At the end of 2019, Dr. Dog decided they'd had enough of the touring grind. After all, the many-hued, many-styled psychedelic band had been going hard for two decades.
"It just got tiresome, and the other guys in the band had kids," Eric Slick, their drummer since 2019, tells GRAMMY.com. "I think there was just this conscious decision to be like, 'Maybe we need to take a breath.'"
This amounted to a fork in the road for Dr. Dog, who have always occupied a funny space in the indie-verse. In a revealing 2016 Talkhouse essay titled "The Counting Crows Taught Me Not To Give A F— About the Critics," Slick acknowledged that music press has written "unspeakable reviews" over the years, unfairly characterizing them as safe, repetitive and wary to take risks.
One spin of Dr. Dog's new self-titled album — which arrived July 19, their first in six years — should disabuse you of this notion. Sure, it's a continuation of their gently trippy melodic soul aesthetic, but it also shows how they've subtly developed on it.
"It's not like a typical Dr. Dog record where I go in the studio and I'm just bashing the crap out of the drums, and hoping that whoever's mixing it knows what to do," he explains. "We all had to play really sensitively to each other, because there's no headphone mix, and we allowed any kind of bleed through the microphones to become part of the ambient noise of the record."
Dr. Dog arrives during a critical year for Slick. An active solo artist on top of Dr. Dog, session work and other group efforts, he released an eccentric new album, New Age Rage, back in April. Naturally, working with Dr. Dog has incontrovertibly influenced his solo work.
Plus, Dr. Dog's last show at press time — a sold-out Colorado amphitheater gig — was a watershed for Slick, as the historically timid singer got to sing his first-ever lead vocal on a Dr. Dog album — the lovely "Tell Your Friends" — live onstage for the first time, the crowd singing every word.
Read on for Slick's account of that special moment, as well as all things Dr. Dog.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
You've written about not being able to catch a break from the critics, but Dr. Dog just performed a sold-out show at Red Rocks. What does that tell you about music critics' authority — or lack thereof?
I mean, with Dr. Dog, I feel like our fan base has gotten riled up by the fact that critics don't tend to like us. Even when they do like us, there's usually some sort of backhanded compliment or there's some issue that is taken with the band's reluctance to change, or at least what it seems like on the surface.
I think the constant criticism that we get is that our albums don't tend to show a lot of growth. Maybe if you're not paying attention that might seem true, but I feel like we put a lot of emphasis on trying new things. It's just like we sound the way that we sound.
[Founding member] Scott McMicken is kind of a musical genius, isn't he?
Scott is extremely prolific, and I used to live with him back in West Philadelphia in, like, 2010. I would go to bed, and then there'd be a CD slipped underneath my door of the 12 songs he wrote that night.
He's just one of those people. He's kind of like Robert Pollard in that way. He has no filter, and he's so prolific, and loves to record. He loves to record on his Portastudio. It's his life, and he's so good at it, and he's so good at tricking himself into creating new context for his art, and it's really inspiring to be around.
I could tell certain directions he was pulling things from. Like, some deep Stax Records vibes…
Oh, yes, yes, big time. He's been really into Stax and also Sun Records the last couple of years. He's just been diving into the production values on that stuff. He also loves all the Studio One stuff, too, like super into dub and the late '60s, early '70s era of Jamaican music. He's way, way into it.
[Bassist and co-founder] Toby Leaman is so good, too. For those less familiar with the band: how would you describe their push and pull as writers?
Scott, I think, always gets sort of pegged as freewheeling — lots of colorful chords and production. It's more kaleidoscopic. And Toby's songs are sort of classic — very open-chorded, "you can hear them in a big space" kind of songs. And I think Toby has also gotten really good at designing songs for the road — for big sing-alongs.
I think they're just so talented at what they do. I used to say that Scott's songs were kind of like a rocket taking off. They would start really small, and then by the end they're huge. And with Toby it's like a big emotion for the whole thing, if that makes sense.
