There was a month-long period well over a decade ago when Amen Dunes’s Damon McMahon rented a cabin in the Catskills, awoke with a morning cigarette, and played songs just for himself. Since then, the songwriter has returned to Brooklyn, garnered widespread acclaim with his 2018 album Freedom—a mostly sunny record full of sprightly folk music that recalled Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks—and become a father. Now, he’s opening the door and singing loudly to the world with his fiercest album to date, Death Jokes. Unlike its predecessor, the new record just starts—no ambient synth passages, no pre-pubescent pep talks. Instead, a collage of sounds (including spoken French and loud laughter) hits the ear in a wash of sound on the minute-long introductory title track as McMahon plays a ditty on the piano.
That title track reintroduces McMahon as the tinkerer-jokester he’s always been. His new album may have “death” in its name, and it may tackle such heady issues as groupthink and censorship, but those themes belie McMahon’s inherent playfulness. Over Zoom on a recent afternoon, the musician is personable, even exuberant—an alternate side to the statue-like face adorning the cover of Freedom. He smiles in a cozy sweatshirt at his Greenpoint home. “I wanted to come to the city, but not to the intensity of the city,” he says of the origins of Death Jokes, which was mostly written and put to tape upstate. “Woodstock just seemed like a happy medium.” While in town, McMahon recorded the album over a two-year period.
He also wasn’t too far from the Catskills cabin where Amen Dunes was born in the late-2000s, and where he recorded what would become the project’s debut. “This is the only album that relates to D.I.A.,” he says of that 2009 record. “But it wasn’t conscious. The only conscious connection was that I wanted to be somewhere where I would have no distractions.” As McMahon points out, however, he didn’t have the luxury of visiting Martha’s Vineyard for an extended period of time, as Vampire Weekend did when writing Modern Vampires of the City. Nor did he attend a meditation retreat, as Angel Deradoorian did when making 2020’s Find the Sun. Instead, “like a car mechanic,” he worked with what he had over a set amount of time.
McMahon has always been a workhorse within the independent music scene. As he’s remarked in previous interviews, he’s achieved success and reverence on a gradual, incremental level. He’s a musician’s musician—a John Prine for modern times, or a latter-day Dave Van Ronk. It’s no small feat for an artist who, amid the constantly evolving and increasingly demanding trends of the music industry, has always followed his intuition without ever compromising his vision. You might recall his decision around 20 years ago to leave the then-hyped New York band Inouk, which, he stated simply in a 2009 interview, “wasn’t [his] thing.”
“It’s all folk music, all spiritual music. It’s all devotional music. And then it’s an authentic version of myself, and I think that’s what the right listener connects to.”
Speaking about his success as a solo artist since then, McMahon says it’s “really just if you can stay authentic, if you can stay brave enough to not capitulate. I mean, how do you stay authentic? Really, you have to just fight the power. I think more than ever in the history of popular music, it’s difficult to not capitulate to the demands of the mainstream. I think even the underground has capitulated to digital, social-media, algorithmic demand. So, yeah, I think it’s very difficult. You have to be brave and have a fighting attitude.” As McMahon explains, it’s the same set of demands that “a normal person who doesn’t do anything meets. It’s like you have to perform for some invisible, algorithmic father. Really, it’s what everybody does.”
Amen Dunes has been a refuge for McMahon, a project through which he explores both his psyche and the society that shapes it. As its name hints, Amen Dunes is akin to a spiritual practice for McMahon, a headspace where he can get some clarity amid the information overload and noise of the world. “It’s all folk music, all spiritual music,” McMahon says of the project. “It’s all devotional music. And then it’s an authentic version of myself, and I think that’s what the right listener connects to.” As he sang on Freedom, “We play religious music / I don’t think you’d understand, man.”
“It’s really just if you can stay authentic, if you can stay brave enough to not capitulate... You have to just fight the power.”
But McMahon is hardly a recluse or a brooder. Going back to Through Donkey Jaw, his mesmerizing 2011 debut for Sacred Bones, he’s always wanted to connect with listeners and reach as many ears as possible. Death Jokes is his most direct album yet. Shifting a bit from the unadorned folk of Freedom, McMahon blasts electronica and even hip-hop on the new recordings. Interspersed with interview samples from J Dilla, and featuring an electrifying mishmash of sounds, Death Jokes is McMahon’s version of Donuts. Although Amen Dunes channeling that iconic 2006 plunderphonic album would’ve been a thrilling experiment in itself, Death Jokes is much more than homage. Including stand-up clips of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor alongside such searching songs as “What I Want” and “Exodus,” the record asks, “How do you stay real and pure in a loud, mad world?”
Like Bruce and Pryor, McMahon is a disruptor on Death Jokes, asking the listener, as J Dilla sampled on Donuts, to “better stop and think about what you’re doin.’” Not unlike Kid A, Death Jokes is an album that enables the listener to pause and reflect amid the chaos of the world. “It’s protest music,” McMahon says, and what it’s protesting is the old world order of insanity and pointing toward a new one of serenity. “You say life is hard / Well, at least you think it is / But it’s a joke / Someday we lose it / So use it,” McMahon sings on “Exodus,” sounding a call to action. Live your life, however messy, however comic. FL
