Dean & Britta: Not In It For The Money
Friday April 04, 2008 @ 02:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

By Matt Reeder

As rock musicians go, few have aged as well as Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips. That's not just to speak of how damn great they both look after all these years (both are 44). Finally freed from obligations to their former band Luna after breaking up in 2005, the husband-and-wife duo have successfully ventured into new musical projects — including scoring Noah Baumbach's 2005 indie film hit The Squid And The Whale — while continuing to improve on more traditional ones, as evidenced by the duo's sublime 2007 sophomore effort, Back Numbers. With Wareham's rock memoirs coming out in March, another scoring project underway for an Andy Warhol film exhibit in Pittsburgh this fall, and a North American tour currently in progress, the duo have proven that aging hasn't slowed them down one bit. ChartAttack recently caught up with Wareham over the phone from his home in New York City.

Dean & Britta Photo by Michael Lavine

ChartAttack: How does this particular musical arrangement — Dean & Britta — compare to working in your previous bands, Luna and Galaxie 500?
Dean Wareham: This is a set-up where we're in charge. We're not pretending that it's a democracy or that it's going to be a way of life for everyone. It's very different. Musically, it took a while on the road to actually feel comfortable playing the songs. With Luna, obviously, we had been playing for 12 years and so it was very easy to play live. This was more difficult at first, but by the time we got to Toronto on our last tour I felt like we had learned the songs and I felt really comfortable.

Do you still enjoy touring after all these years?
Um, you know, I enjoy it sometimes. This tour we did of Germany and Switzerland and Denmark last fall was like 14 shows in 15 days. That was grueling. But sometimes it's fun, and occasionally it's just depressing. That's what touring is like though — it's up and down. It's not good all the time.

With Dean & Britta it seems that you've ditched the typical rock band mold for something decidedly different: the man-woman duo. Was this a conscious choice? If so, what is musically special about duets in your view?
Initially, I had started working on a solo album in 2002. Along with drummer Matt Johnson, I recorded basic tracks for most of the songs on [our 2003 debut] L'Avventura. But then Britta started helping me, and I thought it would be more interesting, instead of the standard solo album by the singer, to record a bunch of duets — something no one else was really doing at the time. We had discovered, while recording "Mermaid Eyes" for the previous Luna album, that our voices sounded nice together. And we were incredibly lucky that we got to work with Tony Visconti, who turned the record into something special.

In addition to being bandmates, you and Britta are also married to each other. An old boss of mine used to warn me about working with your spouse. How's it working out for you guys?
It works out fine in all senses, actually. I guess if there's going to be trouble and if things start going south, then there are all kinds of ways it could cause problems. Britta was already in a band before with her first husband, but that didn't end very well. But we're not jealous of each other musically, so, so far so good. We both have different strengths. I guess I've written a lot more songs, and I write more of the lyrics, while Britta does more arranging.

We've come to expect a mix of covers and originals on Dean & Britta albums. Why do you take that approach?
It's easier to write five or six songs than it is to write 12. So I feel like you can pick a handful of covers that you already know are really good songs, and you can concentrate on a handful of originals. So there's no filler. At least that's the way it feels to me. And it's not like any of the songs we did are really that famous anyway so I'm sure they're like originals to most people. But the reason people started doing originals all the time wasn't out of artistic purity. The Beatles started doing it because you make more money. That's why the Rolling Stones started writing songs, too.

The recently released Variations remix EP aside, what can you tell me at this point about future Dean & Britta releases?
I can't tell you anything about future releases because there are no concrete plans. If we don't release a record this year, we'll at least make one this year. I'm not under any pressure. With Luna there was this constant pressure from the band, like "Quickly, let's go make another record." I don't really feel like I have to do that now. I feel like I'll make a record when the songs are ready. Sometimes when a band is signed to a multi-record deal you've got a decent amount of money coming in, but everyone's like, "Quick, quick we have to make a record. We need the money." It's not necessarily healthy.