Deleted Scenes – “Fake IDs”

For me, music has always been a deeply personal emotional experience. For every goofy mindless song I’ve thrown on repeat, there’s a song like Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” that shakes my entire existence and leaves me trembling in fear and sadness. From Ian Curtis to Elliot Smith to Scott Walker to Jason “Spaceman” Pierce, the most genuinely engaging emotional music has always had a depth beyond the melodies and words. For many of the greats, music has acted as a therapeutic release. A lot of bands will try to copy Ian Curtis and Joy Division’s sound, but without Curtis’ haunted soul giving the music pure emotional resonance they will fall flat.

Everyone is different. Everyone has a different story. What I would like to do with my new series of interviews, titled “Getting Personal With,” is to help uncover who these bands really are beyond their songs, why they make music, and why it sounds like it does.

My first interview is with Dan Scheuerman of DC-based Deleted Scenes. Dan is the songwriter and plays guitar in Deleted Scenes. The band’s debut album was rich with lyrical storytelling that often focused on his rather religious upbringing. Musically, they’ve embraced variety. While a majority of the songs are characterized by smooth bouncy basslines, angular riffs and Scheuerman’s urgent vocals (as though pleading for help), they’re often delightfully unpredictable.

With a new record on the horizon, a tour of the east coast underway, I asked Deleted Scenes Dan Scheuerman a few personal questions to gain a more thorough understanding of music he writes, and he willfully agreed to share some of the personal aspects of his character.

Where are you from originally, and what kind of childhood did you have?

I’m from Gaithersburg, MD, a suburb of Washington, DC. I am the third of six boys. We were your typical large Roman Catholic family, and we are very close to this day. My parents are very devout Catholics, beyond the simple church-on-Sunday requirements, and so religion was a huge part of my upbringing. Every Saturday we used to sit together as a family and sing worship songs and read the Bible together. Both of my parents played guitar, and all my brothers sing, so it was really like a legit choir with multi-part harmonies. That was my first experience with music, and really my only experience with music for most of my childhood. We weren’t allowed to listen to any secular music growing up, and there was no radio in the house. The only music we had was the music we made.

(Appropriately, the first radio song I remember hearing was “Losing My Religion.” I remember it made me feel really creepy and completely exposed. I was at a water park in Maryland called “Wild World,” and they played it about every third song. It definitely brought a serious burden on the day.)

I have a very complicated relationship to religion in my music, and I couldn’t try to explain it without a lot of self-conscious doublespeak, so I won’t. But I will say that it’s important, and it greatly informs the way I look at the world. One summer when I was in about fourth or fifth grade my dad challenged me and my two older brothers to memorize Matthew 5, 6, and 7. I only got through about half of Matthew 5, but I think that experience pretty much cemented my sense of morality. I think my dad’s whole goal in life was to provide a firm moral foundation for his kids, and I think he did that quite well. If you read Matthew 5, you’ll find a lot of Jesus’s most universally appreciated ideas–the importance of humility, the unimportance of material possessions, the supremacy of conscience. A lot of this stuff I’m really grateful for, and I know I’ll have it forever. Any new ideas I come across ultimately have to square with that foundation. I used to struggle with that, but I think I’ve come to a separate peace with it.

Do you remember the first song you wrote? What was it called, and what was it about?

The real first song was in about sixth grade, and it was called “Waiting For the Shatter.” All the neighborhood kids used to play baseball in the green space at the end of our court, and there were a lot of cars and houses around. At one point someone decided we should use a real baseball instead of a tennis ball, and so every major hit was followed by a period of waiting for the shatter. I remember someone used that phrase, and I said it sounded like a song. I went ahead and wrote it, but it was a love song about asking a girl out and waiting for her to say no. I think the only form of asking girls out at the time was through passinng notes. Actual talking hadn’t evolved yet, so there was a real period of waiting if you wanted to find out if someone liked you.

How do you support your music career financially?

I am a literacy tutor in Washington, DC. Deleted Scenes doesn’t yet pay the bills.

You’ve admitted to having been pushed out of New York in “City That Never Wakes Up”. Is there anything about New York that you miss? What was the driving force that led you to DC?

