PropertyOfZack launched Inside during the summer of 2013 with Run For Cover Records. We’re bringing you the first part of the second installment of the series today with Kevin Devine, and it just so happens to line up with the one year anniversary of Kevin’s ambitious and successful Kickstarter drive. What we’re striving to do with Inside is to bring you incredibly in-depth content from your favorite artists, labels, and companies in the music industry with insights and details you would never be able to find in a normal interview or story. It would be hard to explain the importance Kevin Devine has had on the development of PropertyOfZack over the years, and we’re honored to have him as our second Inside feature. Part one features The Untold Story of Kevin Devine from the man himself, and it’s just one of the many interesting and powerful pieces we’ll be bringing you about Kevin over the next month. Enjoy part one, and we hope to see you back next week!

A Brooklyn boy from Staten Island. A lot of musicians use their home as a springboard for the music they create, but you seem to take things a step beyond that within your songs.



It’s funny, because I don’t think that the music I ended up making is specific to New York aesthetically at all. The stuff I make, it could be from the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, or California. It’s just kind of like catch-all rock music with some folk influences. You can see this root, even though they went in totally different directions, with bands like Brand New and Taking Back Sunday. There was a certain thing. Even The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. We didn’t sound like that, but we were evenly playing shows between these rock bands and these emo bands - Miracle Of ’86. We could slide back and forth because we had similar genes as the Long Island band, but we could play with those leather jacket rock bands.



When I think of New York music, depending on which timeframe you’re talking about, it’s Bob Dylan in the early-’60s and Velvet Underground in the late-’60s, all the CBGBs stuff, Talking Heads, and The Ramones, and all that. Then it’s like rap and Sonic Youth in the ‘80s. Then it becomes LCD Soundsystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Strokes. I don’t think what I do, what Miracle did, or what this thing is, is definitive in terms of New York music. But what I think, for me, growing up in Brooklyn and in Staten Island â€” if anything’s in there in my music, it’s from growing up with those hardcore kids in Staten Island. Not a lasting stain, but almost philosophical instead of sonic: the way those kids looked at making music and treating the people that came to see you play. I never played hardcore music, but I played around hardcore kids. Their thing was that there was never any distance between you and the performer. Everyone was on an even playing field.



I was always the kid in bands that were ripping off Nirvana around hardcore bands, but they let us play with them and and their politics got into me. Those politics of performance and how you treat your audience, that stuff is the lasting thing from me growing up in that stuff. Way more than the aesthetic or sonic thing was. That’s a longwinded way of saying that I don’t know if it’s a conscious thing in me of New York, Brooklyn, or Staten Island, but that seems to be almost reflexive at this point. There’s a voice in my head of me being 14 and kids being 17, and that if you treat the crowd like Led Zeppelin treated their crowd, you were an asshole. There was no hero worship. I don’t know if some of that’s specific to the grittiness of being from a place like New York. I didn’t grow up into an art damaged scene in Williamsburg, I grew up in a working class, blue collar, non-ostentatious part â€” boroughs. Those people don’t give a shit about if you’re in a band or not. They want to know if that guy’s a good guy or is an asshole.



Your father was a cop. Your father’s father was a cop. Your mom is an RN. What was it like growing up inside of a house like that? On paper, it feels strict. Also, you’re not a cop. Also, at heart, those hardcore politics are within you.



My mom was born in 1952 and was like 12 when The Beatles played on Ed Sullivan. She was a teenager when Dylan was Dylan, and all of that protest music and those social changes were happening. My dad was a lot older than my mom. He was married once before. My three older brothers and older sister are half siblings from that marriage. My dad’s joke would be that he probably knocked my mom out at a protest with a baton at one point in Central Park. He was like a young cop and she was like a teenage counter-culturalist or whatever.



I heard all of that music from very young. My mom says her first memory of me being attached to music was me listening to “Michael From Mountains” on this Joni Mitchell record. One day, I guess I was like two, and I started singing the song. I remember her listening to Patsy Cline, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles, and all this stuff. Really, up until I was in college, I dismissed all of that music as my mom’s music. It wasn’t until I was a college kid that I bought a tape at Tower Records in Lincoln Center of the The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan at a discount rack, and went to the dorm while I was doing homework and put it on. It was the first time I heard “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and thought it was the best music I ever heard. It was no longer my mom’s music, it was mine.



