An Interview With Dylan LeBlanc: Within and Without

Dylan LeBlanc’s new record Renegade came out last June and it represents both a departure from his past work and perhaps the most logical next step for someone who had firmly established himself as a singer-songwriter. It embraces a Petty-inspired rock n’ roll, especially on tunes like “Born Again,” one of my favorites on the record. Dylan is playing Great Scott on Friday and we got to catch up about the sometimes slow process of writing songs, the challenge of addiction, and the place of music in healing.

RLR: You wrote Renegade in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana and you said in another interview that it’s really hard to write on the road. What does it look like for you when you get into that more secluded space–are you getting up and writing for an hour, taking a break, taking a walk? 

DL: I was having such a hard time. You know how it is when you get hired to do something; when something starts to feel like a job it makes it ten times harder. I had a deadline and to be honest with you, I didn’t have a whole lot of songs to pull from. We stayed on the road so much with Cautionary Tale, so I was having to come from a fresh start. I had basically a year to write the songs and I’m a slow writer most of the time.

My day started like this: there was a coffee shop down the street, called Joie de Vive, because it’s in Cajun country. I’d walk to the shop, get myself a cup of coffee, and I would just leisurely make my way back the house and kind of scatter my thoughts and think about subject matter and things I wanted to write. I had my rhyming dictionary, my guitar, and I still write with pen and paper—something about that just makes me feel good. I used to have a typewriter, but that thing was just too much of a mess. Pen and paper always works. I’d start writing around nine in the morning. And it’s really hard to get your mind flowing but I’d be playing on my guitar and going through these old voice memos of things I’d hummed on the road. The iPhone is probably one of the most amazing things for a songwriter, because you can just record your melodies and thoughts right then. And I was trying to find what I wanted to say and it was hard at the time because I didn’t have a whole lot to say at that moment. It was a bit difficult. So I would write just bullshit. Just word vomit on paper for a couple of hours. And then I’d get distracted and watch something on Netflix, you know how that goes. Netflix has almost ruined my career. [laughs]

RLR: As you’re vomiting on paper, one of the hardest things to do is to turn off that inner critic that tells you it’s crap as you’re writing it. Is that something you have to deal with or are you able to say in that moment, “I’m not that attached to this,” and just let it flow?

DL: I wish I was a writer that wasn’t that attached. My dad’s a songwriter and I called him because I was having the worst writer’s block. And my dad’s a 9-5 songwriter on Music Row, so he literally has to write songs every day. He’s definitely not attached to the things he’s writing and he was like, “Dude, you just gotta get comfortable with the fact that not everything you write is going to be a complete and total masterpiece. Because that’s not the reality of the situation.” And I want everything to be just incredible, all the time, and I always feel like I’m settling at the end of the day—and I think every artist feels that way in some shape or form.

RLR: I know you wanted this record to be more of a rock album. How conscious of that were you as you were writing the songs?

DL: I was extremely conscious of that, and I think that contributed to how hard it was for me to do it. I’ve always just written from whatever I wanted to do, but I was thinking about other people while I was writing the songs. I tailor-wrote those songs for the band I work with, The Pollies. I was thinking: what can they do? what are we all best at? I also wanted songs for a really cool live show. I had never written that way before, I’d only written for myself. It was definitely outside of the box for me.

 

 RLR: Sometimes it’s good to be outside of your comfort zone. What do you think you learned in the process?

DL: I had listened to all these great records and I had bought this book by Paul Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting. I had also read all these different interviews about Paul Simon’s process and Tom Petty’s process and the amount of work; I remember one of Tom Petty’s lines, something like ‘songwriting is like fishing, and there are days you go out and you catch all this fish, and there’s some days where you just don’t.’ I also learned to forgive myself, for one, for not being able to live up to my own expectations. I had to lower my expectations because I am my own worst critic with whatever I do. Cautionary Tale was a successful album and I wanted this one to be successful too, so I was having to train my brain to stop thinking about the end goal and just get back to being a sixteen year old kid, writing in my bedroom because I loved it. That’s where the magic happens anyway, when you can remind yourself: I love doing this, this is something I’ve worked hard to be able to do. It was a lot of self-discovery in the writing and making of the album, for sure. 

RLR: One of the threads in this album seems to be this mode of reflection in the midst of chaos or disruption. The title track starts with sisters discussing this guy who’s; “Domino” features this empathy for a prostitute who is caught; lovers in bed, soothing each other. That opening line from “Born Again” – “well it’s hard to see the past when you’re back up against the wall” feels like an anchor for this record. Lyrically, it still feels like the deep breaths before the shit hits the fan again. Can you talk about how you think about these songs in conversation with each other?

DL: My whole life has been made up of consequences and reflection. Everything about my entire life has been me fucking up and having to reflect on that. That sounds like a joke, but it’s not. I’ve been trying to get my shit together for a long time, and I think that probably has subconsciously worked its way into how I write songs and I’m also one of those people who can only write what I feel. 

This is the last year of my twenties, and I’m hoping this’ll be the year I get it together.

