Audio By Carbonatix
On the 2002 album Circle Meets the Square, Kevin Devine
included a song titled “Protest Singer,” and the tag has stuck to him
ever since, despite his lyrical confession that “I’m only protesting
myself.” But while plenty of his subsequent compositions have grappled
with societal injustice and other crimes against humanity, he considers
his work to be as personal as it is political. “If you can boil eighty
songs over all these records down to ten words or something,” he says,
“it’s me trying to make sense out of myself and trying to make sense of
everything else.”
That’s a big task for anyone to undertake, and at times, Devine
isn’t sure he’s up to the challenge. He admits to insecurity about his
capacity for truly understanding the issues of the day, his decision to
express his beliefs musically as opposed to manning the barricades
full-time, and even the long-term prospects for his musical career,
which suffered a blow when his excellent major-label debut, 2006’s
Put Your Ghost to Rest, succumbed to a killer combination of
poor timing and bad luck. Not that he’s ready to surrender just yet.
Once Ghost really was at rest, he formed his current group,
wittily dubbed the Goddamn Band, and wrote the songs for Brother’s
Blood, an occasionally difficult but consistently rewarding album
on the independent Favorite Gentlemen imprint. According to Devine, the
sonic diversity of his new material, which ranges from the gentle
strums and sighs heard throughout “Hand of God” to the title cut’s epic
guitar histrionics, was nurtured by what he sees as the open-mindedness
of his loyal listeners. “I don’t ever feel conscious of what I’m
writing, because I don’t feel like they’re expecting me to be something
specific,” he notes. “I feel like I can be whatever I want, and however
I want.”
Eclectism was Devine’s birthright. His father, who died in 2003,
served and protected as a New York City police officer, while his
mother, a registered nurse who works in a gastroenterological cancer
ward, once qualified as something of a hippie. “My dad’s stock joke
about my mom is that she would have been the one at the protest rally
in Central Park in 1969, and he’d be the guy who’d be cracking her
friends’ heads with a nightstick,” he recalls.
As a kid, Devine didn’t spend a lot of time questioning the cop
culture of his upbringing — but that began to change in tandem
with the evolution of his musical taste. The cassettes he’d purchased
through a Columbia House subscription (like Debbie Gibson’s Electric
Youth) didn’t seem all that interesting after he heard Nirvana’s
Nevermind, which he calls the “skeleton key” that unlocked a
world far different from the one he’d come to know in the Bay Ridge,
Brooklyn, neighborhood where he spent his formative years. “If you’re
drawn to anything outside the usual framework when you’re young,” he
says, “punk rock and indie rock and these other things, they feel a
little bit like, ‘Oh! There are other weird people. It’s not just
everybody who looks like they’re on Growing Up Gotti.'”
By his mid-teens, Devine was a regular in a Staten Island hardcore
scene heavily influenced by “Fugazi and Minor Threat and all that
Dischord stuff that’s very conscious of eradicating the barrier between
the band and the crowd,” he points out. “Going to shows where it would
cost $5 at the door but it would be $3 if you brought a can of food for
a food drive. Very socially minded people…. It was great to be around
kids who gave a shit about things like that.”
Nonetheless, Devine wasn’t quite ready to chuck convention entirely
in favor of a rock-and-roll lifestyle. In 1997 he enrolled at New
York’s Fordham University, emerging four years later with both a
journalism degree and a membership in Miracle of 86, a punky band named
for his beloved New York Mets. Obviously, something had to give —
and after promising freelance assignments from the New York
Times and the New York Post came to naught, he says, “I was
at a crossroads. It was either keep doing it and go to grad school and
get further in debt but try to make a go of this journalism thing, or
work part-time jobs and try to figure out how to do music.”
In the end, he chose to walk the latter path alone, as a solo artist
with a lo-fi emphasis. The aforementioned Circle Meets the
Square was recorded for just $1,000, with its successors, 2003’s
Make the Clocks Move and 2005’s Split the Country, Split the
Street, costing $2,500 and $7,500, respectively. But after Capitol
Records signed him, his circumstances improved by leaps and bounds.
Suddenly, he found himself in landmark Los Angeles facilities such as
Sunset Sound in the company of Rob Schnapf, a producer whose credits
included Beck and one of Devine’s musical heroes, Elliott Smith —
and the results were first-rate. Numbers such as “Brooklyn Boy” and “Go
Haunt Someone Else” retained the sensibility that had made his previous
offerings so fascinating even as they deepened and expanded his musical
vocabulary.
Too bad so few people got a chance to hear them. The album came out
around the time that Capitol merged with Virgin Records, creating
turmoil throughout the company. To make matters worse, staffers didn’t
quite know how to promote such a stylistically varied artist. “I can do
shows with bands like Stars and Okkervil River or whatever, and then do
stuff with bands like Brand New and KT [Tunstall],” he maintains. “And
I find that a strength — but it may not seem like a strength to a
marketing person.” True enough: “I got an assurance that I was going to
get to make a second record, and then the guy who made that assurance
was let go,” he says with a laugh.
Devine followed shortly thereafter, and by the time he had a deal in
place to capture Brother’s Blood, more than two years had passed
since his last trip to the studio. He was thrilled to be back in front
of a microphone, but the songs that emerged were often quite dark. Take
“Another Bag of Bones,” a horrific litany of shocking images: “It’s an
Argentine schoolgirl, gagged and bound/It’s a torture camp, it’s a long
way down.” Although these lines aren’t emblematic of Devine’s worldview
as a whole, he sees plenty of cause for pessimism. “There’s a lot of
scary shit out there,” he says.
Does making such statements in song constitute protest music?
Devine’s not sure, just as he’s uncertain how much of a difference it
makes. But he’s doing his best to keep his doubts at bay.
“Maybe for somebody like me, the point of me existing in that world
is to get somebody who wouldn’t think about these things to think about
them, and then to go and read the people who really know what the fuck
they’re talking about,” he says. “And that’s just as noble as anything
else. You can talk yourself in and out of reasons for why you should do
anything, or at least I can. But I think there’s plenty to get worked
up about. And you’ve got to understand that yours is just a drop in the
ocean, but it’s still your drop. It’s asinine and egotistical to think
that you’re going to be able to turn any kind of tide on your own, or
even that it’s your job. But it’s not asinine or egotistical to
care.”
