INTERVIEW: Dan Fishback - singer, songwriter, ex-Philadelphian, ex-reptile

But anyway, he was always trying to get a six pack, and one day he told me that six packs are evolutionary vestiges from reptilian anatomy. I was like, "AND YOU WANT ONE WHY?"

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INTERVIEW: Dan Fishback — singer, songwriter, ex-Philadelphian, ex-reptile

POSTED: Thursday, May 3, 2012, 10:00 AM

Filed Under: Music | Album Philly Bands

Dan Fishback. By (Eric Lippe)

As Penn students, in the early part of the last decade, Dan Fishback and Sara FitzSimmons and friends used to serenade Philly in the perky, quirky duo called Cheese on Bread. These days Dan’s a solo act up in Brooklyn, and while his sound is now a glorious full-on rock thing — check out the catchy, dirty, gutsy, queergeeky The Mammal Years (self-released) — his lyrics are just as earnest and chaotic as ever. “I could kill you when you get like that / all autistic and shit like a comatose whale all beached on reality / bitchin’ like a rat.” I caught up with Dan over email.

City Paper: Back in the day, people would call Cheese on Bread an “anti-folk” band. Do people still use the term? What are your thoughts on it now?

Dan Fishback: I definitely identified with the anti-folk label, because I was so involved in the NYC anti-folk scene. For years, that was my community. All of my friends were songwriters. That was the word people used to describe us, so we used it too. Nowadays, that scene is so much looser, with so many of my closest friends and collaborators living in other cities, so, as the community gets more diffuse, I come to identify less with the label. Still: I like labels.

It’s weird though — when I click the “anti-folk” tag on bandcamp, there are all these bands I’ve never heard of. It’s like, “Oh wait, is anti-folk a GENRE now?” It always felt like more of a scene. The music was always so diverse. Who knows!

CP: Is C.O.B. still an active band? I know you live in Brooklyn, and Sara FitzSimmons is in L.A…?

DF: And Dibs [Dibson T. Hoffweiler] is in Oakland and Daoud [Daoud Tyler-Ameen] is in DC! It was only for our first year that we all lived in the same city. This month marks our 10-year anniversary. We aren’t really “active,” but we try our darnedest to meet up maybe once a year to play shows and write new songs. We have at least an EP’s worth of new songs, and we definitely intend to record one day, but there are no immediate plans. We played an NYC show for the first time in five years this past January, and I think it re-affirmed our commitment to never break up, ever. It’s too perfect.

CP: For a guy who used to do lo-fi bedroom recordings, The Mammal Years is shockingly professional in its production, with a really full sound. You did this in a studio? Who’s your backing band?

DF: My experience of making records has never changed! I sit in the bedroom of a heterosexual male friend, looking over his shoulder while he does stuff with computers. We called the first Cheese On Bread album “faux-fi” instead of “lo-fi,” because it sounded so scrappy, but we did it all on ProTools. A lot of the songs on this record were based on arrangements I did with my old grunge band, The Faggots, which was just a rock version of my solo material. The Faggots had a rotating cast, but was mostly Casey Holford (who produced the album) on bass, Dibs (from Cheese On Bread) on electric guitar, and Luis Illades (from Pansy Division) on drums. They reprised their parts on the album and they sound sickening.

CP: “Mammal” is everything I want from a Dan Fishback song: It’s catchy, it’s weird, it puts weird thoughts into your head, thanks to lines like “I am a Mammal. / Another mammal told me six packs are leftovers from reptiles.” It makes me wonder. Do reptiles have six packs?

DF: I don’t know! A mammal told me that! When I was at Penn, I made this really unlikely best friend — a twinky British club kid named Henry. We were opposite gays — he was very Kylie Minogue, and I was very Moldy Peaches. But we hung out constantly, and he often scolded me about getting my toast crumbs on his plate, because he was on a no-carbs diet. (He taught me about ketosis, and inspired the Cheese On Bread song “Stepping Out of Ketosis.”) But anyway, he was always trying to get a six pack, and one day he told me that six packs are evolutionary vestiges from reptilian anatomy. I was like, “AND YOU WANT ONE WHY?”

CP: You’ve kinda nailed this cute-earnest-dirty thing. You also switch from rock to dance to, like, New Wave. Is this a conscious effort to mix moods and keep people guessing, or it’s just how your mind works?

DF: I rarely ever begin a song with a genre in mind. The song tells me what genre it wants to be, and my musical taste is vast enough that the songs have a lot of outfits to choose from. I’m not, like, the kind of rock kid who started shredding when he was 15, and got really devoted to a minor sub-genre of punk, and is, like, totally obsessed with how his amp sounds. I grew up listening to Tori Amos, Ani Difranco and Bjork, and their ’90s albums really defined my sense of what an album was supposed to be. On records like From the Choirgirl Hotel or Post, every song sounds totally different, and it’s the song itself — lyrics and melody — that takes center stage. Every album was like a mix tape. It’s so much more interesting that way, and I guess it’s how my brain works.

CP: Tell me about “Suck it Back.”

DF: This was a really impulsive song about the kind of person who talks a big talk about radical politics, but is really only interested in radical aesthetics. Someone who listens to a lot of Le Tigre, but has never gone to a protest. I was watching one of these people talk one day, and I had this vision of his words as these physical objects squirting out of his mouth and then getting sucked back into his body — like he was only talking for his own pleasure, with no real desire to communicate or make a difference. It felt auto-erotic, and I wanted to throw up.

CP: You see to have a lot on your mind with The Mammal Years — especially on “Some Boys Are Bullies” and “Make Love.” Are there queer issues you think don’t get talked about enough?

DF: YES. There’s this illusion that mainstream media has a lot of queer images, but really the vast majority of authentic queer experience goes undocumented and uncelebrated. I work a lot in theater, and last year I premiered a performance piece called thirtynothing, exploring the work of gay artists who died of AIDS in the ’80s and early ’90s. There is so much queer culture from that period that most queer people know nothing about, and so much of it is so inspiring and so helpful. Every time a queer boy kills himself, I think, “Fuck, if only someone had given him a book by David Wojnarowicz.”

CP: And then there are songs like “Fuckdudes” that are pretty universal: Dating and dealing with complaining, downbeat, frustrating people.

DF: Ha! That’s actually a song about a friend who was pissing me off. But no one has ever called my music universal before, so thank you, this is a treat!

CP: What else should I know?

DF: My new musical, The Material World, runs this July at Dixon Place in NYC — it’s about a family of socialist Jews in the 1920s who live in a boarding house with Madonna and Britney Spears. I’ve had parallel careers in music and theater for a decade, but this is the first time they’re coming together as a musical. I’m living for it.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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