“It’s the greatest moment, the second it goes sideways”: Zia McCabe on The Dandy Warhols’ new album
The longtime keyboardist of the Oregon rock group and solo DJ talks ‘Pin Ups’, the Warhols’ first full cover album, long-lost demos and the importance of free will.
They were psych-pop pioneers in the early 2000s. They’ve released fourteen albums, played with Bowie and created their own colossal recording studio. They’ve also put out multiple Top 40s and did Bohemian Like You, arguably one of the biggest alt-rock tunes of the last three decades.
At the end of this week, The Dandy Warhols unveil Pin Ups, their first full-length release comprising of covers; updating and Dandifying the likes of Bob Dylan, The Beatles and The Byrds. We got the chance to talk to Zia McCabe, longtime member of the group, keyboardist, occasional songwriter and solo DJ, about the new venture, and what keeps the group going all these years later.
Pin Ups is out in less than two months! How are you guys feeling?
Well, it’s something that we’ve wanted to do for ages. I took a running start at it a couple [of] times, and didn’t get anywhere. Then Peter [Holmström, guitarist and co-founder of the band] picked up the idea a little while later, and totally made it happen. So, really, Pete gets all the credit for this. Some of [the songs] — I don’t know how many are out there — were scattered around, digitally. These were all the pieces for when territories needed extra music, and we didn’t have extra songs written. We usually use every song we have for the album. Some bands are prolific and just have tons of extra stuff around, and we’re not that band. So for years, these covers have been going to different territories. And we’ve wanted to get them all in one place for a while. And we’re great at covers! I love our interpretations of other people’s music, so it’s a really fun thing to share.
How does it feel in the run-up to release, compared to your previous albums? Nervous at all?
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt nervous about an album coming out. No, because it’s not this thing that we just created, that we’ve got to get over the finish line. You have to set self-imposed deadlines if you have your own studio. You have to start getting things in motion that carry you over the finish line, because otherwise you’ll just never be done.
But with this one, you don’t really have that, because it’s a body of work that we just had to find on hard drives and gather, and get permission from everyone for. It was a totally different process. So it doesn’t bring that sense of completion; I’m sure Peter feels pretty good that he got all of this together. I’ve just done some interviews; I’ve done no heavy lifting on this. So I feel fine, I didn’t do anything [laughs]. I mean, okay, I did the video for Kiss Off, and that was fun.
Interesting to hear this isn’t the first time you attempted this project!
I’d say [we’ve tried] for the last ten, fifteen years. I’m trying to think when the last cover was even recorded. I wonder if it says the year by each one, like when we recorded them. Yeah, there was literally zero strategy for timing. It was like: this is happening, and this is when it’s done, and this is when it comes out.
What’s the oldest cover on here?
[Laughs].Peter’s really good at linear memory. I’m more like ‘huh?’ We did a covers album that came out, it was called Come on Feel the Dandys [Come on Feel the Dandy Warhols, released 2004]. There’s a bunch [of covers] on there. So that would be the first time we did a collection of covers. Now we’ve just done the comprehensive collection. Is Ted Nugent’s Free For All on there?
Let me check… No, it’s not.
That’s too bad. That’s me singing through a telephone receiver at a radio station. I think that would have been the oldest. That was the first cover the Dandys ever did.
Interesting that you bring up Come on Feel the Dandy Warhols. None of the tracks on that made it on to Pin Ups. Is that because they’re already out there somewhere?
It must be that it would have been redundant. I kinda wanted them all in one place. But that’s cool, that means we had a whole other album’s worth. Hooray for us!
There are some really cool covers on that album. I own a CD single of Bohemian Like You somewhere — that’s got a cover of AC/DC’s Hells Bells on it. It’s so Dandy Warhols!
That’s one of my favourites. And we did that one live! Most of these have never been performed live. That one was a fun one to do any time we went to Australia. Bit on the nose, but it was fun.
Speaking of live stuff, are there plans to take Pin Ups on tour?
We don’t really take our albums on tour. One time, we did the ‘131313’ tour — like, the thirteenth anniversary of Thirteen Tales [from Urban Bohemia], in 2013. We did the whole album, in sequence, with extra artists. That was really fun. But otherwise, we normally just fold in three to six songs off the new album and, within about a week of touring it, we realise one of them is just no fun live. So then that one goes away. We usually end up with two to four songs off each album. Thirteen Tales, obviously, is always heavy because that album has so many songs that we love playing live.
And personally, I don’t like to go see bands’ new albums live. I wanna hear the stuff that I know really well. I carry that over from being a fan of seeing bands, and being really annoyed when a band shows up and only plays their new stuff, and you don’t get to sing along, and you don’t have any emotional attachment. So you just keep going, ‘Cool, well I coulda just done that in my car’. So I’ve always been really adamant about not touring a new album. We’re definitely not gonna do that. We’re not touring this year. It really is a good time to put out an album that is songs you didn’t write, and you recorded ages ago, because we’re taking a year off from touring. She Sells Sanctuary we have been doing in our acoustic sets, and that’s really cool.
Why did you guys choose The Violent Femmes’ Kiss Off for the lead single?
