Dandelion snow, AKA Roger Harvey is an indie-folk musician. With a new album The Grand Scheme of things, produced by Chris 2 of Anti Flag, things are looking good and he is definitely one to look out for. Here’s what happened when Claire asked him a few questions…
Hello Roger, thanks for answering some questions for us.
Thanks for listening, and getting in touch with me.
Firstly, tell us a bit about yourself.
Sure, My name is Roger, I play songs under the name Dandelion Snow.
The new album The Grand Scheme of Things seems to be heavily centred around travelling. Has travelling always been a big part of your life?
Travelling definitely has been a consistent part of my life for as long as I can remember. Ever since i was really young and traveled around with my friends bands, and later my various music projects. I think the years leading up to making that record left me feeling at the time like I had been in a state of eternal motion, what happened before seemed so far away. At first I never got totally comfortable with moving around as much as I was. It was a really shocking thing to me. At this point I have kind of just built my life around it. Music and travel have a long complicated romance, especially folk music. I don’t know if my affinity to songs and sound made travel such a huge part of my life, or if it was the other way around. Regardless, I love to travel, sharing songs, and making’ friends. Its the closest thing to home I’ve ever found, so for me its no surprise that i would leave Pennsylvania and follow this path, ya know? It’s just one way to live that makes sense to me. I find a lot of comfort in it.
I left my apartment in New York City, and stayed with some very close friends of mine in Pittsburgh while we pieced The Grand Scheme Of Things together, afterwards I headed right out on tour and landed in Portland, Oregon a month later and used that as my home base for the summer before returning back to Brooklyn last fall. It’s kind of interesting that you would ask because i had never thought of the correlation, i was on the road when we made the record and was making the long trip across the country while we we’re getting the masters back from Nashville. So thinking of it now I feel like the sentiment of the songs juxtaposed with the actuality of being en route had a huge impact on the way the songs came out and obviously the literary content. I feel like creative souls are affected by so much that isn’t necessarily in the foreground. So much of art is subconscious. I never set out to make a record so consumed with the feeling and ideas of travelling’, but I think that is something that sticks out to everyone about the album.
Do you think your inspiration for writing mainly comes from travel and what is it about a journey that inspires you?
I think there is a certain freedom in the idea of travelling. It definitely is not an exclusive source of inspiration for me and my creative process. But It certainly has granted me a more well balanced perspective of life and the ways people are living over the years. I felt enlightened the first tour I did, I was 14 years old and we took our van and trailer all the way across the country to California. I saw the stars in the desert sky for the first time and the Pacific Ocean. I think that’s what really stuck out to me was how similar and dissimilar geography, and even the way people live can be within the same country. I felt a lot more sure of myself before that, when my friends and family were the only reality I had known. I realised how easy it was to get caught up in yourself, and build your world so small. Needless to say that was first time I had to try to understand the complexity of personal perspective. I came back pretty confused.
I found it super liberating to expose myself to making new friends, sharing ideas, listening to songs, reading books. Travelling is a crash course in that. It’s like you wake up every morning to something new. The sun is shining or the rain is coming down, it’s always a new place, new circumstances. It’s amazing how quickly things change. I don’t think I accepted that as much before I started playing music and travelling around. I grew up in a small town where things hadn’t changed for a long time, I think I would have clung to anything that granted me progress. Cause in a small American town, they raise you to be the same and stay the same.
Are there any other key themes to be found in your work?
I like to use recurrent symbolism when it works for me. It’s also the product of me being forgetful and having a lot of the same ideas in repetition. I like juxtaposing conflicting ideas, love/hate, life/death, war/peace etc… I write songs about the things that affect me, the way I live, the things I see, and obviously the way I feel. Symbols can be so dense, To tie it back in, I think more than anything travelling is a symbol to me, it’s not always about the actuality of a the long drive down the empty highway, it’s often a poetic device. A way of dealing with the complexities of life, understanding things or running away from them. It certainly is a real thing in my life and I travel a lot. But songs are filled with ideas and even when you take something that was written on the surface, there is a lot more buried underneath it. People connect with music on so many different levels and music brings people together, it’s a beautiful thing.
How was recording The Grand Scheme of Things?
Hmm, It was perfect. (Ha ha) We made it at a small studio outside of Pittsburgh that some of my friends built themselves a couple years ago. It was a really spontaneous record, very Neil Young influenced, 1 or 2 takes of everything we did and we tried a lot of new things. Chris and I we’re like little kids playing all these new instruments we had never played before. We let the record come together really organically and we set out to capture that. The imperfections that are usually washed out of modern recordings. We wanted it to be honest and have character. It was Chris and I’s brainchild and we kind of worked long days on it and when we needed other friends of ours to come in a play we’d call them in. I wanted to have as many of my friends involved with the record as possible and all my friends are really talented and are so supportive of my music. So, It meant a lot that so many of my old friends got to help shape the record in there own way. When I hear the songs now I think of them and the long days we spent making it. It was good to leave the city and go back to my home state.