So that sort of undercuts whatever strictness there was. They were both strict, but they were not rigid. It wasn’t like a military household. They laughed a lot and my dad swore inappropriately. They were like people from Brooklyn, but I’d get in trouble if I did dumb shit or acted up or did bad things in school. They weren’t lenient in that way, but they weren’t militaristic either. I’m gonna be 34 in December, and the more you live, the more you hear about people’s lives. My childhood was far from perfect, and no one’s childhood is perfect, but I wouldn’t trade mine for anyone else’s. I’ve met a lot of people and you hear a lot, and there’s stuff I could tell you about mine that’s sad, fucked up, or challenging, but also, someone said to me once that if you sat in a room with people and you put all your problems on a table, that you would take your problems back. I feel that way about my family for sure.



There are photos from a promotion party at maybe One Police Plaza for my dad that might have been when he made sergeant. I’m like three and wearing his hat. I thought it was very cool that my dad was part of this tradition. I don’t have some deep-rooted anti-cop mentality, but I also don’t have misapprehensions about what it is that certain cops are. It’s a weird dichotomy that lives in me. I’m very proud of that kind of parochialism that is Irish Cop/Brooklyn/Catholic, but I don’t subscribe to a lot of that stuff for myself. When I started to meet hardcore kids and punk rock kids and saw that Kurt Cobain had a sticker on his guitar that said, “Vandalism Beautiful As a Rock in a Cop’s Face.” I remember seeing that and wondering why someone would say that. I was 12, I had never thought of anything like that. And then you start to look into it or talk to people and meet these radicalized hardcore kids. Being 13 when the Rodney King riots happened and realizing that there were a lot of really bad cops. But there’s a lot of really bad everything. The difference between the bad guy who runs a convenience store and the bad cop is that they give the cop a gun and tell them to go police the area. In some respects, I think that the police force is a really brilliant way to keep people in the power to keep the working class divided from another. You basically take two people who have the same life experience, but you give one a gun and a badge and you tell him that he’s better than the other and that it’s his job to keep track of the other guy’s behavior. That’s a brilliant way to keep people from getting outside race and other things, and just, we’re the same. I’m sure if I told that to some members of my family that they’d ask what the fuck is wrong with me, but it was never a serious consideration to me to follow in that. I just knew it wasn’t for me. But I like that that’s part of my family story.



What was it like discovering this new music that wasn’t your mothers music and also probably hard for you to understand because it was highly political and you were so young, and then discovering your own music at a similar time?



I sang in the chorus in public school in fourth or fifth grade. We moved to Staten Island when I was in sixth grade. We moved in the middle of the school year. For the first three months, I was in public school in Brooklyn. I could take art, chorus, or guitar. I took guitar. It was like a room of 50 people and they had these cheap-nylon string guitars. I think we learned “Feliz Navidad” and “Love Me Tender” by Elvis, too. I remember sitting in the class and learning these songs. I was starting to fiddle with guitars as early as that. We moved right before my 11th birthday, like two weeks before. My birthday is right before Christmas, and I got a Gremlin electric guitar and a tiny little amp from my dad for Christmas.



I was into Guns N’ Roses and all that LA cock rock and stuff like that. I thought that those guys were cool and that that was rock music. I still liked Guns N’ Roses until I was a freshman in high school. Punk and grunge didn’t kill all that. They killed most bands, but Guns N’ Roses was so deep for me that it stuck with me for a couple of years when I knew better. I think that Nirvana was the first thing that I looked at that just feltâ€¦I don’t know how to intellectualize what it was like. I remember seeing their video on MTV and just thinkingâ€¦I wanted to see it again right now. As soon as it finished I wanted them to play it again right away. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I thought they were so cool, but that they actually looked like they could just be people. They just didn’t look like Guns N’ Roses looked. They certainly didn’t look like Michael Jackson looked. They just looked misfit. That was powerful. It’s later, when you have a more critical apparatus and more room to dissect things, that you realized if you took away the clothes from Kurt Cobain, he was a very traditionally attractive guy. It was not hard for people to be magnetized to him. He had a certain star quality, but was talking about issues like class, race, sexism, and homophobia. They weren’t an overtly political band because he wanted to be famous and he was smart. He was such a confused person that he wanted to be the most famous guy in the room, but he also wanted to be a guy in Fugazi. Unfortunately, those two things within him, getting everything you think you want with the keys to the kingdom, being a drug addict, and being in a relationship with a really unhealthy person while you’re a really unhealthy person, he just built every wall around any option in that situation where he could have gotten out.



