“It’s a rainy day in Los Angeles,” Dean Wareham says, looking away at the start of our interview. “People get very excited when it rains here. Or afraid. They’re like, ‘Oh, be careful. Be careful out there driving.'” This brief exchange captures the spirit of Wareham: observational, reflective, wry, sincere, and with a sensibility attuned to the latent malice that lurks in the world, even in sunny Los Angeles. When I ask about the recent wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles in January, this temperament and worldview come further into focus.
“I did not have to evacuate. We’re in Echo Park, so we were closer to the Eaton Fire,” Wareham explains. “The air was certainly foul, and there was a layer of ash in the garden and on top of the car, but we didn’t have to evacuate.” After a brief pause, he continues. “It wasn’t a huge panic, but it was still remarkable. I knew a lot of people who were evacuating, and that one Wednesday when the fire was coming down the Hollywood Hills, it was like, ‘Oh shit.'”
Wareham has been in Los Angeles for 12 years, where he relocated with his wife and fellow musician, Britta Phillips, after a long tenure in New York. Los Angeles is only the latest chapter in a charmed life and career as a songwriter. Hushed asides like legendary and canonical come to mind when Dean Wareham’s name is invoked in conversation.
Born and raised in Wellington, New Zealand, Wareham’s family moved to New York City, where he attended Dalton, an elite private school. He went on to study at Harvard. During the late 1980s, he cofounded Galaxie 500 with Naomi Yang and Damon Krukowski, former classmates from Dalton and Harvard. This dream pop act has since become the stuff of myth for helping establish the genres of space rock and shoegaze.
During the 1990s, Wareham led the indie project Luna, which revived a tradition of New York rock and roll in the vein of Television and the Velvet Underground. Sterling Morrison of the Velvets and Tom Verlaine of Television would both guest on Luna’s Bewitched (1994) and Penthouse (1995), respectively.
After releasing seven LPs with Luna, Dean Wareham has since recorded with Phillips, who formerly served as Luna’s bassist, as the duo Dean & Britta. They have contributed to the soundtracks of Noah Baumbach’s films The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Mistress America (2015), in addition to releasing their albums L’Avventura (2003), Back Numbers (2007), and, most recently, A Peace of Us (2024), an unlikely, but compelling, Christmas music collaboration with Sonic Boom (Peter Kember), formerly of Spacemen 3.
Dean Wareham keeps busy. With his latest release, his third solo album entitled That’s the Price of Loving Me, you might even say he is on fire, to reference an old Galaxie 500 title. It sticks with the unavoidable theme at hand. “You can’t be announcing an album when people’s houses are burning,” Wareham relays, somewhat sardonically in his quiet manner. “But at the same time, the record’s coming out all over the world. You don’t stop every time something awful happens somewhere.”
This uncomfortable juxtaposition between beauty and awfulness, which can be witnessed in Los Angeles even without wildfires, might also be said to define That’s the Price of Loving Me. Wareham’s new album is certainly among his most beautiful, tapping into a lush 1960s and 1970s pop sound. With ten tracks lasting 36 minutes, his characteristic features are on display, including bittersweet truths (“You Were the Ones I Had to Betray”) and atmospheric romanticism (“That’s the Price of Loving Me”).
Yet, there are also harder truths to be found across this record. “Yesterday’s Hero” starts with the line, “Bombs and bullshit fill the air.” The LP’s apocalyptic closing track, “The Cloud is Coming”, imparts the lines, “I see no difference / Between the blue and the red / The cloud is coming for us all.” In these ways, That’s the Price of Loving Me builds upon the unexpected politics found on Wareham’s previous solo release, I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A. (2021), which had tracks with titles like “The Corridors of Power”, “Red Hollywood”, and “Why Are We in Vietnam?”.
When I ask him whether he is responding to the current political moment, Dean Wareham quickly replies, jokingly, “It’s always a political moment lately, isn’t it?” After a pause, he elaborates, “It’s not central. But it’s there. Even ‘Tugboat’ [the first track off Galaxie 500’s 1988 debut Today] has, you know, the line ‘I don’t want to vote for your president.’ That’s a political line, too.”
