Dean Wareham on Writing Music in a World on Fire
Best known as lead vocalist of Galaxie 500, Dean Wareham has a new solo album. He spoke to Jacobin about what it means for music to be political in times when it’s hard to watch the news.
Dean Wareham performs on stage at Sala Apolo on May 9, 2014, in Barcelona, Spain. (Jordi Vidal / Redferns via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Christopher J. Lee
“Bombs and bullshit fill the air” is the line that opens “Yesterday’s Hero,” a track from Dean Wareham’s new solo album, That’s the Price of Loving Me. It isn’t difficult to grasp the reference to Gaza, though it may be surprising to hear Wareham deliver an unvarnished sentiment of this kind. His latest album is infused with politics in a way that makes transparent a side of Wareham that has long existed, if not always expressed directly.
Wareham is best known as the founder and lead vocalist for Galaxie 500, a canonical dream pop act during the late 1980s that channeled influences like the Modern Lovers and Joy Division to become the platonic ideal of what an indie rock band should be. He went on to establish Luna, which similarly defined the New York scene during the 1990s through a sequence of stylish albums that included guest musicians like Tom Verlaine of Television and Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground. Wareham wrote about these heady years in Black Postcards (2008), a characteristically understated memoir that nonetheless revealed the trials and thrills of becoming an influential musician before digital streaming changed everything.
Since moving to Los Angeles in 2013, Wareham has focused on his solo work, recording with his wife, Britta Phillips, as well as acting occasionally and composing film soundtracks, specifically for director Noah Baumbach. One song from their new LP, “The Cloud is Coming,” was originally written for Baumbach’s recent adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise. Closing the album, it has the refrain “I see no difference/Between the blue and the red/The cloud is coming for us all,” imparting a despondent, if not completely pessimistic, state of mind that Wareham has increasingly articulated in his latest recordings.
Wareham’s solo album from 2021, I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A., marked this political turn with tracks like “The Last Word” (about Eleanor Marx), “Red Hollywood,” and — inspired by Norman Mailer’s long ago political novel — “Why Are We in Vietnam?”
That’s the Price of Loving Me follows suit with songs about student activism and the pro-Palestinian encampments, including “New World Julie” and “Bourgeois Manqué” (“Forty thousand dead/But the students are unruly/So they’re suspending kids instead”), as well as a cover version of Nico’s mournful “Reich der Träume” (“Realm of Dreams”). On this latter track, sung in German, Wareham messages a desire to escape from the present moment, in addition to reflecting his long-standing affection for the Velvet Underground.
All these songs are delivered in the pop perfectionist style that Wareham is known for, creating an uncomfortable, if also beguiling, tension between the bright surface of his music and the darker themes underneath.
Over Zoom, Wareham is similarly a study in contrasts. Betraying, perhaps, his education at Dalton and Harvard, he conveys a cerebral, even professorial, air with his home office cluttered by books and a wall-mounted electric guitar. His hair is tousled like he just rolled out of bed, a casual rock-star look he has nonetheless managed to sustain for several decades. He is quick to drop names in conversation, whether Julian Barnes, Eric Hobsbawm, or Edward Said. He spoke to Christopher J. Lee about the new album, his career, and why his songwriting has become more openly political.
A Political Education
You were born in Wellington, New Zealand, and grew up in New York City. How did these contexts contribute to your political education and your education generally?
Yes, born in New Zealand, then spent much of the ’70s in Sydney, Australia. One early political event that I experienced, at the tender age of twelve, was the ouster of Australian Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam during the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975, which was carried out by the Queen’s representative and reportedly with the help of the CIA.
This history is alluded to in The Falcon and the Snowman, which is about the young spy Christopher Boyce; while working a desk job at [the aerospace company] TRW, he was shocked to learn that the Americans were meddling in Australian affairs. Whitlam was not a socialist, just a Labor Party politician, but he had started to question Australian involvement in the Vietnam War and Australian membership in the British Commonwealth. I arrived in New York City in 1977 — the summer of the blackout and the summer that Elvis died, as it so happened. We lived on 75th between 3rd and Lexington.
You connected with music quickly when you were in your teens. Was Dalton a part of that?
I guess that’s the age when you get most excited about music and form your own opinions — when you’re fifteen years old. There was an incredible music scene in New York, and I had this drama teacher, Van Gosse. I don’t even think he had graduated from college, but he was also a musician, and had landed a job teaching drama at Dalton. He turned me and my friends onto Television, Talking Heads, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. He also staged a production of Danton’s Death, [Georg] Büchner’s play about the French Revolution.