To the question, Nirvana was the first thing that I thought, “I could do that.” Guns N’ Roses, I couldn’t play that guitar solo, but with Nirvana, I thought I could do that. It was a magic trick because then you learn later how sophisticated their music is. It’s so simple, but it’s not easy to write Nevermind. If it was easy, I would do it.



Most people see you from a Long Island scene coupled with Brand New. If you dig back, there’s Miracle and earlier solo stuff from the Staten Island hardcore scene. What was your original entry into that?



I had a band called Delusion. I was a freshman in high school and me, my friend Joey Martin, and a guitar player named Jimmy. Jimmy ended up being the Junior Chair or the Chair of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. He was very good. In seventh grade, he could play Metallica and Guns N’ Roses, and we just knew he was really good. I could play “Come As You Are” and he could play Slash’s guitar solo. We had no bass player and we played at the Super Dance at Farrell. We played two original songs, we played a Stone Temple Pilots song, and three Nirvana songs. After the show, this kid that was a junior, came up to me and looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo and was clearly stoned. He might have been the first person I ever met that was stoned - his name was Chris McAllen. He said that we were cool and that he’d play bass for me. He told me his homeroom and to meet him there on Monday. He was older and knew Fugazi, Minor Threat, and punk rock music. Jimmy never came back. He didn’t want to play the music we liked. Chris came in and he had a big Rickenbacker bass that didn’t work. I had never seen someone do this before, but he took the backplate off of his bass with a screwdriver and started soldering it right there. It was like, “Whoa, who the fuck is this kid.”



We got a gig at this place called The Rock Palace in Staten Island. It was May of 1994. I was 14. It was us and all of these older bands. We made flyers and we handed them out in school and the local music store. We played that show; five of them were original, and four of them were Nirvana covers. It was a month after Kurt Cobain killed himself. I was 14 and didn’t know anything. That was the first time I met hardcore kids. They were standing there with their arms crossed, shaking their heads. That’s literally true. To think of that now and being 14 at a club like that. I think my dad drove us to the show. I was so nervous. After the show, this kid John from a band called Pseudo Hoodlum that was a rap-metal thing before Limp Bizkit. It was when Rage Against The Machine was just happening in 1994. This was fucking 20 years ago. This kid came up to me and told me that we shouldn’t do stuff like that, and that it wasn’t cool to play four Nirvana covers at a show. And I was like, “Fuck you, Nirvana’s awesome.” But I also wanted to know the rules. That was my introduction.



I went to college in September of 1997. Between May of 1994 and August of 1997, we probably played 35 or 40 shows on Staten Island. We opened for touring bands and the cool bands from Staten Island. It’s a footnote, but Staten Island was a real scene. There would be hundreds of kids at shows on Staten Island. There was this guy Freedom Trapodie who had a label called Struggle Records. He was vegan and socialist and straight-edge. He ran a place called The Joint and would rent it and put on shows. It was very much a DC model. It was super political and was the first place that I ever heard anyone talk about animal rights, Malcolm X, or Karl Marx. For someone like me, it was explosive. Nirvana hinted at all of those things, but they’d make fun of them too. This was so far past that. It was really radical. That stuff is still in me today. On a really simple level, a basic distrust of left/right-dialectic in America defined by the mainstream political dialogue absolutely came from those merch tables. It’s hopefully become more sophisticated 20 years later, but yeah.



Young, not fully educated, and open to suggestion - there must have been a lot of that in that scene. You, however, all these years later, come across as very calm, decisive, and intelligent. Sure it’s 20 years later, but I’m sure there’s still someone from that first show that is very radical. What do you think centered you?



