the days where we would hand out flyers but that’s obviously dead and gone.
But it’s like if you’re not on social media now you just miss out, because people aren’t doing print, and aren’t doing flyers, and street press.
There is of course the other side of that. My friend will be like “that insane punk show the other night, there was a guy with a flamethrower, it was under the freeway” and I’ll be like “fuck!” because I don’t have social media. So it’s like “you gotta call me” and he’s like “it’s not my job to tell you about things on the internet.” I’ve been trying to keep a more active finger on the pulse as it were, to keep in touch with stuff like little underground happenings like that. I’m also getting old so I don’t think it really fucking matters anymore. There comes a point at a certain age where you go “fuck it, who cares” you know, so thats where I’m at now.
Well I feel like it hasn’t really impacted you guys in the sense that you still sell out shows and play to big crowds.
We have great fans, we’re very lucky. They do all the posting.
You’ve changed your line-up again, does that mean your sound has changed?
We haven’t ‘changed’ our line-up in probably seven years now. We did add a member though. It hasn’t really changed the sound any more than it would have just because he was coming in and playing on our records for a while previous to that. So he’s like a keyboard shredder, he would come in and play electric piano.
On the last record it did change the sound I guess because he played guitar with me which was really fun. I realised while we were working on the last record that I haven’t been in a band with another guitar player since I was like 17 years old! So I’ve been a complete hog of the guitar, it’s been all mine all these years you know, so that was really fun actually. So we’ve been doing that on and off a bit more live, he’ll bring a guitar and I’ll have him play the punk songs.
I was listening to the album this morning and it is really quite punk, really frenetic. 10 songs, 22 minutes…
Great morning album (laughs).
I was like, “this will wake me up!”
Your pets are like “why are you doing this, what is happening?”
From the outside of the US, we are all looking in and going WTAF is happening there? I’m wondering if the climate over there is affecting your creativity, thinking of Perm Act and the lyrics of that.
Yeah of course! It’s impossible to deny. Obviously very much in America, because I live here and I have a first hand account of all this stuff, but all over the world there’s been this wave of aggression towards each other and especially authoritarian governments. I mean Brazil like Bolsonaro, just a horrible person. I don’t how it is in Australia politically right now, but it’s really charged here.
I mean, fuck a cop, cops have always sucked. Nobody likes a cop unless you’re a nut job I think. I’ve had relatives that were police and I still thought he was an asshole. It’s like, my experiences with the police, I’m a white man so I’ve been very fortunate I’m sure. Still, I’ve had a knife held to my throat while butt naked in a cell by a cop, I’ve been beaten by the police several times. So I have a lot of pent up aggravation with authority figures and I feel like if you want to be a cop or even a politician there’s got to be a bit of something wrong with you to wanna hold a position of power like that.
Now that said, I don’t believe in anarchy necessarily either. I think there needs to be some sort of system in place because there’s so many of us on this planet now, people tend to behave pretty poorly if they think they’re not going to get caught. I’m a pessimist like that. My ex-girlfriend would be like “I think people are really good” and I’d be like, “I think people are pretty bad.” But you have to work to be good and the people that are being good are really worth it, because they’ve made an effort to be kind and to have empathy towards each other. It’s a bond, it’s a way of life you have to work towards. Not everybody wakes up everyday being like “I’m going to be nice to everybody,” it’s a very fucking complicated time.
I do think that the way things have been in America in particular is really great for aggressive music. And I think it’s really weird that anybody here, and this is just my personal preference, it’s very much a subjective thing, but it’s very weird for anyone I know to be writing cotton candy, Mickey Mouse, light hearted music right now. I understand the escapism of art, but to me this is the release and unfortunately I raise a lot of problems with no actual solutions because I’m an idiot. The world right now feels like it’s moving faster and faster and sometimes that means worse news for everything. It’s a very complicated time, so I made a very uncomplicated, angry record. It was really fucking fun ironically. It came really easily, because it was just right there, like low-hanging fruit.
If you look at music that charts, it’s heading back towards a heavier sound.
I think even pop music is getting weirder and darker sometimes. I remember when I first heard Billie Eilish and I was like “huh, this is kinda fucked up.” It appealed to me, even though it’s like a massive pop thing here in the states. It appealed to me in a way that it wasn’t just another love song. There’s nothing wrong with a love song obviously, but I feel like love songs right now should be left for another time.