And maybe Toby's songs are a little bit more even-keeled in how they're put together, and how they're structured, but that emotion is really felt throughout the whole thing — whereas Scott's more of the story guy.
Where would you say Dr. Dog fits into that "class of 2009" milieu — whatever you want to call it? How has everything shaken out as per the band's role in the landscape?
A lot of the bands that we toured with are not really around anymore, and that's kind of an interesting thing. How have we endured, but a lot of other great bands aren't still around? I think about that a lot.
I also think about — because we didn't have any kind of critical acclaim — maybe we went unscathed a little bit. In regards to something like Pitchfork, there were some do or die moments for bands, and there were some bands that we're friends with that had their careers completely killed by a certain review.
And for whatever reason, because we didn't bring any attention to [our music]it, and we didn't say anything on social media about it back in the day, we just kind of accepted it for what it was.
I heard there was All Songs Considered about our new record that came out the other day, and they were kind of placing us in the same category as the Mumford era. I never really saw that comparison, but…when you're so in it, it's hard to know.
"Tell Your Friends" is so beautiful. What led to your sneaky George Harrison role in the band?
Well, I also wanted to respect the fact that we already have a two-songwriter band.
Everybody in the band writes songs. It's already enough if you've got one, but if you've got two great songwriters in the band, how do you approach them — the classic trope of Phil Collins coming forward during rehearsal ready to sing now, or whatever it is.
I had that song left over from the New Age Rage sessions, and obviously it didn't fit on that record at all, and I was like, What if I just send it to the guys? And I did, and I was super nervous about it, but then everyone immediately was like, "Yeah, let's do it. Let's try it."
So, by the time we got to the cabin in Forksville, Pennsylvania, where we made the record, everybody was really enthusiastic about the song. And then it kind of dawned on me that this song sort of encapsulates how we're all feeling about our relationships with each other. So, it feels like a nice little bow on the sentiment for the record.
You had posted on Instagram about the powerful moment of singing "Tell Your Friends" to that sold-out audience, and hearing the audience sing along. I know you've had a lot of insecurity and baggage with singing over the years, even hiring vocal teachers. Can you talk about your journey on that front?
I had a teacher growing up through the School of Rock program that actively discouraged me from writing songs and singing. So, I kind of feel like this whole racket of me writing songs is kind of like a spite store. [Laughs.]
I think I started doing it just to prove a point, and then it's turned into this whole other thing. I'm in love with the process and I love doing it, and I think it was there all along, and I was just kind of stuffing it down.
I started putting out songs for real in 2014, and still had years and years of stuff to work through with that, and also I just started doing it, because I had this impulse to do it, and it became clear pretty much right off the bat that I needed to start taking vocal lessons and take it seriously, because I was blowing out my voice every night.
So, eventually I started taking lessons with a teacher in Nashville who's like a gospel/CCM teacher, and the first lesson, I walked in there and she was like, "If you could sing anybody in the world, who would you sing like?" And I was like, "I don't know, Stevie Wonder or Prince." She's like, "Great, we're going to sing 'Purple Rain' right now."
And I was like, "Wait, what? I have to sing 'Purple Rain' in front of you right now?" And she's like, "Yes, so let's go." I was just like, "Holy s—, I'm not ready to sing 'Purple Rain.' I don't know the words to the song, really."
She really kicked my butt, and it led to me strengthening my chords, and it honestly gave me the confidence to come to Dr. Dog with this song, and then to be able to perform it.
The first time performing it in front of 10,000 people was pretty intense, and I think as it was happening, the beta blockers kicked in.
It was just really special and meaningful, and it just felt like the culmination of these 10 years of just really putting in the work, and taking lessons seriously.
It's the fulfillment of this thing that has been gnawing at me my whole life — which is to be able to write songs, to be able to perform them, and now I get to do that within the context of these people that I care about so much.