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By Tiffany Razzano
This Brooklyn native, who has played over 500 shows since 2003, supporting acts such a Lou Barlow, the Get Up Kids, Gordon Gano from the Violent Femmes, Bright Eyes and Brand New, is set to headline his first national tour with a major label.
"This upcoming tour will be the most intense," he said. "Before it was very do-it-yourself. This time it's with a major label. There's more structure. It'll be more demanding."
Devine has moved up in the world since his emo band Miracle of '86 broke up. He put out his first solo album, Circle Gets the Square, on indie label Immigrant Sun Records, followed by Make the Clocks Move and Split the Country, Split the Street, both of which came out on Triple Crown Records. With the completion of these two albums, Devine fulfilled his contract with Triple Crown and found himself without a home. That's when Capitol began courting him after seeing him at both SXSW and CMJ music festivals.
"It was surreal. I was asked to come out and play in L.A. for the president of Capitol Records," he said. "I played No Time Flat, which has cuss words and is overtly political. I thought no way ... and shockingly [I was] picked."
So far the experience with a major label has been a good one for Devine. He reports no artistic infringement has occurred; in fact, he says that this new album is exactly the record he wanted to make. He, however, is not "naive." He knows that "art and commerce are not supposed to be good friends." He admits though that his relationship with Capitol has allowed him some security and to get his life together. "So far I'm happy with the relationship," he said. "But we'll see how long it lasts."
Working with producer Rob Schnapf, who's worked with Elliott Smith, Beck and Guided by Voices, in Los Angeles, Devine put together the record he wanted to make. "We made something mindblowing," he said, "It was a total dream to work with [Schnapf]. It was an incredible experience."
Devine, who is known for his intensely personal, as well as political, songs, says these songs of a political nature are not written "tactical[ly]." Politics are "just something [he] writes about" but he also writes about a wide variety of topics - love, life, religion, people, places and things - pretty much everything. This coming album will have four overtly political songs on it though. "I'm not Noam Chomsky. I'm just a concerned, freaked out citizen," he said. "It's scary that the world is revolting against itself. Our militaristic government is imposing its dominance on the world and that's scary as shit."
With older brothers and sisters, Devine grew up surrounded by music, from Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson to Kiss blaring from the radios in his Brooklyn home. From his mother he found the influence of singers/songwriters, such as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez; through his father he was introduced to doo wop.
His life, however, was set to change when he was in the second grade. "That's when I got into Guns 'N' Roses," he said. "I heard Sweet Child O' Mine and thought it was the coolest thing ever." He started his first band, Arsenic, in the fourth grade, playing plastic, toy instruments that played prerecorded music when a button was pressed. He would sing his own lyrics over this music.
He began Miracle of '86 in junior high school under the name Delusion. Delusion was what he called "a Guns 'N' Roses rip-off band, which graduated to a Nirvana rip-off band, and to a Pavement rip-off band." As Devine got older he got more into the indie music scene, discovering bands like Pavement as well as the first wave of emo bands, such as Sunny Day Real Estate, back when "emo still meant something." He said, "[These bands] could say whatever they felt and they might have looked silly but they just didn't care."
He was most influenced by Dylan and Elliott Smith. Smith took everything Devine loved about the emo scene, but he did it more artistically rather than making his lyrics seem as though they were merely a page torn out of his diary. Both Dylan and Smith took songwriting to a different playing field - a playing field Devine aspired to get to.
A voracious reader and wordsmith by nature, Devine was always most fascinated by the lyrics of a song. Whether writing stories or poem or letters to Nintendo with ideas for video games, he had a way with words from a young age. "I discovered that you can write songs like your favorite literature," he said. But he admits that he is just "obsessed with words, whether it be Gabriel Garcia Marquez to the way a sign is worded on the subway," he said. "Brain to tongue, the way people communicate just fascinates me. Books, movies, songs and people are what interest me."
Though Devine is a native New Yorker, having lived here his entire life, he's never felt part of a cultured scene. He feels that the New York scene is mostly constructed by the media. "The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes, Longwave ... I don't know if those guys hang out, but that's what we're told," he said.
The reason he's never been a part of any larger scene is because he's too hard to be labeled as any one genre. "My music is a little too folky for the indie scene, too indie for the emo scene, too emo for Pitchfork," he said. "I fall right between everything. That's cool though. It helps me not to be pigeonholed."
"I must be a nightmare for marketers," Devine said, "but to me I'm just a guy writing songs. I'm just myself."
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ith his latest album, tentatively called Put Your Ghost to Rest, mixed and mastered and being prepared for release on Capitol Records this summer, Kevin Devine seems ready to come into his own.