I feel like there’s a couple of ways to get to that question. One thing is, there’s a part of me that thinks I’m not radical enough. That I’m actually worse than someone who is politically ignorant because I have been exposed to all of these things, but I haven’t fully gotten into some extreme way of living. I think it’s been really torturous for some women that I’ve been in relationships with because I’ve had these bouts of “we don’t do enough” for picking the cause. It’s this really vague thing. What I’ve come to realize as I’ve gotten older is that there’s an invisible council in my head. If I am not taking care of myself, no matter what I’m doing, that voice will pop up in my head, even if I’m reading a book, and will say, “Why are you reading that book? It’s the wrong book. You should be reading that book. That book is the real shit. Someone who’s really committed to should be reading that book. An intellectual person wouldn’t be reading this, they’d be reading that.” Apply whatever you want to it, like watching a fucking television show. “You’re watching television? If you were really into fucking making the world a better place you’d throw your television out the fucking window.”



That council, when I listened to it more in my late-teens and early-20s, it made me an itchy-skinned type of person. That’s not real. It’s an arbitrary voice that no matter what I’m doing is looking for a way to try to beat me up because, I don’t know why. I think everyone has some version of it, but I know one wants me alone and making bad decisions. That’s one way into that question, which is that if I am in any way a more centered person now, it’s from a lot of trial and error. I have friends that would probably say that this is either a cop-out or a really good personal philosophy on a macro level, but I have no control over anything beyond what I say and I do. I could have a lot of ideas, passions, or thoughts about what the world should be or what’s right or wrong, and I do. Because I am a person. But the difference between me today and six or ten years ago is that I don’t believe that me having those ideas means that I get to dictate anything about anything else in all of existence besides what I said out loud and what I do. I don’t even have control over what I think because I think certain things sometimes that are crazy. The second thought is, “What are you talking about?” But the first thought is, “Go do that thing.” But if I went and did that thing it’d be super self-destructive. So, if by extrapolation, I don’t have any control over what I think, then how the fuck am I supposed to dictate how the world should be run or how you should eat or not eat.



As a musician, I would imagine that’s difficult, since it’s your job to speak or sing in that kind of way. People latch onto that, just like you did when you were younger. You have political songs, but those are political statements for you, not your fans. You also have songs that are just about just being a human being. How do you take that inner struggle, but also at the same time, it’s your job to put down and sing about what you’re thinking.



I just try to represent what that thought process is like without worrying about it. If what I’m supposed to be responsible for is representing what my experience of being a person is like, then if that changes every record, every couple of songs, or within the same song, then I’ve done what i’m supposed to do. I think my responsibilityâ€¦I think there are several. One is to be honest about my experience, but also to do it in a way that is aesthetically interesting. A lot of my songs play with real and not real. There’s stuff that’s very literal and real in the sense that it happened to be, and then there’s stuff that’s extrapolated from a thought, or something that sort of happened, but that could have gone in a different way. It’s not all a diary or a journal. I don’t think it’s necessarily my job at all to lead anybody to any conclusions. Everyone’s got an ego, and I have one for sure, but my ego doesn’t tell me that I need to tell people anything about their experiences at all. I think that if anyone connects with my music it’s because it’s honest and about figuring out your own path. I think I suspect that that’s what most people’s lives are like. If there’s anything I do that’s nominally different from other people, it’s not being afraid to tell you that I don’t know. It would be a lie to project an imagine of certainty about a life that I think is actually really about figuring out absolutely everything as you’re going through it. If I knew how to project into the future like ten years and build a path based on itâ€¦I don’t think that’s real. I think everybody’s figuring it out as they go, and most of my songs are about that. As long as I’m honest about that, I don’t worry about whether I’m doing my job to anyone else’s satisfaction or not.



The names Bubblegum and Bulldozer seem accidentally swapped at first, but then after a few listens it actually makes sense. You’ve said that you sort of like the “B” letter in each name as well.