Looking back, I’ve come to realize now that my German teacher at Dalton was also very influential. There were only four of us in her class, but she had us reading Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann and studying German expressionism. I became obsessed with Brecht.
What about him?
The plays, the poetry, the politics: his whole life. I think he’s someone who casts a long shadow, and it extends to rock and roll. Even [Bob] Dylan was seriously interested in Brecht, his songs were an influence, alongside Woody Guthrie. People don’t talk about it that much. But even “The Times They Are a-Changin’” is extracted from something that Brecht had written.
Would you say you became politicized in high school then, despite the elitism of Dalton?
By the time I finished high school, I considered myself on the Left. I listened to the Clash and especially Sandinista! I was kind of obsessed with Joe Strummer in addition to Bertolt Brecht. Right before I graduated, in May or June of 1981, I saw the Clash during their famous run of twelve nights at Bonds in Times Square, which was supposed to be six nights, but then the fire department came in saying you’ve way oversold this place, and they shut it down.
Grandmaster Flash opened, and they got booed off the stage to racist chants. It was horrible. Strummer came out on stage looking like he wasn’t very happy to be there. Kurt Cobain dealt with that, too, like he didn’t like some of his fans. Some group was set up in the lobby selling left-wing newspapers about Nicaragua, that was a big issue at the time.
You went on to Harvard. What was student activism like there at the time? You touch upon this topic on your new album.
It was the 1980s; the whole country had shifted to the Right, so it was not a fun time to be a campus radical, part of me wished I’d been there in 1969. The big issues were Nicaragua and El Salvador, the wars going on down there. And divestment from South Africa. I didn’t really take part in that. I’m skeptical of the claim that the boycott movement helped bring down the South African government. I feel like it collapsed from apartheid’s own contradictions, not because students were protesting on campuses in the United States.
There were a few Maoists around, specifically the RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party, USA]; I think maybe Tom Morello [of Rage Against the Machine] hung around them at Harvard, but they were particularly awful on sex, on gay rights, they considered homosexuality to be a bourgeois sickness.
I got involved with a Trotskyist group, the Spartacist League (SL); they were perhaps the most hated group on the Left, but they were more pro-sex for sure and had a number of gay cadre.
They had a knack for coming up with slogans that would completely draw a line between them and the rest of the Left. Like “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” — arguing that the Soviets were on the correct side in that civil war. Or the Iranian Revolution: I think a lot of the Left tailed after the Iranian Revolution. Michel Foucault famously sang its praises whereas the SL pointed out that this would end very badly for Iranian socialists. I feel like that’s an ongoing issue, when leftist groups lend support to reactionary theocratic movements.
Anyway, at least they had me reading history every week, studying the Russian Revolution, the Vietnam War, reading that complemented my other, formal education at Harvard. The problem was that they had all the answers to everything. It wasn’t quite academic. It was like: this is the correct line on this, and this is the line on that, and this is the line on Kronstadt [the rebellion against the Bolshevik government in March 1921]. I remember one of my professors said to me, you’re not questioning anything.
What did you major in at Harvard?
Social studies. There were no professors in social studies, the idea being that if you wanted to be in the social sciences, you should study economics, history, anthropology, sociology, statistics; you should have some kind of knowledge of all these things. I wrote my senior thesis on Rosa Luxemburg and the history of the German Communist Party around World War I. I remember my teaching assistant, Debra Satz [currently Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University], who was very helpful to me.
I still read history, Hobsbawm, people like that. Hobsbawm of course was long a member of the Communist Party. He was also a music critic, jazz specifically. He purposefully did not write about the twentieth century for a long time because he knew they would kick him out of the party if he did; you couldn’t write honestly about these things if you wanted to remain in the CP. I’ve recently been reading Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism. My son told me to read this, and I think I read it at the time. That’s an excellent book.
When you finished Harvard, what did you consider doing? Or were you further immersed in music by then?
I went away to Germany for a year with my girlfriend, who had a Fulbright scholarship. I practiced guitar every day and taught English to workers in the shipyards in Kiel. Then I came back to New York City and worked various temp jobs. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my life, but I wanted to start a band, to give it a try.
So that’s how Galaxie 500 was founded in 1987. I was living in New York. But Naomi [Yang] and Damon [Krukowski] came down for the summer, and we started playing together. I knew them from high school and from college. Damon was in my class. Naomi is a year younger. Things went on from there.