Seriously, this is as much as I know about how and why this happened; we were on the tour last fall with Kula Shaker in the States. And we were doing a little run around the Southwest with them. It’s kinda grown out now, but I have these shaved side-cuts in my hair, and I have this cool, kinda zef, kinda headhunters of Borneo thing. And Peter just thought my hair was so weird and cool. We were going down into Joshua Tree, down into the desert for a show at Pappy & Harriet’s, in Pioneertown, which is kinda like the old west, where they did westerns in the ‘60s and ‘70s, maybe even older than that. John Wayne movies.
So we’re down there doing a show, and Peter’s like, ‘Well, why don’t you just do a video for that track, and it’s just all about your hair?’ And I was like, ‘Of course I can do that’. We just ran around the desert and made a quick, silly video with me being sassy. I think that’s literally it. We had a vague idea for a visual, so we made it the single. And apparently that’s out somewhere digitally, but we added the back-ups finally. I think it got released unfinished, so we finally put the backup harmonies on it. Brent sang, and we got it done. That one had absolutely never been released finished, so it may be a little bit new. Those are all guesses. [Laughs].
What a use of free will. I love that you just play around.
Sometimes you’re just standing around, going, ‘What should we do next?’ We’ve just had our 32nd anniversary; if we don’t start doing retrospectives, the hard drives are gonna rot. We gotta do something with the stuff we got while we can. And, not that we have any plans to break up, but you just slowly get on with your life. There’s less collective energy. If we’re all together and in communication, we should be wringing out anything in our body of work that hasn’t been shared or expressed or whatever. No one’s gonna fight and break up, we’ve already had all the fights, and we've completely accepted each other for all the annoying flaws we have. We know each other’s shortcomings. Nobody’s pretending to be anyone they’re not. Nobody’s trying to fix each other anymore. All that stuff’s in the past.
There was literally a point to saying that. Hold on. Pull it together, Zia. We have been and ever shall be the Dandys. We’re just never gonna break up. We’re just gonna slowly fizzle out into the ether of musicians, unless we get some big like, ‘Remember these guys? They never really got their due’.
So it’s nice to constantly look across the landscape of our career and think about, is there anything we didn’t do that we wanted to do? And that’s a really nice position to be in a band. Because then we can just do that. Right now, we’re making a kind of ambient album, and we haven’t done that yet. Last time was ROCKMAKER, which… — we’ve made rock albums, but that one is more consistently rock than the other ones. So that’s a cool thing we’ve been able to do, just sit around and go, ‘Has anybody got an idea?’ And we got our own studio [The ‘Odditorium’, based in the band’s hometown of Portland, Oregon]. We can kind of just do whatever we want. We really have no external pressure in our career.
That must be so freeing!
It is! We also don’t fight or get stressed out. You pick your battles and make your life how you want, if you have that privilege. So our privilege was, let’s take it down a notch, let’s make the band not a big, stressful thing, and let’s just do what we want. I like that approach.
It’s nice to hear from the band’s perspective, wanting to get your stuff out there. When you love a band, you want everything they’ve ever put out, even the unpolished demos and B-sides. It’s cool you guys came together and wanted to do the same!
Yeah! And things stop you sometimes. Like, we did a Spanish EP where we each wrote a song while we had some free studio time in Spain. One of the tracks got lost, or someone didn’t do their homework and finish it. So it never came out. And I’m like, ‘Fuck it, put three of the four out. That needs to come out!’
Or, I think the last volume of our remix. What was that album that has Wasp in the Lotus on it? [McCabe refers to the Warhols’ sixth album, Earth to the Dandy Warhols, whose first two-thirds were remixed and re-released on EPs Earth to the Remix Vol 1 and 2.]Whatever album that is, we each remixed four [tracks]. And there happens to be twelve songs. The third set of four didn’t come out because Courtney’s remix got lost. And so, again, that should be put out.
So we are trying to look back over our catalogue and see what’s missing and what didn’t get released. My big regret is, Courtney would not let a lot of our live performances be filmed. I think he had more performance anxiety than he ever really let on. If it sucked, and someone films it, or the mix sounds bad, then he didn’t have control over those mixes. Now we’re big enough that we’d just give you the mix when we okay it. But I’ve watched terrible live performances of bands and, like you said, you wanna see them. We haven’t filmed or recorded a lot of performances, because of Courtney refusing most times. And I think that was really a disservice to us overall. That’s too bad.
And like you were saying, about unpolished stuff, that’s why the Black Album is one of my favourite albums of ours. Because that is a completely unfinished record, and it sounds so raw and so cool. A lot of times in mixing, you can actually lose some of the voice and essence of the original project. And so I really love unpolished stuff from artists I dig.
One of my favourite artists, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, are all about fun. They record all their stuff, stream live shows, and put out bootlegs to the world. I think Nonagon Infinity was mixed on the tour bus and in dressing rooms — and that raw sound definitely works for it. Polished albums are great, too, obviously. Robert Jon ‘Mutt’ Lange’s sound on Back in Black sounds great.
