Domestic Drafts, the new project from solo artist, critic, and Garcia Peoples bassist Andy Cush, has shared a new single called “Someplace Without Rain,” which is set to be featured on his new album Only the Singer. With all that fun biography outta the way, let’s talk about the song itself: There are a few things you can latch onto, beginning with Cush’s clever, knowing, but somehow not omniscient storytelling. Cush sings: “I have one more word to say / Before I go away / But if I can’t find the word I have in mind / I guess I’ll stay.” Words are hard. You’re telling me, pal!
Instrumentally, we got below-the-surface pedal steel accents, proggy drums that swing back and forth between folk and jazz, shredding guitar solos, and an appearance from Jeff Tobias (a true hero of modernity). There is so much good stuff going on that we tracked the Cush man down and asked him a few questions about the new track (which you can, coincidentally enough, check out below). A David Foster Wallace reference within the first four sentences of Cush’s first answer? Was this dude built in a lab for me?
The wonderful Only the Singer is out on February 28 via the inimitable Glamour Gowns. Pre-order the record here.
I love the opening verse, how it plays with the importance of language and our inability to say exactly what we mean. The lyrics across the whole album are really inspiring, just gorgeous and thoughtful. Can you talk to me about your evolution as a lyricist?
That feeling of being unable to say what you really mean comes up a lot in my songs. There’s another one on the album called “What I Need You to Know” that’s pretty explicitly all about that. I haven’t read it in at least 15 years, but there’s a David Foster Wallace short story called “Good Old Neon” where the narrator talks about feeling like you’re locked in a room filled with everything you’ve ever felt and experienced, and anything you might want to express to another person has to get out through the tiny keyhole in the door, and then in through the other person’s tiny keyhole on their own locked door, and inevitably whatever makes its way over is this tiny misshapen fragment of the huge pure thing you really wanted to get across. That blew my mind at 18 or 19 and it still sticks with me. It may seem bleak, but I also see it as kind of hopeful. You have to keep squeezing your stuff through the keyhole.
It’s difficult to track my own evolution as a lyricist, but it has definitely involved learning to trust my own impulses. There are a couple of songs on the album that started as little notes app jokes to myself, observations or bits of wordplay that I got a kick out of but seemed like they’d be embarrassing to share with the world because they’re so revealing of my own preoccupations and internal monologue. You learn over time that if the stuff you’re working on scares or discomforts you in some way, that’s a reasonably good indicator that it’s worth pursuing further.
The pedal steel is delicious! Gimme some of your favorite pedal steel performances of all time.
Shout out to Dan Iead, who came through and ripped that in one or two takes if I recall correctly. Some favorite pedal steel performances include Red Rhodes’ version of the Ahmad Jamal classic “Poinciana;” this video of the late, great Susan Alcorn playing “Shenandoah” in what looks like someone’s living room, which will make you cry when she hits that high run about a minute in; and an off-the-cuff improvisation that Barry Walker played for my Garcia Peoples bandmates and me in his actual living room one morning on tour.
Talk to me about the name Domestic Drafts. It gives me lots of different images. I think of Google Docs and Budweiser.
The band name has a few different associations for me. Cheap beers at a neighborhood bar, first and foremost—as worthy a namesake as I can think of. But also: I write the songs at home, and they’re often about some idea of home, so they’re domestic in that sense, and I like that “drafts” implies works-in-progress, in the vein of songwriting heroes like Bob Dylan and Will Oldham, who treat their own past work as a still-living thing, never quite finished. Finally, “domestic draft” could be a sidelong way of referring to a breeze blowing through a house, which just strikes me as a nice metaphor for a song: the way a breeze clarifies the porousness between inside and outside; and the way it touches you, enlivens you to the world for a moment, and then moves on.
The horn arrangement is stellar—I love the way the fuzzy guitar line mirrors the melody. You also shred. Who are your favorite guitarists?
When we laid down the basic tracks for this song, I knew I wanted to stretch out that end section, but I wasn’t sure exactly what shape it would take. We recorded the basic tracks live, and the band just improvised with me on the core harmonic idea until it felt like it was time to wind down. Sometime later, I decided to loosely compose another layer along the contours of that initial improvisation, which became that big sax-and-guitar unison line that arrives just as the group jam is reaching its peak. I asked Jeff Tobias to improvise a sax solo that would land on that line as its ending, and Tom Malach to improvise a guitar solo that would begin with it, so you get these two great solos with a composed part that they play together in the middle. It’s one of my favorite moments on the record.
Thank you for the compliment on my guitar skills, though I suspect it might be Tom’s solo that provoked that reaction. The acoustic fingerpicked stuff (and bass guitar) on this one is me. There are three guitarists on this album—Tom, me, and Katie Battistoni—and each of us gets our moments to take the lead. One of my goals for this music was to make a shredding guitar record and I think we succeeded on that front. As for favorite guitarists, it’s mostly my friends: Katie, Tom, Danny Arakaki, Mike Bones, Ryan El-Solh, Ryan Weiner, Ryley Walker. I recently heard this LA guy Dylan Day for the first time and think he’s incredible. (I cannot hold a candle to any of these people, for the record.) All-time favorite is probably Richard Thompson.
Jeff Tobias is a hero. I love Sunwatchers. Do you?
I, too, love Sunwatchers. I was a big fan before I got to know Jeff. I came across their second album at a time when I was mostly playing punk-ish music but increasingly gravitating toward psychedelic and free-jazz improvisation as a listener, and their mixture of all three things made a real impact on me. Eventually Garcia Peoples started playing shows with them and we all became friends. There was one show—on a boat, no less—when Jeff sat in with us on a song that I sing, and it was an incredible thrill to deliver it with his waves of pure energy pulsating behind me. (If you’re a fan of his playing, you know what I’m talking about.) Pretty much as soon as I finished writing “Someplace Without Rain,” the first thing I knew about the arrangement was that I wanted Jeff to play on it. I had to try to recreate that feeling.
If “Someplace Without Rain” is a book what does the back cover say?
“Meandering, ponderous, and indulgent, but in a good way.”