That song is a mess of images, so I don’t want to say that it’s only NYC. Although the skyline of burnt out cigarettes is from NYC. I don’t really miss much about NYC. I felt very lonely and became kind of self-absorbed and vain during my time there. Reading L Mag is disruptive to my soul. Anyway, the chief driving force in me leaving NYC would have to be the bed bugs. I moved into this place in Greenpoint, a single room with a shared bathroom and no kitchen that I called the Hotplate Inn because it came with a hotplate. It was furnished with a bed and mini fridge. Anyway, the bed was infested with bed bugs, and so all my stuff became infested with bed bugs. It’s really a wretched existence. They hide all day in the corners and cracks, and under the fake wood paneling, and in your clock radio, and in the power sockets, and under the radiator, and in the closet, and in your computer, and in gear, and in the creases of your clothing (so you can’t visit anyone without exposing them). After you notice the red spots, you start sleeping with the lights on, so you can catch them in the act, which is just gross. When they scuttle away from your body, they leave a streak of your own blood. Then you get all gung-ho, and you have to buy all this powder to pour all over the cracks and seams of your room, so you’re basically living in a cloud of poisonous chalk. And in the end the chemicals don’t work because the real bed bug killing chemical has been illegal since the 70s, which is why bed bugs are back anyway. And so ultimately you have to move out, and leave behind all your precious musical gear, all your books, all your non-washable-on-hot clothes, and all the little things that you’ve collected that might somewhere hide a tiny microscopic white egg that will travel with you and begin the process again. I think that feeling became my allegory for New York. A feeling of having all your shit rendered useless. I left all my stuff there, and ended up sleeping in a borrowed children-size sleeping bag on a wood floor in Bed Stuy. Then my girlfriend got robbed, and I moved back to DC as soon as I could after that.

Unlike many bands, your songs vary greatly stylistically. From my perspective this is a great thing, but do you ever worry about lack of cohesion?

No. It will all even out. Journalists often like to be told what something is so they can categorize it and then move on to the next manila envelope or spam email. We’ll keep experimenting with style. As long as we don’t fall into rote genre exercising, we’ll be fine. A lot of my favorite bands are musically restless, and I don’t really see a problem with it as long as the songs hit you in an honest way.

Is music therapeutic for you? and do you ever worry that the political nature of music scenes and recording industry will destroy the therapeutic nature of your art?

Performing is therapeutic. Writing is more delicate and involves too many levels of self-consciousness to be therapeutic. As far as industry stuff, I try not to think about it too much. It’s all so ephemeral, even the great stuff like Motown. I just concentrate on saying something true. As long as it’s true, and I continue questioning the quality, I think I’m doing my best.

I’ll end this with a less personally intrusive question. If you could convey any one message in your songs, what would it be?

Oh jeez, if I could answer that I would quit making music.

Deleted Scenes are currently on tour:
Jul 12 2010 • 8:00P • Mercy Lounge • Nashville, TN
Jul 14 2010 • 9:00P • GO Bar • Athens, GA
Jul 15 2010 • 8:00P • New World Brewery • Tampa, Fl
Jul 16 2010 • 8:00P • Will’s Pub • Orlando, Florida
Jul 17 2010 • 8:00P • Jack Rabbits (w/Black Kids!) • Jacksonville, FL
Jul 18 2010 • 5:00P • Snug Harbor • Charlotte, NC
Jul 20 2010 • 9:00P • Tipsy• Greenville, NC
Jul 21 2010 • 8:00P • Pinhook w/Medications • Durham, NC
Jul 22 2010 • 7:00P • U Street Music Hall w/Medications and Hume • WASHINGTON, DC
Jul 23 2010 • 8:00P • Littlefield w/Medications • Brooklyn, NY
Jul 24 2010 • 8:00P • O’Brien’s w/Medications • Allston, MA
Jul 25 2010• 8:00P • Le Divan Orange w/Medications • Montréal, QC, CANADA
Jul 26 2010 • 8:00P • Teranga w/Medications • Toronto, ON, CANADA
Jul 27 2010 • 8:00P • Majestic Cafe w/Medications • Detroit, MI
Jul 28 2010 • 8:00P • the Cave w/Medications • Chicago, IL