I went through a process of each record trying to find the right name after they had been recorded. I didn’t have any idea while we were making them. Every record I’ve ever made, I’ve named after we recorded it. Every Famous Last Word was the title track for that Miracle record, but every record of mine had either been a phrase of lyrics or a composite of a few songs or an idea. Put Your Ghost To Rest was called that because that period of my life was super transitional and that record was an attempt to make sense of that period of time so I could tie it up in a bow and move past it. Brother’s Blood, it was very apparent that that song to me was just a monumental song. I didn’t know what others would think of it, but it was a culmination of a whole bunch of themes in my writing and stylistically. We just had to call it that. Something about Between The Concrete And Clouds, that song and those words said a lot about the themes all over that record. The art for that recordâ€¦I wanted to use this black and white photograph of this woman that is hanging, almost like Christ, in a night shirt on a ledge of a doorway. But we couldn’t use it. The other imagine we used that Rubin gave us of the odd figure that was just creepy and mysterious, and I think that record was inscrutable for a lot of people. And for Circle Gets The Square there was a song called that that didn’t make it on the record.



These records, I sent Rob and Jesse and the band all these titles, and we’d just sit there and go through them. Bulldozer was initially going to be called Litter In The Fountain Of Youth, and Rob was like, “I know why you want to call it that, but I think it’s too much and that the record is subtler than that.” He was right, but I couldn’t find it. “Little Bulldozer” is kind of a linchpin song on that record to me, so it was cool to just call it that. It kind of represents how the record was made. I’d play Rob a bunch of songs, and then every day for a month, we’d stay up until two in the morning making this record and then go home. It felt appropriate as a title for it. With Bubblegum, it felt perverse. The cover image combined with that name combined with the content of the record. As weird and wild as some of that album is, it’s super traditional in it’s structure. It’s the most verse-chorus-verse-out songwriting I’ve ever done in my career. It’s a catchy record that’s filtered through my Pixies/Nirvana record. That’s why Nirvana Unplugged was the magic trick. My mom thought it was great. She didn’t understand why he had to yell and repeat the same lyric over and over again, and then she saw Unplugged and thought he was like John Lennon. I also like the consonance of it and the two “B’s.” I also like fucking with what something is supposed to be. I think Bubblegum is a more immediate record and that Bulldozer will take a little more time. I’m too close to it, but there are days where I was worried Bulldozer, by our core fan base of younger people that got into us through Brand New, would get treated like the kid brother. But I had to be careful to not over-advocate for its merits, because both of them are mine. I’m ultimately in a place now where I think Bulldozer has a real lot of subtle pleasures to it. All I can is try to find both of them an audience.



There was a brief period of your life that was spent on a major label - Capitol. Those were the years where a lot of bands from “the scene” signed to majors and actually got on the radio like Taking Back Sunday and Yellowcard. Your experience wasn’t like that at all.



One thing that’s important to say during that period of time â€” Make The Clocks Move was made and when it came out, I was still working a job and had graduated from school and had done some touring. I wasn’t a heavy-hitting touring musician at all. Miracle had done one partial US tour and South By Southwest and stuff like that. I made those records for Fred at Triple Crown. In combination with the amount I was drinking and stuff like that, I was totally oblivious to the fact that Triple Crown was a sort of real label. I was 100 percent entirely oblivious that during the period of time I was getting ready to and making that record that Triple Crown was exploding because Deja had just been made. I had no idea how popular Brand New were. I was like not into that world at all. I came into stuff more through indie rock. My experience with emo music, the stuff that was called that, was earlier stuff, like Sunny Day, Mineral, Promise Ring, and a little bit of The Get Up Kids.



Right around there was when I saw and heard Elliott Smith and totally got into that other trajectory. I came from the indie rock side and got into emo. Miracle’s bassist called our first record a period piece because we wrote the record after listening to that kind of music. Then we got into other music. The last Miracle record doesn’t really sound like those bands, its more like Superchunk and The Replacements. I was oblivious, made this record for Fred. My dad died, I lose my job and go on unemployment, and Make The Clocks Move comes out. I was totally disconnected; I was going through life, but not really paying attention. That record got written about in the New York Times Sunday Art Section, in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and shit that was totally not, just not what I thought was happening.



