Danny Bateman on Grog and the rules of form.
Frog frontman Danny Bateman chats with Firebird about Bach, movies, and his creative process.
A lot has changed for Danny Bateman since Frog’s last album in 2019. He became a father and his brother, Steve, became a fully-fledged member of the band. Now, the New York indie rock duo are returning with a new album. Grog, which comes out on November 17th, is a self-produced, eclectic mix of songs that explore sounds never-before-seen in Frog’s catalog.
This month, I had the opportunity to chat with Bateman about the long-awaited record.
promotional image provided by Frog’s management team.
Evgenia Anastasakos: The press materials for Grog describe it as a gothic, cartoonish album set in Hades. What inspired this image?
Danny Bateman: That’s just how it looks to me. I was talking about how each album has a setting for me. For Kind of Blah, there was a New York setting and for Count Bateman, I feel like that was Los Angeles but not real Los Angeles, like a fake one in my head, like the Eagles.
I’d been making this one for a really long time and it didn’t feel like it was set in a real place. There’s violence and there are lots of references to things that I’ve never thought about. I became more interested in things that have never happened and ideas that are more alien to the world that I’m used to. I was more excited by those things. But again, each song is individual and I put them together and try to figure out what it means. It’s not like I meant to make a record that sounded like it was in Hades, that’s just the way that it feels to me now that it’s done.
EA: The album goes in a lot of directions you haven’t gone in before. Did that just happen or did you set out to explore something a bit different?
DB: I spent a long time on this one. My personal life changed a lot. I became a father and stuff. I think the biggest influence on it was my brother Steve. He started playing with me. He’s on every song. Our relationship is really fruitful. I think that it’s really exciting to play with people you love. Music is a team sport. It’s a reflection of the relationship you have with the people you’re playing with.
That was the biggest thing and I feel like that allowed me to try things that maybe I’d always failed at before. It’s not even that I’m doing different things—I’ve always done a lot of the things that I’m doing on Grog—it’s just that I failed and threw them away. This time I didn’t fail. And that was why it was so hard to stitch together, because there were so many different directions. Nothing worked. I sequenced it in so many different ways.
I wanted it to sound like a comic book. Like an MF Doom sort of quality. I don’t think I got anywhere near that. I was just scared about sampling because I started doing it and then I realized how much work it was to clear everything. So I only have one sample and the guy said yes, so in the end, that’s all we have. Originally there were a lot more.
taken by Audrey West.
EA: Who would you have wanted to sample, if it wasn’t such a hassle?
DB: There’s this movie called American Movie. Have you ever watched it?
EA: I have not.
DB: Oh, I recommend it. It’s a documentary about these people in Milwaukee who are filmmakers. Or the one main guy is a filmmaker. And he gets all of his friends and all of the people in town to make his movies, but he never finishes any of them. He's an alcoholic and he’s totally obsessed with being a filmmaker. The movie is just following him around and listening to him talk. I had so many samples from the movie. But yeah, I chickened out. I don’t want to deal with getting it taken down or something. The business of sampling is just over my head, man. And at the end of the day, I don't have time to deal with that. Maybe if I cared less about it being taken down it would be one thing, but I worked hard and I want people to hear it.
In the end, I feel like it’s always good to have constraints. They’re the foundation of all art. You have to conform to a form. It’s important to add as many constraints as possible so you can find different ways to tell whatever story you’re telling. It’s good that I wasn’t able to do this because then it wouldn’t be like it is, and I think it turned out alright.
EA: One of my friends had been talking about how “Black on Black on Black” was such a departure from earlier songs and I had a similar reaction when it came out. I thought it was really cool how it didn’t sound like the Frog that I was familiar with.
DB: Yeah, I’m having a lot of fun with it. You’ve gotta have fun with it.
I have this idea for an album called A Thousand Versions of the Same Song where I just play the same song a thousand different ways. We have like a hundred so far. I don’t know if this is something we ever want to show to anyone, but basically, there’s this very old form of variations on a theme. Like the Goldberg Variations, where he has a melody and a bass line in a bunch of different ways and in different styles.
I don’t want it to be a song in terms of lyrics or melody, just vibe. The same vibe over and over again.
The whole reason albums are 35 minutes long is because that’s what fits on an LP. That's the only constraint. Songs are three minutes long because that’s what fits on a 78 or a 45. These are artificial constraints. They're vestiges of the 20th century and I think it's scary to lose those constraints, because then you lose the form. But I think if you add different constraints, like that it has to be the same song every time, then you could do whatever you want. The album can last forever.
