It’s a balmy Thursday evening in early July and merrymakers crowd the narrow streets of Amsterdam. Enjoying a fleeting taste of Summer, the city’s outdoor terraces are packed out, leaving many of its tiny bars themselves empty. At the back of one such bar, in the trendy De Pijp district, Spanish Love Songs frontman Dylan Slocum, along with keyboardist/guitarist/general vibe merchant Meredith Van Woert, has found the quietest spot in an already quiet spot.
A typical Dutch “brown café” – not a euphemism – Café Gollem serves modest pours of deceptively strong regional beers which go down like lemonade and hit like prescription-only sedatives. Empty bottles bedaubed with candle wax huddle on the dusty wooden shelves lining its dark mustard walls, the decor reflecting the bar’s weeknight vibe – easygoing and quiet. Muted, even.
In theory, it’s the ideal venue for a long conversation about Spanish Love Songs’ remarkable new album, ‘No Joy’. That is until the only other patron in the bar begins a Facetime call with his phone speaker at maximum volume.
“If you want to know the true essence of me,” Slocum says, “it’s that every time I hear that sound, I’m flexing with anger.”
He pauses for a split second before taking a second pass at that last phrase.
“I’m hulking out emotionally.”
Understated yet comically exaggerated, it’s a characteristic response from the singer, songwriter, and creative force behind the Los Angeles quintet. A physically imposing presence – there’s a reason the band’s 2015 début album was called ‘Giant Sings the Blues’ – in person, Slocum is reflective, funny, and pathologically self-aware.
There is a perception in certain quarters – of Spanish Love Songs generally, and of Dylan specifically – as being overtly serious and self-consciously miserablist. Fuelled by his unflinching lyrics about depression, addiction and late-stage capitalism, there’s a sense that Slocum is shouldering the burden of conveying not just his own trauma but that of a generation. One recent review described him as “the first poet laureate of late millennial malaise.”
“Who the fuck wrote that?” He asks, laughing. “Listen – I like the hype. I love being talked about as a writer. I’m a narcissist, it’s fine. But it’s also silly because on the one hand, no I’m not! I play in a shitty band! I’m writing stupid songs. On the other hand; Yeah, sure. Make me feel important!”
It’s certainly hard to reconcile who and what people might assume Spanish Love Songs to be with the two goofballs sitting across the table. Over the course of an hour they – among many other things – praise Blink-182 as “high-level comedians”, conceive of a Car Seat Headrest cover band called “Car Crash Singalong”, and describe their career using multiple, protracted references to the 2016 movie ‘Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping’.
As a writer himself, Slocum is conscious of how his words might be represented in print. He chooses them carefully, even editing his own grammar in real-time (“I can’t be on the record sounding like an idiot!”). He’s also disarmingly forthright in a way many musicians seem wary of being.
“I love to feel important, and I also never want to talk about how good it makes me feel that people like our band. But also, we’re not shy about the fact that we want to be loved.”
He pauses again, aware that he’s about to deliver the kind of pull-quote that gets used to promote features like this one.
“What’s the fucking point of being in a band if you don’t want to be the biggest band on Earth?”
The next step towards Spanish Love Songs’ world domination is the release of their fourth album, ‘No Joy’. Having been robbed of the chance to promote 2020 masterpiece ‘Brave Faces Everyone’, a should-have-been breakout album whose touring cycle was kiboshed by Covid, Slocum’s taking this one in his stride.
“I’m not going to be dramatic,” he says. “I’m happier with this album than I was with the last one, so that’s a positive spin on it. And we grew a little bit over the pandemic so it’s not like we were just stagnant. People discovered us.”
That’s not surprising considering that Spanish Love Songs inadvertently wrote the perfect soundtrack for facing an uncertain future, feeling isolated and afraid. For many people, ‘Brave Faces Everyone’ was THE pandemic album, which speaks to a key pillar of the band’s appeal; the ability to write deeply personal songs about highly specific situations which nonetheless feel like universal experiences.
In fact, Van Woert considers lyrics to be so key to the band’s appeal that their fanbase can be divided into two distinct cohorts; those interested purely in the music, and what she describes as “lyrics fans”. It’s this second group who she thinks have found ‘Brave Faces Everyone’ to be such a salve over the last three years.
“Predict is the wrong word,” she explains, “but the album came out and then a pandemic hit. And people felt like, “Damn! How did you know this was gonna happen?” Because all those songs related to how they felt during the pandemic. And I think there are things on the new album, post-pandemic, that people will find a way to relate to.”
“Yeah,” Slocum agrees. “The whole point of the lyrics are to be so specific to my own life that it almost becomes general to someone who’s hearing them. Because they have no fucking clue!”
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the assumption that he’s always writing about himself, or from his own perspective. While that was true on their first two albums, his writing on ‘‘Brave Faces Everyone’ and to an even greater extent ‘No Joy’ is more concerned with telling stories. I suggest that their brand might be too well established for people to fully process this transition.
“Storytelling is cool but I also don’t give a shit about some story if you’re not in it. There are two different parts to it. Sometimes I’m very obviously telling a story, but from a first-person perspective so people are like “Oh that’s clearly you”. And other times I’m saying “you”, in the second person, but I’m actually talking about myself – looking at myself and criticising myself. Songwriting is personal, it feels like a poem and most of the time – lyrically, at least – it’s coming from a singular voice.”
