Culture
Chatting With Dougie Poole
By: Emily Votaw
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It’s the day after the Fourth of July and New York City-based psychedelic-musician-storyteller Dougie Poole is ironing the t-shirts he’ll be selling throughout his tour. They depict a gleefully grinning, lipsticked emoji with a cowboy hat – reading “Have You Seen This Man?”
Poole is touring his debut album, Wideass Highway, released in February by JMC Aggregate. Although the album is rich in plodding synths and soaring melodic lines that emulate the sighing of steel guitar, Poole is no cowboy.
While George Jones, Johnny Cash, and Hank Williams sang of heartache, working hard, and drinking harder in a predominantly white and hetero-normative America; Poole sings to a wider range and depth of American experiences in the 21st century.
“There are a zillion things that I like about country: the sound palate, the power of its words – but the subject matter that typically gets covered by country songs is pretty narrow,” said Poole, speaking to WOUB from Providence, RI, directly after tending to those t-shirts. “I was intrigued by the idea of telling stories with country western music that it doesn’t typically tell.”
Wideass Highway is a lean volume that weaves ten tales over the course of 40 minutes and some change – stories of halfheartedly agreeing to drop lysergic acid diethylamide with a fading love interest; of an drunken man in a sundress clinging to a toilet; of learning to live alone in a world of Tupperware and zipcars; of urinating in jars and finding food crumbs in your bed all whilst your thighs grow hot from the burn of your laptop.
“I think that a lot of people like country music aesthetically, and for its storytelling power; but are alienated by its typically conservative politics,” said Poole. “I want to see country music open up more – and not just tell the story of an America where a man is a man and a woman is a woman and everybody is straight.”
Akin to the way that Was (Not Was) sang of the troubled, druggy reality of the ‘80s within the musical confines of R&B, Poole writes little hymns and lyrical testaments to the lonely, technology-drenched, and often painful ennui of the contemporary American experience within the aesthetic bounds of country music.
“There are a zillion things that I like about country: the sound palate, the power of its words – but the subject matter that typically gets covered by country songs is pretty narrow. I was intrigued by the idea of telling stories with country western music that it doesn’t typically tell,” – Dougie Poole
“I was into math and science as a kid, and it wasn’t until I was living in Providence that I started being in bands; that’s where I see the musical part of my existence beginning,” he said. “I think that a country song needs to have a catchy tune and the words need to play off one another nicely – writing one feels like solving a puzzle. It feels less creative and more like I am playing Tetris with the right words and the right meanings to fit within the structure of a song. Shel Silverstein, the children’s author, also wrote country songs, and to me, that makes a lot of sense. Just like children’s books, country songs follow these rigid meters and little stanzas – it’s like solving a puzzle, which I think is a lot like solving a math problem.”
Poole said that crafting Wideass Highway was a long process that included months of recording and writing and performing all over – including a gobsmacking performance last summer in Athens at a house show that also had cerebral pop singer Jerry Paper and Columbus-based sound collage act Giant Claw on the bill.
“It was a good thing that it took a while to come out – I liked being on that journey with someone (Jordan Michael Iannucci) instead of just working with a label that had taken that trip a million times before,” said Poole. “(Making the album) was a really personal experience – something that we went through together.”
Poole will be touring throughout the rest of the month, and performing at the Smiling Skull Saloon on Monday, July 17. Check out the list below for a complete look over his tour dates.
7/17 Athens, OH @ Smiling Skull
7/19 Atlanta, GA @ 529 Bar
7/21 Athens, GA @ a house
7/22 Savannah, GA @ Nathan’s House
7/23 Gainesville, FL @ GUT fest
7/24 Lexington, KY @ Best Friend Bar
7/25 Huntington, WV @ Press CLub
7/29 Philadelphia, PA @ Phila MOCA
8/3 Queens, NY @ The Knockdown Center