This guy Frank Reilly, who books Wilco and all these amazing bands, writes me and wanted to book me. The woman who was doing press for the record sent him Make The Clocks Move. This is the really story. He had a stack of things on his desk, including that CD, and it fell. So he decided to put that on, heard “Ballgame,” and he wanted to book me sight unseen. This was like 2004. I’m on an emo label, but I’m being written about in these prestigious mainstream places. There was no way to bridge it. When I’d play in New York I wasn’t playing with those bands, I was playing with this band Lambchop, the guys from Husker DÃ¼, and others. It was a totally different thing. I was playing this way and getting written about this way, but the label I was on was not there. And that’s no fault to Fred; Fred is my favorite person. There was just no way to do it and I didn’t have an audience. I would have played in front of three people in non-major cities, and in major cities it would have been 20 people. This is a lot of prologue, but the story doesn’t often get told.



We make Split The Country, and now, because in my head people liked Make The Clocks Move nominally, I had expectations. I’m like, “Oh, this record is going to really do something.” I had done shows with Bright Eyes and Cursive and all these people wrote about it. We made that record in a studio and got a little bit of money to make it. Clocks was $2,500 and I think Split The Country was $7,500, and we could rent a studio and not do it in Chris’ basement because of that. We made that record and sent it out to press, and for a bunch of reasons, certain people were having their own struggles with drugs and alcohol, and those are not my stories to tell, and didn’t show up for the job. We ended up in a position where that record got made and nobody wrote about that album. Split The Country came out to total silence. Shit. I thought that was it because I couldn’t get on significant tours. I had done a tour with The Rocket Summer, and no disrespect to Bryce, but it was far from what I thought we were. We did a week with Brand New and Piebald and that’s when I found out that they were enormous. There’s a story where Jesse said to me after the first show that he wanted to come out and play “Wolf’s Mouth” with me. I went out and played in front of 2,200 kids and I’m telling you, if 100 people were paying attentionâ€¦The crowd was louder with me. I start playing “Wolf’s Mouth” and my eyes were closed and the place erupts. I was like, “Oh, I got them. This was the tune they were waiting for.” Then I heard this other voice singing and I realized this dude was like a famous person to these people. We’re getting close to the question.



CMJ comes in 2004 at 7th and C at this place called the Alphabet Lounge. There were 50 people in room. My memory of the show is that it was a good show and I performed well. I left the show, went to a bar, and did drugs. Just what I was doing at the time most nights. The next day I woke up and had to go to the Javits Center to get credentials. This guy is walking out and stops me and asked if I was Kevin. I was really hungover, but he told me he saw me play last night and that his name was Dan McCarol. He wrote his phone number on the cover of The Village Voice and told me not to forget to call him. I tell Mathiason that this guy gave me his phone number and John said he was a big deal â€” a big publishing guy at EMI and a talent guy at Capitol Records â€” and that I had to call him. On the street, he said that I was the best act he saw at CMJ. He came to SXSW. That, I played in the daytime at Hotel Cafe and don’t remember at all because I played accompanied by alcohol and prescription medicine that I was not prescribed from somebody’s medicine cabinet in Austin. I was hanging out with some girl, and Dan McCarol was there, and he said that he wanted to fly me out to California to play for people at Capitol. Again, I never thought any of it was real, and I also didn’t fucking care about anything in my life that was happening at all.



He flies me out April of 2005 and I was in a room with six people including me, Ron an A&R guy that Spoon wrote a song about him being the prototypical asshole A&R guy, Andy Slater who was running Capitol, McCarol, and some others. I sit in the room and I played him “No Time Flat,” “Yr Damned Old Dad,” and “Ballgame,” or something. I played him three songs that had like no chorus, had swearing, and were political. I realized in the middle of the meeting that he was selling us. I looked at John and instantly realized we were going to get offered a record deal after a record that was about to come out stillborn on Fred’s label. We had all these pieces in place that never lined up, and now we were being offered a contract. They were soliciting us, which lead to me doing another audition for this guy Perry at Warner and was very weird. Once one of them hears there’s an artist someone wants to sign, they all come in. I played for him, and I remember him very vividly saying to me, “Yeah, I quite like it, but Muse, that guy is cursed because people think he sounds like Thom Yorke. Do you ever get that with Conor Oberst?” I could tell it wasn’t going very well. I then got offered a deal from Capitol and that’s how it all started. All that pretext was long.



