INTERVIEW: DAVID NANCE

CHOPPING IT UP WITH THE OMAHA ROCKER

One of my favorite David Nance songs is a cover of “Silver Wings” by Merle Haggard and The Strangers. On it, Nance’s vocals, Beck-ish in their fullness and twang, rest above a slightly shambling backbeat, which stays steady throughout, even when shards of thick noise appear out of nowhere and play a kind of solo. The cover is a nice encapsulation of the mode Nance has been working in for the past decade. His music moves between dissonance and tunefulness, but it’s always American.

Though David grew up in Nebraska, I believe I met him in Los Angeles. His wife, Anna, was the co-founder of The Dog Show, a legendary conceptual store in Echo Park that I remember fondly for, among other things, the giant unicorn head that protruded out of its front facade. David and Anna have been back in Omaha for a minute now, and over the past decade, Nance has been on a steady tear, releasing everything from cover records to live records to more formal studio projects.

His newest record, under the name David Nance & Mowed Sound, comes out this Friday on Third Man Records. “Mock the Hours,” the album’s lead single, is one of the most dialed-in tunes he’s written to date. The song has 18-wheeler rhythmic drive and a chorus big enough to get burn on a classic rock station with a name like THE HAWK or THE EAGLE or THE FOX. A few weeks ago, we had a fun video chat. I got to say what’s up to Anna and meet their kid. 

The new record is coming out on Third Man. I saw that you once played at a minor league baseball stadium with Jack White. 

Yeah. It was pretty funny. We got offered two gigs and we turned one down, stupidly, because we had a gig in Chicago, a Trouble In Mind festival kind of thing. And we were the bottom feeder on it. But it was like, Oh, no, we got to honor that and turn down a big show in Shreveport. 

That’s it’s own weird thing—playing, I believe they're called C market shows, with big bands. 

It was sick, man. We did the Tulsa gig. There were like 5,000 people there. It was crazy. I've never done anything like that. 

Did you go over well? 

I think so. I was kind of surprised by how people liked it. It seems like you thrive in situations where there's mass hysteria, but I was just full out of body, like, I don't know what the fuck is going on here. There was one point where I forgot to say the fucking band name. I just said, I'm Dave. That's Jim. That's Kevin. And there was one point towards the end where I heard this chanting or in my mind, it was like, “get off stage, get off stage.” After the show, everyone was applauding and being really nice. So it was very confusing. But when we left, Anna was there and she's like, What the fuck is your problem? Why didn't you say the band name? That's what they were yelling. So you're really shooting yourself in the foot on that one. 

I've only played a handful of shows for really big audiences. And it felt like, Oh, I would have to do that 20 more times to figure out exactly how to do it right.

I felt like I wasn’t up there. I broke every string on the third song and then had another guitar that I broke immediately after that. So you're just winging it. But the big moments happen where there's just these massive fuck ups and you just got to roll with it. 

Are you doing any touring coming up?

Not as our group. Do you remember Kevin Donahue? He played in Yuppies. 

For sure.

Kevin and I have been playing music forever. And then this guy Jim Schroeder who plays guitar with me, us three, we back this woman up, Rosalie Middleman, who just goes by Rosali. We met her in Philly and she lives in North Carolina now. And she's got a record coming out on Merge and a booking agent and all that stuff. So we're doing a month with her, March to April. 

Well, you have a record coming out, though. 

We do have a record coming out. I know. Yeah, it's silly, right? You think I’d be more on it. I was booking some stuff for spring, but then a European booking agent hit me up, so I kind of put that stuff on hold. Booking agents have been hitting me up, which is crazy because I've always booked things myself. But yeah, we have a record coming out and we should be touring. But I haven't set anything up. So I'm a bad musician right now. 

What's it like out there right now? I feel like an ex-high school athlete when I ask musicians about what it's like out on the road. 

I feel like people are just as hungry, like just stoked. There's still good bands. There's tons of great bands right now. There's tons of great places to play. Yeah, I feel like it's just as good as it's ever been. 

Is it harder to book shows now? It seemed like for a while, things were pretty gridlocked. 