Yeah, that’s amazing. But don’t throw away the other stuff because it’s not garbage. Those guys [King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard] are amazing, they’re so prolific, everything is out there. They’re on fire, they’re doing things exactly how they want to. I so support that. I’m even kind of jealous, because we came up ‘DIY’, but then we got on Capitol [Records], and kinda half listened to what we were supposed to do. There was a lot of influence from outside ‘professionals’. We never picked a lane that whole time we were on major labels. We kind of listened, but we also wouldn’t do what they said just for the sake of doing what they said, and I don’t think that’s a great way to make decisions. Because sometimes you’re shooting yourself in the dick by just being defiant. We were defiant at times where it wouldn’t have hurt us to just cooperate. But yeah, good job for King Gizzard, they’re killing it.
With covers, do you kick back in the studio and do whatever, or plan it meticulously?
No, what we realised was we’re such hacks that we literally don’t know how to accurately cover a song. We’re just so bad! We’re awesome musicians, of course, but like… there’s the musician who can make up their own stuff and then there’s the musician who can do what anybody does. We can’t do what anybody does. We can literally only do what we do. So we start out covering the song like we’re normal people, and then it always goes sideways somewhere. Which is the greatest moment, the second it goes sideways. That’s when we make it something we like. It’s like this boomerang that we throw out there, and it comes back and, whoops, it’s just a Dandy Warhols song again.
Is there a particular cover on Pin Ups that you’re most proud of, or think fans will really dig?
I shoulda listened to this album before I started this batch of interviews, I swear to God. I haven’t listened to it since we were sequencing it, and that was a lot of beginnings and endings of each track just to see how things tied into each other. So I literally have not sat down and listened to the album start to finish. Of course, Kiss Off [originally by The Violent Femmes] is my favourite — I freaking got to sing it, and they were my number one favourite band in the ‘90s. I sent it over to Brian Ritchie. He didn’t respond. I was like, ‘Dude, come on, tell me things, like ‘this is a sick cover, yo!’’’. I should put a poll up on the fan sites when [Pin Ups] comes out, because what I imagine is that there won’t be a standout. I imagine it’ll be very much how people felt about the original band, original song, and how we interpreted it, and it’ll be really different for everyone. I hope that it sparks some really good debates.
The Dandys have had a busy few years. ROCKMAKER, Rock ReMaker, a second performance with the Oregon Symphony. Now Pin Ups! Where do you get the energy?
Yeah, well, it kinda fried us. We’re fried right now. We’re over it. We got this album we’re working on, but that’s just chipping away in the studio, and that’s fun. I don’t know. We somehow developed a pretty decent work ethic over the years. Certainly never, ever in the realm of prolific, but I guess that does sound pretty prolific now that you list it. I’ve run the merch for a long time, but the interface with the labels and the phone calls, that’s not fun for me. So Peter really stepped up. And what helps is we have this amazing label, Little Cloud Labels, that puts out all the vinyl.
And so, between Mike Nesbitt [founder of Little Cloud Records] and Peter, really becoming an awesome, solid working team, which gave us this streamlined lane for releasing things. And then also Sunset Boulevard Records has also been supportive. We just have a good team in place, and that really helps with making sure that the releases just keep coming out. I think it’s the touring that kinda fried us. We are going to do a tour at the end of the year in Australia, but I think that’s it for ‘26. Maybe we’ll head back out in ‘27.
I’ll be sure to see you! Nothing beats the live experience.
It’s completely different. Again, that was another big carryover for me, seeing bands all the time when I joined the Dandys. I hated it when it sounded exactly like the record. Again, I could have listened to this in my car. I think it was when I saw Weezer, I thought, ‘This sounds exactly like the record. Boring!’ And I liked Weezer at the time!
But our live thing is a completely different experience. It’s way more enveloping and swirling and trance-inducing, and emotionally consistent. We all go on this ride together of exploring these seemingly simple songs that really have so much nuance when it comes to tone and texture. So maybe the chord changes and melodies are fairly straightforward, but once you add in all that tone and texture, you really can just surrender to the ride of the whole thing.
If we were ever going to be considered… What is it called when people don’t get the credit they deserve? I don’t know that our reputation for our live performances is really known in the industry the way that it should be. Because it’s a fucking experience, and our records would never, ever let you know what you’re about to expect. And it’s not spectacular and amazing and a big show. It’s just a thing. We just go up there and the lights flash and the sound is cool and it ends in an hour and a half and you’re like, ‘what the fuck was that?’
You don’t need the theatrics!
It took me a long time to get used to people just standing there with their eyes closed at our shows, going ‘mmm’. I was like, have a little feedback, dawg! But then I will go see Kikagaku Moyo and that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m just there like, ‘aaahh, this is the best. I’m in a zone’. And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s what our fans do! They love it. Okay, cool, I feel better’.
I look forward to Pin Ups and this strange, upcoming ambient release!
Thank you. I know we have two more records in us if nothing else. And to just go through all these ancient hard drives and release everything. Every random little thing. Just have a yard sale, right? That’s what we should call it — ‘Yard Sale’ — and it’s all the random ass shit that somehow didn’t get completed for one reason or another.
Pin Ups is out March 20th via Beat The World Records / Little Cloud Records.