Your team didn’t have to end up being this huge corporation of a major label, Razor & Tie, or anyone else. It ended up being you and those people like John and Fred that have been there all along. What about the team that we don’t hear too much about?



John’s cousin was my ex-girlfriend’s best friend’s friend. That friend asked me to see Westin at Brownies because his cousin managed them. We went. You’ll notice a theme in stories from 1998 to 2005; I’m drunk. I got up and was yelling at the band at Brownies to play their old shit. Mathiason walked up to Dustin and was like, “Who the fuck is that, I’m going to kill him.” Dustin told John that I was really good and to check out my band. So he ended up managing Miracle, and then me as well.



It’s sort of impossible for me to think about having a career without having John. It’s also really difficult for me to talk about it in an objective way, because including the person I married and all of my family, I’ve probably talked to John more in the last years then any other single person on earth. Antony now, his partner, is part of the picture too. And I’ve known Antony as long as John, but had never worked with him. He used to be an A&R guy for Rick Rubin, and wrote me an email one day that said Rick Rubin really liked Circle Gets The Square and that I should fly out. I was a people pleasing idiot and sent that email to Miracle and said I should go and play Rubin the Miracle stuff. Our old drummer, Skinner, told me I had to go, and that if I didn’t, I was an idiot. The other two guys in the band thought it was fucked up if I went, so I didn’t go. Years later, recently someone was like, “Of course you didn’t go. You didn’t meet the most famous producer of all time because someone might be annoyed with you.” That’s where my head was then.



But anyways, John and Antony are not a big management company that can call up David Letterman and be like, “If you take Kevin we’ll give you the Foo Fighters next time.” That is something that is true and deserves to be said. It’s not like working with those guys open those doors for me, but what I can say, is that over the course of a career, John was involved in me getting a major record deal, two publishing deals, another independent record deal, and more. Big ideas that have come up for band structuring, how to react to Capitol and put the shields up and borough through to daylight and building a career with the money they gave us. Subtle things, too. I don’t know what a manager does, but what I know is that when we put this tour together, my brain works certain ways and doesn’t work in other ways. I didn’t know who to open this tour, and John was like, “Who was that band you listened to exclusively during the making of Bulldozer?” It was Now, Now. Let’s ask Now, Now! That’s the kind of shit that John does all the time that doesn’t show up in the box score, but I suspect that if John disappeared tomorrow that in 18 months, I’d ask where my head was. Whatever things I have like an artist deal with Gibson guitars, I didn’t make that happen - John did. In this new phase of our career, John and Antony are sitting in their garage putting together 1,500 Kickstarter orders. A big management company isn’t going to do that shit.



John and Chris Bracco know more about my career than I do. That’s not a cool interview soundbite, that’s literally true. And Fred, Fred was great to be on a label with, but the timing was off. To have him involved with him helping me get this thing off the ground today and helping soften the learning curve has been great. The other one is Ellis. Alyssa is helping us to press for this, but the team is really like John, Antony, Alyssa, and Ellis. We hired some people for radio that have known us since 2006, but Ellis isâ€¦



The Frank Reilly thing ultimately didn’t work. We had an unfortunate ending that to this day I don’t understand. I talked to him about what I thought the problems were, and we had a good conversation and thought we were really getting ready to get into the trenches for Brother’s Blood to build something. The conversation ended in a really amicable way, and then something happened to him in the intervening week that soured his perception of the conversation and that was the end of him booking us. Ellis had a series of no-bullshit conversations with me about what he thought about me and my career. Being on a major label, they still can enable you to jump on the food chain to grow more quickly, but how I feel now is that the victories are earned. For us, doing a tour where basically every show has been between 200 and 300 people in places before where it was between 700 and 125 people. It’s growth that feels real. I may pay for Ellis’ electrical bill, but I don’t keep the doors open for him. There’s a personal investment for the people I work with now. The day I heard Ellis say that, “The way I see your career is that every time you go out it’s a little better than the time before, then it’s working.” If he got it, we’re fucking gold. He’s going to book a tour sometime this year that brings out 5,000 people a night, but for him to feel that investment in me about a crowd jump in Orlando from the last tour to this one, I’m likeâ€¦We’ve got a thing here. I get to have a different career from almost anybody I know in the music industry.