I've always worked like a rat and a leech. So I'm operating in different avenues—someone will ask us to go play somewhere and then I'll book something small. We played some gigs in Atlanta. So I had a friend in Boone, North Carolina set us up a show and then we played Birmingham, played Memphis. We operate at kind of a small level. So it's pretty easy. But Nance Band hasn't done a full three weeks or something like that. I've been attached to opportunities and making stuff around here, you know, like babies. 

Yeah. The actually important stuff.

Yeah. They creep up on you, but it's awesome. I don't know. I never thought I'd be a father. Now that I am, I’m like, What the fuck was I doing before? 

Has that changed how you've approached music? 

It's definitely made me more intentional about what I choose to do. I feel like a lot of the time before, I was just kind of blowing in the wind. Oh, there's something to do over here. I'll go do that. But now you got to really want to do the things you're doing out there. I feel like I would take any gig before. And now I'm a little more choosy. But it's fun taking any gig. Because that's where the wild shit comes from. 

Are you recording a lot of your shows when you tour? 

People record stuff and send it in. And I think I've released a few things where I found that someone recorded something on YouTube, so I just steal it from them and make a tape out of it. Maybe it's unethical, but I mean, they didn't ask to record me. So I don't feel like I have to ask to use their stuff, you know? 

Well, yeah. And nobody's making any money here. 

Nobody's making any money. Yeah. You know, I put out a tape and make a few bucks, but, you know, it's nothing serious. 

I love “Mock The Hours.” 

Oh, thanks, man. We spent a long, long time on this record. Kind of. We started working on it in 2021 with no opportunity to go anywhere. So we just spent a bunch of time making a record. We normally operated as a live band that was very minimal in our approach, where there's just a few instruments. But this one, we spent a lot of time, adding bells and whistles. Now we're like, I don't know how we replicate this. 

That's often an issue. You make a record and you have to almost reverse engineer it live. 

Totally. I'm really glad we've made the record, but thinking about playing shows with it—like, we're doing a release show where we have to have six people to do it. But otherwise we operate as a four piece and there's half the record we can't play because it just sounds like shit when you play it with four people. You need someone doing this extra percussion part, because that's like what makes the sound. 

“Mock The Hours” is so driven by piano.

We can't do it without a piano. We've tried it and it sounds terrible. So I guess we have to bring a piano on tour with us. 

So this is a funny question. I've always heard a lot of Beck in your voice. 

Beck? 

Yes. I was googling to see if anyone had compared you to Beck before, but I couldn’t find anything. And then I was listening to Negative Boogie, which I did listen to a ton when it first came out, and there's a Beck reference on that record, but I couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not.

What's the Beck reference? 

There's a reference to Midnite Vultures but that might just be totally coincidental. 

Like, a line? 

Yeah, but maybe you were just freestyling, I don't know. 

Holy shit, is it the first song where it's basically a rap? 

I gotta go back.

I would love for you to point that out, but no I've never been compared to Beck before.

I hear it so clearly in your voice, but maybe I'm just tripping hard here. 

No, I love it. I mean, I love Beck, I grew up with that stuff, but I never think about it when writing music or arranging. Okay, on one record there was a song like “One Foot in the Grave” that I really liked and I felt like I was trying to rip off, but then it turned into something else. That's maybe the only time where I've thought about Beck.

It’s amazing—you put something out there and somebody listens to it and they get something totally different than you intended. I hear it in your voice, but I hear it in the phrasing, too.

We definitely weren't thinking about Beck when we were making the new record, but I feel like it could be perceived that way. It’s nowhere near the Dust Brothers shit on those early Beck records, but there is an element of rhythm and crap that we never had before.

I’m curious about that Cure cover record.

That's the ninth cover album I've done and I feel like all the other ones I've done have a tongue-in-cheek or a jokey kind of element to them, maybe to guard myself or something, but this one, I felt like I took really seriously and was trying to be as sincere as possible and also kind of open myself up to when I was a teenager, how much I loved The Cure. I hadn't really listened to them in a while, but Disintegration has always been a huge record for me. And then here's the obvious Omaha connection with 311 covering “Love Song.”

When you grew up in Nebraska, was 311 a big deal?

