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In a Sunny Daze with The Donkeys

Make 'Ride the Black Wave' your summer record.

Even if the word didn't come up within the first 90 seconds of their new album, you could probably guess that The Donkeys are from California. The San Diego band's jangly guitars, casually friendly vocal harmonies, and gently psychadelic synths—not to mention a goddamn sitar—are basically sunny music incarnate, nodding to coastal forbears like The Doors and Neil Young, as well as the dreamier reaches of early 90s indie rock. If jammy East Coast bands like Real Estate and Woods lived by the San Diego shore instead of the one in Jersey, this is what they might sound like.

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Conversely, if The Donkeys lived on the East Coast, their brand of chill might have a little bit bigger foothold among indie rock audiences. Although they've toured with The Hold Steady and Magnolia Electric Company, as well as provided the music for fictional 70s psych rock band Geronimo Jackson on the TV show Lost, The Donkeys are about where they were three years ago, when their last album Born With Stripes, came out, although a bunch of them got married in the meantime. That doesn't mean the time's gone to waste; rather, the band has written a bunch of music that tussles with and embraces the idea of stasis for their new album. It's really good.

Ride The Black Wave, which came out June 3 on Easy Sound Recording, is pretty much an invitation to sit out in the sun and feel a little stoned, to contemplate where you are in life but never ultimately end up too troubled by it. It's a perfect summer album, for those days when the warm weather seems like it will stretch out forever, to a point that's almost unsettling. You should make it your summer album, too. I walked around listening to it yesterday evening, when it was a perfect 72 degrees and everything was glowing with the pre-sunset light: I instantly felt more relaxed.

A couple weeks ago, when the weather was more or less exactly the same in San Diego as it is now, I gave rhythm guitarist/bassist (although pretty much everyone in the band plays everything at one point or another) Tim DeNardo a call to talk about making it for ten years as a band, growing older, and why drinking can't be your only form of musical inspiration. The Donkeys kick off their summer tour in earnest next week, and you can find the dates, along with our conversation, below:

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You guys have been around now as a band for about ten years now. How would you say that things have changed over that period of time?
I was just realizing for myself that we had been together for ten years this year, and that came as a surprise to a certain extent. It's just funny how it's worked, and from the beginning it's been the kind of thing where we've been doing it because it makes sense. Like, opportunities just kind of kept arising, so we just kind of kept jumping at it. I'd think the main thing that's changed from then to now is that we're not quite as much of a getting wasted and make music [type of band]. It's a little more deliberate than that. Which I think is good, in a lot of ways. I don't know if you can really sustain that for ten years, just like getting wasted as your main form of inspiration. But yeah, it still feels the same in a lot of regards. It started off as just friends who love and make music, and that still holds pretty strong to the core of it.

How has your songwriting process changed? Did you come into the new album with a different mindset than you have in the past?
Yeah, I think it in the beginning it was more jam-based. We'd get together and start playing riffs and stuff and then go “what about that worked?” and then transition into songs and things. I think as time's gone on we've all kind of stepped up as songwriters individually. There'll be more of, like, Sam has an idea for a song, so he'll bring a kind of more visualized idea, and we'll work on that from there. So I think in some degrees we've individually grown as songwriters, but there's still collabing in that to create cohesion. It still sounds like the same band, but there may be a little more deliberate, individual effort.

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How do you feel like you guys fit into the San Diego music scene in general? What is that scene like?
It's weird. It feels at times a little disjointed. There have been times where I feel like we exist in a different world than a lot of it. But lately there's been a lot of cool bands coming up in it. It's old friends making new music now or new friends that are in epic bands. I feel there's this decent music scene. San Diego isn't always the strongest music support city, I've noticed. A lot of bands touring nationally will skip San Diego, or some bands will come to San Diego that I feel should have a much better following than they do when they finally do show up. The town in and of itself is not like, say, Austin, where people just love live music. It's not a thriving community. But the bands here, they're cool. There are a lot of good [bands]. It's a nice scene. I just wish the city would pull around it a little bit stronger.

Is there ever a temptation to move to LA? It seems like there is more opportunity there for musicians, but I also imagine you guys are pretty settled where you are at this point.
We're pretty settled for sure. There's been talk in the past about moving to LA or San Francisco or a place like that where there's more happening. It's a weird industry in that a lot of the money bands make comes from live performances anyway. Touring is where it all happens, so if you can generate a strong touring community it doesn't really matter where you land when you're done. It's always been tempting because history shows that LA has this weird promise, whether it's realistic or not.

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What do you think are the themes or ideas that hold the songs on Ride the Black Wave together?
I think there's definitely a specific kind of musical quality, just kind of jumping off of the Born With Stripes record. I feel like a lot of the lyrics in the record kind of have this malaise to it, or just like this sense of [you're] not sure where you need to be or where you're at is where you want to be. [There's] this uncertainty with everything while at the same time having this sunny [environment]. The “Sunny Daze” song, the one that we start the record with, kind of ties together the mood I'm thinking about. Having that [sense of] content and not being sure if that content is a good or bad thing. That's like the vibe or the energy of the record to me.

You guys are in your early 30s. Are there certain things that you're realizing as you get a little bit older that kind of feed into those themes?
Totally. I feel like there's definitely some of that. I think when we're all younger, we have this idea of what's going to happen when we reach certain landmarks in our life. And then as you reach those landmarks, you kind of realize “oh, this is the same as five years ago.” Nothing's really changed, necessarily, just your mindset starts shifting. I also feel to a certain extent that San Diego, and what it is, Southern California has a lot to do with that kind of energy. I'm looking outside right now, it's probably 73 degrees, sunny. Same as it was yesterday, same as it was last month. There's this quality about living in a place that's just perpetually temperate and beautiful and nice. It just kind of adds to this unrest, or like procrastination. Like, this is beautiful, yes, but there's got to be more to it. Or does there have to be more to it? Getting older and pursuing these artistic endeavors and not necessarily having a traditional set career plan that the world tells you you need to have—it's a lot of those questions that [come with] this age and this place.

