Hopscotch Interviews: The Dodos

The Dodos are a guitar and drums duo from San Francisco who play sweet and clangy indie rock. While they are sometimes compared to bands like The Shins and Modest Mouse, what makes The Dodos stand apart is the physicality of their music. On their newest album, No Color, charming hooks unfold into a waterfall of guitar riffs and percussion before curling back to the basics of a gentle love song. Drummer Logan Krober and I discussed his metal background, collaborating with Neko Case, and his plans to get Guided By Voices to autograph a postcard—all as he was doing laundry with the other tour members at a hotel.

The Dodos will open for Drive By Truckers and Guided By Voices at 5:45pm on Friday, September 9th, at Raleigh City Plaza as part of Hopscotch Music Festival. 

New Raleigh: The new album, No Color, sounds really fun and carefree. Was that the feeling when y’all were recording it?

Logan Kroeber: I think the process we had when we were making the record really helps. It maximized those qualities. I think some of the songs are just inherently like that, but we definitely were having fun with it.  It can only help when you’re making something if you’re having fun, and I’m glad it came across. Some of the album titles and imagery are misperceived as being dark, and more serious, and that wasn’t our intention.

NR: You have a unique percussion style. When you are writing songs do you start with a melody and add the percussion, or is it the other way around?

LK: I think more often than not, [guitarist] Meric [Long] has a riff and a vocal thing that he’s working out, and then we sort of just build it up from there. The rest of the times I’ll give him a beat – something that I think is cool, that I’ve been working on – and he’ll come up with something to it in the practice space. There’s a lot of both of us coming to the other with unfinished things. We both have a decent amount of patience. If something has potential we can just sort of ride it out for half an hour, and get into this really repetitive mode where you can sort of work out the nuts and bolts of the song.

NR: What is your background with your style of drumming?

LK: I grew up and took some drum lessons from this guy, Rick Walker, and he was a pretty eclectic guy. He was kind of a jack of all trades in drumming. He played crazy rock and punk stuff, and was a fan of progressive metal, and he also studied a lot of African drumming. He never pushed a single style on me. We would just basically get together. He tried to teach me some more fundamental stuff but I guess I don’t have a good attention span, so I was just more into trying to feel the music, and I never really learned to read it that well. So a lot of his influence on me is very subconscious. There’s not a lot of concrete beats or ideas that I can attribute to him directly, but I played a lot of drums with the guy and it worked its way into my brain in a sort of muscle memory kind of way. 

After that I played in bands around Santa Cruz. I played primarily really heavy stuff, like metal, and I was transitioning out of that when I met Meric. I had just quit playing in my metal band two years before me and Meric started playing, and I was looking for something new. I still love all that heavy stuff but I just felt a little bit bored with my big drum kit and I wanted to do something different but I didn’t really know what it was. I was lucky to be playing with Meric that, organically, something new sprang up.

NR: So do you play something other than a traditional big drum kit now?

LK: Well, I don’t have a bass drum. I just play four tongs and a snare, and I have a sort of high hat cymbal; it’s just two cymbals squashed together. It’s not on a high hat stand so I can’t make the tone of it change, so it’s just like a trashy kind of sound. And I’ve got a crash cymbal, and a tambourine on my left foot, and that’s it. On some songs I pick up another tambourine or some shaker bells but that’s about it. 

NR: I know that on some of your recordings you use a vibraphone. Can you explain to me what that is and what sort of sound it accomplishes?

LK: The vibraphone is a giant metal percussive instrument that’s arranged like piano keys, but it’s all laid out on metal bars and you hit them with mallets. It’s this melodic/harmonic instrument but you hit it until it has this percussive bite to it as well. Ours was electrified so we ran it through amps so we could trick it out with guitar pedals and do some pretty cool things with it. But it just got kind of limited after a while and we took a bunch of vibraphone off of the new record. There’s still some on there, but Meric was getting much more into electric guitar and so for this tour right now we don’t have the vibraphone with us, we have another guitarist. 

NR: You mentioned that you have a metal background. Do you think that comes out with The Dodos?

LK: I do! Certain people come and talk to me after shows, and bring it up immediately. Not very often, but some people are like, “Dude, did you used to play metal or something? Like, I totally picked up on that,” and they probably used to be metal heads too. So every now and then someone will say something. But I don’t know, maybe they just read in an interview that I used to play metal and they just wanted to talk about it. I don’t know but I certainly feel that I can’t get away from it in a way. It’s an energy thing to me – I want to fucking rock out and really exert a lot of energy when I play, when the time is right and when it serves the song. I think that that part of my style, from the metal phase, comes out all the time, but I’m much more discerning. I don’t want to jump in and stomp all over the songs when they’re supposed to be pretty. So I try and pick my moments. 

NR: Neko Case makes a cameo on your last album. How did that collaboration come about?

LK: Hold on one second – I’m doing mine later.  I gotta get all my shit together. Sorry about that, what did you say?

NR: [laughs] How did you end up working with Neko Case?

LK: It sounds almost too simple to be true but we just toured with the New Pornographers last summer and met her and got her to sing with us on stage a few times. I guess she was a fan of the band because she wanted to get us on that tour. At the end of the tour Meric just had the courage to ask her, because we were trying out a bunch of new songs on that tour and getting ready to record and he was like, “We’re recording and if you want to get down on that then you should,” and she said yes. It was super simple and we’re lucky that she took an interest, and it was great fun seeing her work in the studio. 

NR: How did you find out that you were getting to open for Drive By Truckers and Guided By Voices at Hopscotch?

LK: We’re good friends with Megafaun, who are some local badasses that I’m sure you know of, and I heard a lot about the first Hopscotch from them, and saw that Grayson [Currin] was just putting together a bunch of stuff on facebook and… Hold on one second – I mean, I could definitely add stuff. I could do a chunk of it right now. How much room? I’ll get that underneath. Sorry, they’re trying to some laundry here at the hotel right now. Uhhhh, where was I?

NR: [Laughing] Just talking about Hopscotch.

LK: Yeah yeah yeah! And so, I was super psyched this year when we got invited to play. And I just recently found out – I need the key! Um, I just recently found out that we were doing the Guided By Voices show. And I’m so fucking psyched. My big plan is to get close enough to Mr. [Robert] Pollard that I can have him sign a postcard to send home for some friends of mine who are super huge fans and just had a daughter, and then call him Uncle Bob and stuff. I think it would be super sweet to make that happen. 

NR: Any other things you are looking forward to with Hopscotch?

LK: I haven’t seen the whole lineup, so I don’t know what else is going on. But, I know that Grayson likes a lot of modern heavy metal type stuff, so I assume that he’ll have some of that booked for the festival. Not knowing what is booked, that’s just what I assume, – You think it’s skipping? Sorry, laundry talk. 

NR: I’ll let you get back to doing laundry.  Thanks for chatting with us and we’re really excited to see you next week.

LK: Us too!

See the City Plaza page.

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