The Role of the Musician in Society
I want to skip ahead to discuss your songwriting and how it’s become more political. You’ve long displayed a literary bent with songs like “Moon Palace” and “Great Jones Street” from your years with Luna, referencing Paul Auster and Don DeLillo, respectively. We have also discussed how DeLillo has grappled with the role of the artist in society in novels like Great Jones Street and Mao II. What is your take on how the artist or musician gets commercialized and becomes alienated from their labor?
I read Great Jones Street in 1986 when I came back from Germany and lived just a couple of blocks from Great Jones Street in the East Village. I would go to Great Jones Cafe all the time. I think it’s the funniest novel about a rock and roll musician and the best. It’s just good about the management and the whole situation. It’s very funny.
You see that all the time: musicians slowly losing control without even quite meaning to. Sometimes you must remind yourself: you are the artist, it’s not a collaboration, remember that when talking to your label.
That said, there’s no escaping the business side of it. I have a song on my last record called “Cashing In.” I remember sitting in Tompkins Square Park talking to filmmaker Richard Kern – we had kids about the same age — and I mentioned that Richard Hell just sold his archives. “He’s selling out,” I joked. “He’s not selling out,” said Kern, “he’s cashing in.”
I don’t know what selling out would be as an artist anymore. I used to refuse to dress up for photo shoots. Sometimes they’d want to shoot you for a magazine and ask, will you wear this fancy suit? And I’m like, no, I’m not going to. I’m going to wear my regular clothes. Today I think, who cares? It’s just a photo in a magazine.
Do you think this question of selling out still exists for younger musicians and bands, or is it a totally different scene?
It’s different now because when it comes to, say, getting your music in a TV show or advertisement, that’s now one of the few sources of income for recording artists, it’s hard to blame people for taking that money. You can’t sell CDs anymore, not in meaningful quantities. Still, you draw the line somewhere.
An experience I have quite frequently is walking into a store, and they’ll be playing the Ramones. When I was in high school, that would have blown my mind. But now they play “Beat on the Brat” at baseball games. Punk has become an accepted part of the culture.
A Heavy Year
Mao II contrasts with Great Jones Street insofar that it’s about an artist who’s trying to reengage with the world, though he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing. He just knows that he has this motivation to connect. Your recent solo albums reflect a similar motivation to engage with the world, marking a departure from your past work.
My life is at a different stage. I’m not in my thirties, singing about living the fun life in New York City. And that’s probably not a fair summary of my lyrics with Luna, but I get tired of writing about my own life; there are other things to write songs about, too.
It’s been a really heavy year, year and a half, a year where it’s hard to watch the news, the genocidal war on Palestinians, and the tumult on American campuses from students who are just doing what they can to draw attention to it (though I don’t necessarily think that “divestment” would accomplish much). So, those events found their way into the songs that I wrote in 2024. With “New World Julie” I was trying to write an optimistic song about a better world. But then I’m also writing obliquely about politicians who talk about peaceful solutions while funding war (“bombs and bullshit”). And in “Bourgeois Manqué,” I reflect both on my own life but also draw on a chant that went up on campuses: “Forty thousand dead — but they’re suspending kids instead.”
Going further with the idea of the songwriter as witness: pop music isn’t always taken seriously from a political vantage point, but its subversiveness can be underestimated. Furthermore, pop music can also be a source of reprieve during difficult times. What is your take on the social and political value of pop music?
I can’t imagine life without pop music. I think about the Velvet Underground’s live recordings at The Matrix during the height of the Vietnam War, playing these shows right when [Richard] Nixon announced a draft registration. The Velvet Underground helped process what was going on. Lou Reed winds up singing “Heroin” with the lines “I really don’t care anymore about/All the politicians making crazy sounds/And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds.” He’s not an overtly political songwriter, but that’s a great line. The last time I ran into him in person was at [the radio station] WBAI in New York, during the Occupy Wall Street protests.
And pop music can offer things without being overtly political. You can make a case that in the early 1980s, the more subversive music was not punk rock, but New Romantic bands (Haircut 100, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club) who offered a different way of living your life, or at the very least a different way of cutting your hair; they were ahead of the curve on gender fluidity for sure.
It’s for each artist to figure out what they want to do with a song, if you want to make people dance, or think, or cry.
When I think about it, I have an urge, now more than ever, to bear witness not only to the present but to the past, to place some historical references in the songs. I talk about this in an essay I wrote for CounterPunch about my song “The Last Word,” which regards the suicide of Eleanor Marx. Maybe it’s similar to choosing a cover song, an unknown one that needs to be rescued before it, too, dies from obscurity.