They were fucking it, man. When I was, I don't know, eight, I remember hearing them on the radio, it was fucking cool. But yeah, it's huge, it's also a joke. It seems like they became a joke, you know, like they're getting memed or something. On tour someone was asking about 311. They said, Dude, I heard those guys have so much money that they own an island in Greece. It’s so funny, it's like telephone, you know, miscommunication, because there's a restaurant in Omaha called the Greek Islands that I believe one of them is part owner of. 

Amazing.

Isn’t that incredible? But yeah, 311, people definitely go apeshit. The bar I work at, every year, there's 311 day, where someone hosts a party and they just play the music. 

Some hometown bands are hated, but they have good standing? 

I mean, it's contentious, but they definitely have love here. 

There was probably a point during the indie rock era of Omaha when 311 was looked at a certain way. But that was a long time ago.

For sure. I mean, I'm not gonna say I'm above turning my nose up at it, but I'm not gonna lie, it was huge to me as a kid. There is that big renaissance with things like that—nü metal and the rap rock stuff that's super in vogue now. Does that blow you away?

I was pretty early to the rap rock revival.

Right, right. Do you feel offended in some way? Like, you were doing this so much before, but I feel like you had your own lane with it, and now it's the aesthetic of like Limp Bizkit or Deftones or whatever.

Zoomers are glomming onto a specific end of it. I think what I did was more indebted to early Kid Rock or Beastie Boys, plus a lot of other shit. That band Turnstile sounds a lot like 311.

Totally. I've definitely seen videos of them performing and the spectacle of it, everyone going nuts and jumping, that rules, it's sick to see people going nuts, but when someone played me Turnstile I was like, this just sounds like P.O.D., which blows my mind. I remember growing up as a kid, I associated all that music with the most hateful shit. Growing up around that sound in small town Nebraska, I had such a bad taste of it, but it's cool that it's being reclaimed by queer kids, you know, it's stripping away the power of that. 

And it’s complicated because a lot of those bands, if you trace their influences, they go back to hardcore music, so in a way it's a full circle moment for some of these styles to be back in a legitimate hardcore space.

Right, it's not like I should be the one talking about it, fuck my opinion of it, if people are happy getting into it.

I feel like there was a point when guitar music was in a real pit, and this is not to say that you make music that is really interfacing with this sort of Zoomer shoegaze, Deftones reality, but I will say it seems like kids are open to guitars now in a way that maybe wasn't true eight years ago.

Totally, I love that rock and roll is in this kind of embarrassing state, I feel like there's so much bullshit presented with rock and roll that it's kind of easy to see it. I think that's a really great place to be with it, because the real shit shines through, not saying that we're the real shit or whatever, because I can think of 100 other bands that play rock and roll incredibly and honestly and is a reflection of this time, and it's not some past worship, clothes thing.

I was trying to pin down any sort of a linear development in your music, because it kind of goes in and out—some records are more dissonant than others, some records kind of lean a bit heavier on classic American music. Have you seen a linear development in your records and your songwriting? Or are you kind of jumping around through these styles, always trying to figure something out? 

Earlier on, it came from an atonal point, just being naive to musical theory or knowing how to play an instrument. You're getting something out, you can make an abrasive noise on a guitar, and it does something, so I wrote like that for a while. But then I got more into songwriting and trying to make pretty music. I definitely came up through misanthropic music, I mean, that stems from the rap rock and shit. As much as I didn't like it, that is a part of me, and I searched for gnarlier forms of it. Music's always been therapeutic and, like most people, I have a lot of pain inside of me, so I was letting the music go out as a painful, cathartic expression. Now that I've grown older, I’m trying to be more intentional with songwriting and the energy that is put into it. The record before, Staunch Honey, I got into J.J. Cale, and so I was trying to make shit really mellow, you know, drum machines and not scream at all and try to sing as much as possible. I’ve been trying to sing more. I was a choir boy, so I grew up singing.

I can hear that, for sure.

Yeah, my grandpa was a singer, too, and he died recently, so I feel like I try to honor him, but I want to be more of a singer. It’s wild, my grandpa would sing at funerals and shit, and the week after he died, I had a friend whose son died and asked me to sing at his funeral. The fucking coincidence of that—it was like my grandpa left and I became him or something.

David Nance on Instagram and Bandcamp