Since I was about twenty-four, I knew there was something wrong with me and I needed to make some changes.  The songs I love the most reveal emotions and things within ourselves. I used to think people were stupid when they said, “music is therapy,” I was like, “What the fuck you talking about?” But it’s true, it’s these things we need to feel in order to move on with our lives and music helps us do that. In order for me to like something, someone has to have that voice that you can tell has seen a lot of hardship, and has the conviction of someone who’s suffered. Maybe that’s because of my own inner disturbances that I need to have that in order to enjoy it, but that’s the way it is for me. And this was a tough record to write, I’m not gonna lie.  

RLR: You take on, or examine, different personas on this record. I’m thinking about “Domino” or the sisters talking at the beginning of “Renegade.” I remember Jason Isbell saying it was “Angel From Montgomery” that taught him that he could write from other perspectives. Can you talk about the advantages and challenges of doing that?

DL: I was always so afraid of my reputation. I could act out. I’d get drunk and then pee in a bar, and have an altercation, and I’d be afraid of what people would be saying about me the next day. When you think of the perspectives on Renegade, I was trying to think of how people look at other people, the way that I think other people look at me. Also, it kind of holds me accountable in some ways, to understand where I’ve been wrong. That song [“Renegade”] is about a fuck up. He’s a gangster, he’s getting in trouble, and she’s drawn to him because of that. But everyone knows it’s a doomed-to-fail relationship. In my earlier years, I was in one of those. But I think finding a self-discovery and telling stories through other people’s eyes is something I think every songwriter can’t help but do.

 

 RLR: For what it’s worth, I know exactly the feeling you’re talking about. I’ve been sober for nineteen years now, but what you’re describing is exactly how I felt when I was drinking. You’ve been really candid about going sober, having relapses, but moving forward. But life on the road is super hard and stressful. What are some things you’ve found to be essential on the road to help support you?

DL: I’m in AA, and I’ve been in and out of it for many years. I’ve struggled in my adult life to get a year sober. I never could maintain. There was always this reservation in me, somewhere deep down inside that I could handle it. In AA, they say, “a phenomenon, a craving both physical and mental, and no will when it comes to the first drink.” That exists so strong inside of me. Why there’s an allergy to the alcohol I’m not sure. But that doesn’t really matter. I had it put to me: “Hey man, you don’t drink worth a shit,” and it keeps proving true. I can have fun for 8-9 months, and then something happens, and my life starts to slowly fall apart. Thank god there’s people out there who really…[pause]….it’s unbelievable to me that I still get to do what I do. It’s hard to talk about because I am ashamed of myself. But I think I put a lot of that into the music as well, my own shortcomings. And I feel the overwhelming need to shed light on other people who are suffering too. I’m not a martyr or some shit like that. You know how it goes—the disease of alcoholism has you hurt a lot of people.

But getting back to the record, a lot of my experience goes into the songwriting process and I use music to get me through. And I’m so grateful that I get to do what I do and make a living. It’s also a fairly self-indulgent process for people like me who need to stand in front of people and sing and play guitar. And they need that applause and self-assurance and that constant approval of other people. But when you get down to why you do it, it’s because you love it. And for writing Renegade, getting to that place was a little bit harder because I had all these expectations.

RLR: It’s a great record, Dylan. I don’t want to argue with you about what it feels like to you, but in terms of that approval or self-indulgence, you’re voicing things that a lot of people can’t put into words, so from this side of things, it’s not so much approval as gratitude.

DL: Yeah. I think this country is in a process of waking up. Everybody keeps saying “stay woke.” And I think people really want change and they’re voicing it. And this interview’s getting less about music and more about life, but someone told me this and I thought it was fucking outstanding: if everyone would take care of their inner pain, then collectively, on a global scale, you would see things naturally start to change. Because as within, so without; you can’t transmit something you haven’t got.

 

 I couldn’t do anything different when I was drinking, because I was sound-ass asleep. Learning to understand that, it’s not an excuse, it’s the way it is. If you don’t know, you don’t know and there’s a lot of people out there that don’t know they don’t know, and I was one of them who didn’t know I didn’t know. [Laughs] And I still don’t know hardly anything, but I do know when I create, it has to be from a place of self-discovery; it has to benefit me in some way so it can possibly benefit someone else.

RLR: This idea makes me think of that line in “Lone Rider”—“I’d rather give you my heart than a piece of my mind.” You talk about staying woke, but it’s also about staying open to other people.

DL: Absolutely. Living and letting live—that’s a great slogan, to allow people to be who they are. Who they want to love, what color their skin is, just allowing them to live in peace and allowing yourself to do that as well. Where all the hate comes from, I think, is people growing up with these ideologies that don’t allow themselves to be who they are. So it’s giving yourself a chance to be as you are. You can’t look for something that’s already there and I do believe peace is within everyone, you just have to reach down and find it.

Catch Dylan on Friday at Great Scott or at Higher Ground in Burlington on Saturday. More tour dates are here. And definitely spin Renegade–it really bears relistening and going deep with this one.