Dan Deacon Ponders Creativity in Music, Architecture and Kermit...

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Dan Deacon Ponders Creativity in Music, Architecture and Kermit the Frog Memes

To see more of Dan’s photos, check out @dandeaconofficial on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.

Dan Deacon finds beauty and amazement in everything: bright desert flowers; cheap, obscure DVDs that he buys at gas stations with titles like Mr. Art Critic — even jumbled snapshots of himself or his friends, where he misplaces and doubles up basic facial features.

“I like how disturbing they are. I find them to be hysterical,” the Baltimore-based electronic musician says of the twisted portraits. “I love the mixture of comments. There’s no more polarizing post than a face on a human head sideways with, like, two mouths. No one doesn’t have an opinion on that photo.”

These days, the 33-year-old spends a lot of time on his tour bus — a converted school bus named Vantastic that he and his pals gut and remodel before every trek — scrolling through pictures, pondering why and how people respond to them all.

“I love when someone posts something they think has a powerful message and then the first comment is something completely having nothing to do with it or completely changes the context of how everyone is going to see it next,” he says. “Like, the fact that Kermit the Frog drinking tea became a set of memes that completely changed the entire character of Kermit the Frog is insane. The fractal effects of what happens once you put an idea in the world is endless.”

In a way, that represents how Dan looks at his own musical output, from his early days self-releasing albums as a student at State University of New York at Purchase to his most recent album, 2015’s Gliss Riffer. “I think my whole life is seeing a point on a horizon and wanting to get to it but not knowing how to do that, and figuring it out as I go. Or, vice versa, seeing a path in the woods and not knowing where it’s going to take you and following it anyway. For each song, it’s the closest thing to meditating I could probably ever do, sitting there and letting the music take me where it’s taking me and trying to get what’s inside my head outside without thinking about it too much.”

Yet, for all the school bus travels and international audiences he leaves in pools of sweat with his egalitarian shows — where he almost always performs in the midst of the crowd — Dan gets bored like any other human. And when DVDs like Mr. Art Critic and Two-Headed Shark Attack aren’t enough, he’ll find a unique way to entertain himself. Take the recent prank he pulled at Ireland’s Body & Soul festival.

“I was talking about how I was obsessed with The Doors in high school and I used to draw The Doors logo in notebooks. Then someone was like, ‘What does The Doors logo look like?’ And I said, ‘I can draw it for you, exactly, from memory.’ There was no table space, so I was leaning up against our dressing room door while doing it, so I thought, I should just tape this here. And then, I don’t know why, I started drawing it again and then I was like, I’ll tape this on the door of Savages’ dressing room.’ Then I really liked how it looked, so I did it to all the dressing rooms.” Eventually, a worker at the festival took them all down, but Deacon took them out of the trash and reapplied them. “I don’t know,” he says of his motives. “It was really fun. I had a great time.”

For the rest of the summer and a bit into autumn, Dan will be playing gigs, mostly festivals, in Europe and the US. After that, it’s back to figuring out a path to the figurative point on the horizon. “I’m starting to sketch out the new record. I’d like to get going on that. It takes me a while to formulate an idea. We’re going to have some non-pop music projects as well and getting into production of music that’s not my own, so I’m excited for that. Nothing at the confirmed stage to talk about, but I’m trying to diversify my output. I really want to keep making as much music as possible in as many different forms as you can make it, and trying to expand on what music is — or the next art form of what will be sound-based but not music.”

There doesn’t seem to be a way to explain it, so we’ll just have to trust Dan’s ability to see and hear the world in his own unique way and turn it into something that fascinates and entertains us, just as a dollar DVD or face-swapping app does for him.

—Dan Reilly for Instagram @music

by via Instagram Blog