How did it come about that Chris 2 from Anti Flag produced your album?
Chris is a very old friend of mine. I’ve been writing songs since I was a little kid. It wasn’t for a long time that he heard them. I was painfully shy about showing them to anyone, Took me a long time to get demos out to my friends and further to start playing shows. My friend Marc who tours with AF now was one of the first friends I showed my songs too, I think it probably happened like this, I started sending Marc 8-track recordings I had made and he started passing them around trying to make some good things come back to me. Chris called me one day when he was on the road and said something along the lines of “Man, I had no idea you did this, I wanna produce your record”, I was travelling a lot at this point and had already self-released a few records with my friends at the Lock & Key Collective. The next thing I knew I was looking at the New York City skyline driving to Pittsburgh to make the album.
Who are your musical or artistic influences?
I’ve been listening to Crooked Fingers a whole lot lately, Bring On The Snakes. (Ha ha) It’s kinda hard to nail it down to specific influences cause I’m influenced by so much music and it changes so quickly as I’m endlessly discovering new records and stuff like that. I definitely draw from other bands and songwriters, I always liked that about folk music. It seems like a collective movement of artist it just continues to grow. New artist find there way and just kind of extend and reinvent an old tradition. I think that in the end it depends on what day you’d ask me. I love listening to my friends music and have had some consistent artist that I always go back to, mainly classic stuff that really spoke to me when I was growing up, i.e. Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, etc…
If you could only listen to five albums for the rest of your life what would they be? (Sorry that’s a really tough one!)
This certainly isn’t easy,
Bob Dylan – Blood On The Tracks
Neil Young – Harvest
Paul Simon – Self-Titled
Simon & Garfunkel – Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, & Thyme
Leonard Cohen – Songs Of Love And Hate
… Those five records hold a lot of answers in them
Who are you enjoying listening to at the moment that we should keep an eye out for?
A few friends of mine on Big Bullet Records, one of the labels that I worked with on the release of The Grand Scheme Of Things, have been coming through my speakers a whole lot lately on the road, The Demon Beat made an amazing record a while ago called “Shit, We’re 23” it’s a very fuzzy rock n’ roll record that if you haven’t had a chance to listen to yet, everyone should check that out. Pat Hull, a friend of mine that I met playing shows in New York City just put out a new record.
Where are your favourite places to play live and why?
I love playing, it is an essential part of my creativity to me. I feel like when I first started this project I would have said that I preferred indie venues and community art spaces. But I have played a lot of shows in the past few years, of all shapes and sizes and have found things that I can appreciate about them all. Playing live and travelling around in today’s over-saturated music market is a very unpredictable thing. I have had shows in college town basements that are some of the best shows I have ever played juxtaposed with big support act shows where I played to really big disinterested crowds. It’s taught me a lot about being a performer and how to transform the songs I write depending on the crowd and instruments we have on stage. I just pass through and try to get as many people in the room and connect with them. I would say 9 times out of ten times it works in my favour. But I have learned to love the unknown elements of touring and just try make the best of every situation, not let myself get broken up over anything. I have learned that it’s not so much about the room or the turnout but about how the kids that make it out connect with the music and how we all interact. I like to make my live show as personal as possible, and just try to embrace the unpredictability of being out on the road.
Do you have any plans to tour here in the UK?
If all goes as planned, I should be in the UK in January before heading over to the continent for more shows later in the month. I’m working with a record label called Road Sweet Road out of Switzerland filled with lots of very talented friends of mine, they will be releasing The Grand Scheme Of Things on vinyl for European-release in the winter and I will be out that month promoting the release. It’s a strange thing being an American artist and wanting to come over to Europe for the first time because it seems so overwhelming, like where do I start. (Ha Ha) I’ve gotten really good at self-booking shows in the States, but personally as far as the booking side of things go I have never branched out from my little American network of indie bands and songwriters. I’m hoping i can find a good promoter in England to help me out with finding the right places and get a solid couple weeks of shows locked in over there.
And finally, what are your plans for the rest of the year?
I have lots of awesome things in the works aside from the tour in Europe. I really wanna get The Grand Scheme Of Things out there and into everyone’s ears before Christmas, when I head overseas, so lots of new shows will be announced over the next month or so. I have been laying pretty low for the summer focusing on getting everything set for the fall. Lots of tour dates are locking in around the States and Canada. I also recently started a new project with some old friends of mine that I sing and play guitar in as well, so you’ll wanna keep your eyes out for that, it’s a lot more amplified but not too far off base, I still play the acoustic guitar on some songs. (Ha Ha) We’re gonna start releasing more information on that project in the next couple months.
Thanks for chatting with us, Roger. Good luck with the album.
Thank you, Take Care, And Be Well! XO
Check the official website out here: www.dandelionsnow.com
Copyright Lights Go Out Zine. Interview conducted July 2010.
Thanks to Claire, Roger + Willow @ Here We Go Agency
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