Darwin Deez

By Jeannette Madden
Contributing Writer

There are true pop stars among us; the ones blessed with rare, innate qualities who shine just as vibrantly offstage as on, who have the genetic good fortune to be able to write whip-smart, life-affirming, heart-swelling songs and at the same time say all sorts of funny and clever and entertaining things. No one illustrates this distinction moreso than Darwin Deez.

With his debut album “Lucky Number” released Feb. 22, there are many songs to treasure, such as the brightly scrubbed anthem in waiting “Radar Detector” to the barbed verbal sally “Bad Day” (“I hope that the last page of your 800-page novel is missing”) to the plaintive, lovelorn croon of “The Bomb Song,” all of which he wrote and recorded entirely on his own, in his apartment, on one mike on his PC.

His shows bring everyone together, a Darwin Deez commonality shared by a bright shining roomful of fans. The fans perpetuate the hand clapping that is so much a part of his music and the live sound is so much more than keyboards. If nothing else, his old school dance routines are reason enough to see catch his live show. I love to dance,” Deez said with a laugh. “Michelle, my bandmate, is a tap dancer and I’m secretly pretty good at it as well, so we take it up another notch onstage. But when we play live the bottom-line is we want all the people outside the room to come in and we want the people inside the room to really enjoy themselves. I want people to get into it the way audiences at the Sidewalk Cafe got into shows, people would tell jokes onstage, and if you told them to clap, they’d clap.”

Like Owl City, Darwin answered questions for the Reader via email. Read on to experience the truly original thoughts of Darwin Deez…

HIGH PLAINS READER: Has anyone mentioned that you are like a walking Napoleon Dynamite movie? You look like his brother Kip yet you move like Napoleon…

DARWIN DEEZ: Yeah, people make the Napoleon comparison from time to time, but they’re just jealous because I’ve been chatting with babes all day long.

HPR: Can you tell me about the band you have with you while you tour?

DD: Miles is the master of disguises. So when we need to infiltrate enemy lines for reconnaissance or cross the border into Canada, we put Miles in the driver’s seat. Andrew’s the muscle. He doesn’t like to fly, so when we go to Australia, we have to drug his milk. Greg (Big Prawn) is a few donuts short of a dozen, but his demolition expertise is indispensable. And I’m Daisy Duke.

HPR: Who does the choreography for your shows?

DD:  When I was growing up in Chapel Hill, my sister made up dance routines to Paula Abdul songs. Our dance routines are a tribute to her and that innocent, sincere childhood excitement for music and motion.

HPR: You put on such a fun show. How do you transition from recording to live?

DD: First, I take off my headphones and I put on my headband. And my earplugs (maintaining your hearing is important). I take off my intro-spectiveness and put on my extroversion. But I wear the same sweater the whole time.

HPR: Do you write your music with any thought to how you will play it live?

DD: My music’s pretty minimal, so it’s never too difficult to stay faithful to the recordings. We have two guitars, a bass, a drum set, and two voices, which are plenty of tools at our disposal to bring the mother-[f’ing] ruckus. There are some extra sounds that would require a bigger band (the guitar layers in The City, electronic drums) and we have those playing on a backing track.

HPR: How about your influences?

DD: My influences are always changing. Bush. The Chemical Brothers. Q and not U. The Strokes. On the local New York scene: Wakey Wakey, Olga Bell, Lowry. Deerhoof. Everything Everything. Das Racist. Lately, Pink Floyd.

HPR: What’s the history of Darwin Deez?

DD: Darwin Deez started with me playing my guitar along with an mp3 player. I was hanging around at the Sidewalk Cafe open mic in the East Village, shaping my sound, finding my footing. Next I added Greg on drums. We toured down the eastern seaboard (a la Dave Matthews, John Mayer) playing tiny shows in the summer of 2008. We’d go over to Philly now and then, play Bard college, Sarah Lawrence, some house party in Massachusetts. Andrew joined on bass. We started doing the dance routines as an intro and outro for our set. Cole joined on guitar, and then we had four, the magic number. I did three song opening sets for Creaky Boards in Europe at the beginning of 2009. My CD-R demo worked its way over from a girl named Sabine in Germany to Lucky Number Records in the UK. NME began adding fuel to the fire in the summer of 2009. We circled the US for the first time at the end of the year touring with Bishop Allen. UK stuff blew up in 2010. We started seeing kids posting YouTube covers of Radar Detector. Perpetual touring initiated in the spring of 2010, and it hasn’t stopped. We played UK, Europe, Japan, Australia. I put out my free rap mixtape, Wonky Beats, a couple weeks ago.

HPR: Can you tell me how you write/create your music?

DD: First, I start out with a word or phrase that seems interesting to me. Radar detector. Interesting as an object, and also phonetically, when you think about making it the heart of a song. Then I get out a notepad and write down every word that rhymes with Radar Detector. “Gaydar Selector,” “Vadar Rejector” (as in Darth Vadar. That one’s a slant rhyme). And I follow those tangents to find the rest of the lyrics. And then I get to a certain point where I realize, “Hey, I don’t need to rhyme so much to make this song sound good.” By then I’ve already accumulated a lot of material. So I get rid of some rhymes and I almost have a complete song on my hands.

HPR: Have you always been such a great performer? Is it natural? Or did you have to learn it, work at it?

DD: It took years of focus to become Darwin Deez. And the changes sneak up on you. There is a story about a monk instructed to meditate for three years on being an ox. He ends the meditation, opens his eyes, and finds that nothing has changed. He’s still a human being. Then his teacher asks him to leave the prayer room, and the monk says, “I can’t, my horns won’t fit through the door.” This is kind of what it felt like to change from Darwin Smith to Darwin Deez (substituting big hair for horns).

HPR: Can you tell me about your fans?

DD: Our fans sing along with us, and fill the whole room with pumping fists during the Spring Dance. Sometimes we pick someone out of the audience to do the goddess dance with us during Single Ladies. Some of our fans wear headbands. It’s like Bjork said, an Army of Me. Our fans send us friend requests and tag photos of us the day after the concert. Our fans in England are younger than our fans in Germany, for some reason. We used fan art to make the posters for this USA tour. Someone constructed my face out of a long strand of cassette tape. We also made a t-shirt using a fan drawing of the Radar Detector 360 camera.

HPR: How is it starting out now, in today’s music business? Are you using the Internet to get out there and get heard?

DD: Lately, we’ve been dipping our toes into the Twitter pool. The band was just discussing it…before the Nashville show. If I tweet more, will there be more people at our shows? Is the correlation that direct and that certain? My bassist defected from vegetarianism at lunch (southern BBQ in Memphis) and dinner (unagi roll), so I blew his cover with a tweet. If we exhibit all the little idiosyncratic nuggets of our day on the Internet, will there be 70 people at the Nashville show instead of 50? Will there be 2200 people at the London show instead of 1400? It seems both too easy and too absurd, but, for better or worse, this is the future.

HPR: What is the future of Darwin Deez?

DD: The wit of our tweets will become progressively keener. And we might even put out a second album.

Click here to see Darwin’s video for “Radar Detector”: http://tiny.cc/2qasm

Click here to see a group of 4th graders from P.S. 217 in New York City lip-synching to the track, and working out their own “Radar Detector” dance moves (HYSTERICAL): http://tiny.cc/afe5n

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