EA: What does songwriting look like for you?
DB: The song is something that you have to let happen. You don’t make it happen. You can play something on the piano or the guitar or just sing it, but you can’t think about it. And then you’ll play something that maybe you like a little bit. And inside of something you like—maybe it's a melody, maybe it's a couple chords—there’s a vocal melody. It’s hidden in there. You just have to ask it to come out. And inside of the melody itself, all the lyrics are right there.
In general, I just try to make myself laugh or cry. I usually just laugh.
It’s a rejection and an embrace of form. Each song that I write is a reference to many other songs. They’re references to other forms. You have verse, chorus, verse, chorus. That’s a form. You have soft verse, loud chorus. That’s a vestige of some production techniques in the 90s. Basically, you have to love the form and you have to also hate it and do it way different than anyone else did it, because you’re just like “fuck them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” You have to have that attitude.
You just have to do it over and over again and then it starts to be something that you like doing and then it starts to sound like you.
EA: You mentioned that you became a father relatively recently. Is the recording at the end of “Ur Still Mine” one of your kids?
DB: That’s my daughter, Sally. She’s singing “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” That’s what she thought the lyrics were. Frankie comes in, too, but he’s on about something else. He’s telling me to stop paying attention to Sally. She was playing with this thing in the playground. They have these sound toys. And then I put the little jam that me and Steve did under it and it was like she was soloing. It was so sick.
EA: I read in an old interview that you used to be in a folk/alt-country band. Is that true?
DB: Yeah. It was a lot of fun. It was a band called “Uncles.” It was with a friend of mine who is still my friend. He was a very militant folk guy. That was his musical thesis, that you should have unadorned music that is only guitar and vocals and some really straightforward other instruments. And it’s really about the songs. The songs were the only thing that mattered at all and you should have nothing else. And although I'm not sure I agree with the thesis, I sort of embraced it with him and I learned a lot by, again, having those constraints. Learning how to write like that helped me to write anything I wanted.
We made a couple of records. You can probably find them, if you try. One of them, I made myself. It sounds really weird. I didn’t know how to use any equipment at that time. For most of the record, I didn't use any plugins, I just used automation. It actually sounds kind of interesting because there’s almost no reverb in a lot of the songs and I didn’t use any EQ at all. It goes to show that you don't really need any of the tools, you need your ears and that’s it.
I think that the reason why I left the band was that I was not really interested in making that music again. I did it and I was like “alright, that was cool.”
Me and the bassist from that band formed Frog. I told him to stop playing bass and I put him behind a drum set that I had. It was me and Tom. And we recorded “Nancy Kerrigan” like the next day. It was very freeing to try something new.
taken by Andrew Piccone.
EA: What music have you been listening to lately?
DB: Mostly, I like listening to classical music like Mozart and Bach. I bought The Well Tempered Clavier and I’ve been playing through it. It’s just so fire. The Mozart piano sonatas, I have volume two but I don’t have volume one. I have to get that. These guys are the best. Mozart wrote this music when he was 17, 18. It’s just straight flames. The whole thing is so good. It’s amazing that we’re able to play through it and listen to it and enjoy it. It’s so great.
And Bach wasn't really famous for his composing. Everyone knew he was the best keyboard player but no one really understood that he was the greatest composer to ever live. The only reason why he’s remembered that way is because he made The Well Tempered Clavier which is a prelude and a fugue in every key. The rich youth of Europe, learned to play the piano through it. It was both art and instruction that taught you to play in every key and was at the advent of well-tempered tuning where you could have twenty four keys. Twelve major, twelve minor. He’s sort of like the founding text of western music because that’s how everyone learned to play. All of it springs from that, it’s like the Bible. Every single thing that came after it in western music is directly from that, from Beethoven to the Beach Boys to everyone. It’s amazing.
EA: I had no idea about that. That’s so interesting.
DB: It’s cool. You should check it out. It may be off putting at first, because, again, you don't understand the form, you don't understand what he’s doing with it. If you were from 1800 and you heard a Lil Wayne song, you probably wouldn't understand it because you wouldn’t understand what he’s doing. But once you understand what he’s doing you're like “oh, this is awesome.”
EA: That’s fair, I see what you mean. I think that’s all I have for you today. I appreciate you taking the time.
DB: Of course.
edited by Paulina DePaulo.
photos by Audrey West & Andrew Piccone.
images approved for non-commercial use by Frog’s management team.