David Duchovny on His Debut Album

David Duchovny on His Debut Album


Baltin
Writer
September 25, 2015




Photo by Adam Bradley

David Duchovny began playing guitar a few years ago while still working on the now-defunct Showtime show Californication. When I visited Duchovny on set, twice, he wasn’t looking to make an album because as he put it at the time, “I may be learning guitar, but I’ll never be able to sing. So I would say no, there are some things that God has prohibited from the beginning.”

A few years later, though, Duchovny is releasing his debut album, Hell Or Highwater. So what changed? “These are my songs and I’m telling my story, so I should be able to put them over. I should be able to make you feel them,” he says.

That he does on the impressive debut, an album marked by both his sincerity, evident on songs like “Stars,” and the diversity, from the country-esque tinge of “Stars” to the crunching finale, “Positively Madison Avenue.”

For Duchovny, Hell Or Highwater is the next step in a creative renaissance that also includes a recent novel, Holy Cow; and of course his continuing acting career that includes a return to the X-Files with a six-episode arc and the upcoming Aquarius on NBC. Yahoo Music spoke at length with Duchovny about making music, meeting Mick Jagger, and why Fox Mulder will never play guitar.



Yahoo Music: What was the moment in making this album that you realized you would put out music?

Duchovny: It was working with Keaton [Simons] and hearing what they can do with compressing your voice a little bit and making it sound better than it does when it comes out of my own head; and hearing that even if I don’t have the range of this person or that person or the melodic quality of this person or that person – these are my songs and I’m telling my story. And since I wrote them I get to sing them first. If anybody else wants to sing them now that’s cool, but I get to sing them first.

Were there any moments in the writing that surprised you?

Totally, the act of sitting down and writing a novel or a song is really the act of trying to figure out what you’re thinking or what you’re feeling, in many ways. You don’t sit down because you have something to say, you sit down to figure out what you want to say, what you need to say. So the songs were surprising to me as they came out.

Were there any songs in particular that really surprised you?

Honestly, they all kind of surprised me. The first two songs I wrote were “The Things” and “Stars,” so “The Things” kind of started like, “I want to just keep repeating ‘The Things,’ see what kind of song that makes.” Like, “The thing is, the thing is, the thing is, these things.” And it was like, “That sounded like a song.” So I wrote that, but then “Stars,” the idea that these stars are dead that we’re looking at, that the light is taking so long to get to us that that the star has died. Then I just thought about love and life that way. I get emotionally affected by that song still when I sing it or listen to it. It’s a very kind of apt human condition to me, that song.

Will you be able to play this stuff live?

I gotta be. I’ll be on The Today Show playing live, I’ll play the whole album live on May 12. I’ve been rehearsing with the band and I keep saying, “It’s gonna be the live experience, you’re gonna get all the sharps and flats you want. You’re gonna get the songs, it’s not gonna be the record, you’re gonna get the songs.” I’m not the kind of guy that when I go to a concert I want to hear the album, I want to hear the band.



Yahoo.com