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Do you feel a stigma to the career path of being a musician?
It's weird. I just have kind of weird hangups about what the right career path is. I try not to define myself by what I do to make a living. I think in a lot of ways just having an aspect of expression if that's the way you're geared is really important to do for those reasons. You could arguably say that my career path is in the service industry, as that's how I've made the majority of my money my whole life. But I would consider a musician before I would consider myself a waiter. There's a validation to it. I'm not just a waiter, I'm also a musician. But then again I love being a waiter. It's funny. I can see how people could manage to look down on it, like “oh that must be nice just to be able to fuck off all the time and play music.” But that's not the reality.

I'll be taking time off work to go on tour, and they'll be like “oh, that sounds like so much fun. I wish I could do that.” It's like, yeah, it's cool. I'm not going to say it isn't. But at the same time, it's a lot of fucking work. It isn't the most glamorous lifestyle. I think when you're pursuing something you're passionate about, people will look down their nose at it like “it must be nice to have that luxury.” I see it as a luxury, yes, but I also see it as valid expression and a lot of hard work.

What's the story with your label, Easy Sound?
It was kind of random. We had turned in our last record, the record that's coming out right now. We were with Dead Oceans beforehand. We were kind of waiting to hear back from them. You know, classic record contract: They signed the first one and then give you a couple options so they can back out of it if they want to. We'd just kind of been waiting to hear back from them, and in the meantime, we'd gotten an email from the main A&R guy from Easy, and he was saying like “I know you guys are doing this with them, but we just want to let you know you have fans at Vanguard.” He works at Vanguard also. They're all part of the same umbrella.

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Dead Oceans passed on the record, and so it was like, this is weird that he had sent us that at that time. So we contacted them, and we pitched them the record, but when all was said and done, they couldn't figure out a way to sell John Fogerty records and The Donkeys album at the same time, so it wasn't really going to work with their release schedule. But Steven was interested all the same. We had mentioned and he had noticed that a lot of other bands that were friends of ours and kind of in the same California scene were also kind of labelless. So he had the idea of putting together a new label with the help of Vanguard and just to kind of take up these bands that were no longer represented: Papercuts, Vetiver, Eric Johnson from the Fruit Bats, Rodrigo Amarante from Little Joy and Digital Candle and Belle & Sebastian. Which is really cool because he's more a fan of the label, and he's just like doing this with the intention of putting out music that he loves, as opposed to as a business endeavor, which I think can sometimes get lost in a label scene. I'm sure that there's business involved. It would be ignorant to believe otherwise. But it just has a nice, small label vibe with major label ability.

That's nice to be alongside likeminded bands, too.
Yeah, we've been friends with a lot of those people for a while now, so it kind of just like automatically feels like home. It just makes sense to us. And yeah, we've been waiting to put this album out for a couple years now, so we're just stoked to have it out and be touring the country again. We put it off because people were getting married.

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Who in the band is married?
Pretty much everyone in the band but me, as of this last year and a half. They just all went for it. So I'm just the single, dating guy, while the rest of them are all walking around doing things as a unit.

Does that change the dynamic of the band at all, for them to be married?
Not necessarily. It's unfair to think that it didn't, but at the same time, I think our intentions are the same. It's just a matter of executing them differently. We have to make a little more space.

We had intentions of going to Europe with the Born With Stripes record, but that fell through, so it would be nice to do that, to get some momentum going again and strike while the iron is hot… We had intention to, and we had it all kind of lined up, and some things changed, that we kind of put the brakes on that for a minute. We have plenty of friends that we know we could do a mutual thing with over there, it's just kind of a matter of setting aside the time and doing it. Which I think is where the wives will play a role. Our lives are getting more serious. We're not just a bunch of young kids getting wasted who can leave town for a few months as easily as we could before.

The Donkeys summer tour dates:

06/28 - Los Angeles, CA - Viper Room
07/02 - Tempe, AZ - Yucca Tap Room
07/03 - Albuquerque, NM - Low Spirits
07/05 - Norman, OK - Opolis
07/06 - Dallas, TX - Three Links
07/07 - Austin, TX - The Mohawk
07/08 - Houston, TX - Mango's
07/09 - Baton Rouge, LA - Mud And Water
07/10 - Birmingham, AL - Parkside
07/11 - Athens, GA - The World Famous
07/12 - Knoxville, TN - Pilot Light
07/13 - Chapel Hill, NC - Local 506
07/14 - Baltimore, MD - Ottobar upstairs (early show)
07/15 - Philadelphia, PA - Boot & Saddle
07/16 - Brooklyn, NY - The Knitting Factory
07/17 - Pittsburgh, PA - Smiling Moose
07/18 - Cleveland, OH - Beachland
07/19 - Chicago, IL - The Hideout
07/20 - Kansas City, MO - The recordBar
07/21 - Denver, CO - Hi-Dive
07/22 - Salt Lake City - Urban Lounge
07/23 - Boise, ID - Neurolux
07/24 - Portland, OR - Mississippi Studios
07/28 - Bellingham, WA - The Shakedown
07/29 - Seattle, WA - The Sunset Tavern
07/30 - Eugene, OR - Cozmic Pizza
08/1-3 - Happy Valley, OR - Pickathon

Kyle Kramer is probably wearing sunglasses and drinking a Pacífico right now. He's on Twitter - @KyleKramer

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