The interview we did with John was great. Directly from him, “Kevin’s curse is that he’s too emo for the indie world and too indie for the emo world.” That’s also your biggest blessing.



It allows me to not be totally affiliated with any scene, which is also harder for growth. It’s probably more lasting though, the growth that you get to have since it’s not tied to a trend.



For many artists, it would be hard to not have a home in a certain niche or scene. You seem comfortable with that, ego-wise.



Everyone has one. My ego is weirder. I have friends that want to be the biggest band in the world, but my thing was worse. I thought someday someone was going to be like, “He was better than all those guys, why didn’t he get really big?” That’s being dead-ass honest. That’s the most egotistical thing I’ve ever thought. That I was doing really interesting music, but I didn’t get why people could connect with it and love it, but why it wasn’t percolating. That’s the most egotistical thing I’ve ever thought.



At a certain point, you realize that there’s so much music and that there are so many bands and artists, that if anyone chooses to spend their time and money on you and you want to worry instead about what other music that they listen to or who else they think you sound like or some journalist uses the word emo. I’ve had emo kids call me a hipster. I’ve had the hip people, very dismissively, call me emo.



You weren’t totally coming from The Get Up Kids side. You were coming from Nirvana or Dylan. Me, personally, I’m a big Get Up Kids and Brand New fan. That’s how I got into you. Emily, next to me, she loves Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and comes to you from that side, which is very different from me. It’s interesting to me because from a music side, you have two jarring scenes of fans.



There are times on each record cycle or release where I can get momentarily frustrated by that stuff. It doesn’t seem super hard to challenging to me for all of it to live in the same space. I don’t even feel like I make music that is challenging or abstract. They’re just songs. I had a talk with Matthew from Nada Surf that, sometimes, if you have a high voice and sing about how you feel, you’re emo. That’s it.



I’ve never made music, maybe with the exception of some of the songs on the first Miracle record, that has ever sounded like a Taking Back Sunday record. If I’m going to be completely transparent, I thought I fit more, in the early 2000s, with Saddle Creek stuff. All those kids and all those Long Island kids and me listened to some of the same music, but I always felt like Cursive and Brand New aren’t that different, but they’re really different. Cursive came in from the indie side and Brand Newâ€¦it’s so interesting to me about their band, I can’t tell you how many cool/hip people I’ve told that are my age about Brand New and they go, “Oh, that band?” I had a guy from a prominent indie rock band that I won’t name say to me once a show that I opened for them say to me, “What’s it like to play with these bands? We’ve been asked to play with these bands. What’s that like?” What’s it like? Their fans pay attention, the band treats us great, and they’re really fucking good.



The point of all that is, I think it’s enabled me to make Bubblegum and Bulldozer at the same time. It sounds like Kevin. What’s so cool is that you can listen to both and both of them make sense. Ellis said to me that maybe when I’m 75 I’ll be able to play Hammerstein Ballroom, and like, fuck you, but I know what he means. If I’m able to keep doing thatâ€¦maybe this is a nice button for it.



Chris Carrabba said to me in 2011 at a Dashboard Confessional show in LA, “It must feel awesome to know that even though you had a slower start getting out of the gate that every year you are more and more relevant.” I thought, from Chris, who is a super successful and a smart student of things, was a really thoughtful thing to say and hear from him. A lot of things, on both sides of me, emo and indie rock, grew a lot faster than I did, but they also changed for them. I’m sort of just still doing my thing. There was a thing in a Chicago publication when we played Lollapalooza for the first time that categorized every band on the bill. It was like “Money-grabbing reunion bands” and “Mid-label acts forced to play the early slot.” At the end of it was, “Kevin Devine, Kevin Devine.” They were making fun, but that was cool because there was nothing to compare it to.