A Galaxie 500 Reunion
Like most first bands that become canonical in status, Galaxie 500 has cast a shadow over Dean Wareham’s career, though not one without a sense of nostalgia and pleasure. Wareham has regularly revisited his back catalog while on tour. A collection of archival material, Uncollected Noise New York, issued last year, provided unheard demos of Galaxie 500’s earliest years, which was warmly greeted by fans and critics alike.
Notably, That’s the Price of Loving Me is helmed by Kramer (Mark Kramer), who famously engineered Galaxie 500’s three studio LPs – Today (1988), On Fire (1989), and their swansong, This Is Our Music (1990) – bringing their unusual sound to prominence. Wareham’s new album sounds very different from his first band, but glimmers can be heard on tracks like “New World Julie” with its brooding opening chord progression and lightly employed reverb. I asked Wareham what it was like to work with Kramer once more after three decades.
“We didn’t really discuss it beforehand,” Wareham replies. “He’s a big believer in what happens in the studio is what happens in the studio. I made demos, and he didn’t want to listen to the demos. I think in his mind he didn’t want it to sound like Galaxie 500 either. He’s been making records a lot longer now. I’m also singing a lot closer to the microphone on this record than I was in Galaxie 500, where I was further back and kind of belting it out. It’s more intimate.”
Going deeper, I ask about the recording process and how Kramer famously went with first or second takes for Galaxie 500. Was the approach the same for That’s the Price of Loving Me? “First or second take, absolutely,” Wareham answers. “Everything we did when we were tracking the songs, a couple of takes, and then just move on. When it came for me to do my guitar overdubs, it was the same. Everything was done in six days.”
He pauses for a few seconds and then continues. “When you’re working with someone a little older like Kramer, they’ve kept up with the recording technology. We don’t listen to a lot of possibilities. Decisions are made very quickly. It’s like, ‘Play a fuzz guitar solo or play a backwards guitar solo,’ and I’d be, ‘Alright’, and he’s like, ‘Okay, now do one more’, and that’s it. I would probably have spent more time on those, but I like doing it this quickly. You can spend ages playing a guitar solo, but it doesn’t necessarily end up any better.”
The Band As a Concept
Going further in this direction and the improbability of a future Galaxie 500 reunion, I ask Dean Wareham about the concept of a band. What makes the material different on That’s the Price of Loving Me from his work with his first band, Luna, or his wife Britta?
“I went into this knowing that I was going to make a solo album,” Wareham replies. “With Luna, we would get together two or three times a week and just jam, and the songs would grow out of that. Because you’re doing it with a full band, you tend to play faster. Whereas if I’m writing songs on my own in this room on an acoustic guitar, then they’ll tend to be slower and quieter.”
“What I’m trying to do as an artist is always on a song-by-song basis,” Wareham explains after reflecting further. “I know some people sit down and they’re like, ‘I’ve got a concept for an album I’m going to make now,’ but I don’t do that and never really have. I once did an album of Western cowboy songs with a friend of mine [Dean Wareham Vs. Cheval Sombre from 2018] that was kind of a concept.”
Songwriting for Wareham is ultimately about the contingencies of time and place. “The last one, I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A. [from 2021],” Wareham starts, before changing his mind. “Before that, I hadn’t written a song, I think, for like six years, since moving to L.A. with Britta. We’d been busy doing other things and touring plenty, but it was really only the pandemic shutting everything down that gave me an opportunity to sit down and write songs. It was kind of like, ‘Oh God, this is actually kind of nice.’ I would say the last couple of records have more complex chord progressions than I ever used in my youth.”
The Price of Loving Dean Wareham
Beyond complex chord progressions, Wareham’s past two LPs have also delved into more complex themes. As noted earlier, a number of songs from I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A. address political subject matter. The opening track, “The Past Is Our Plaything”, has the lines, “The city we loved is now lost / The towers have fallen, my brother is gone / As blue turns to grey.”
These thoughts on 9/11 by Wareham form a contrast to his work from the 1990s with Luna, which celebrated the pleasures of young adulthood in New York City. Going out with friends and staying up all night animated tracks like “Great Jones Street” from Bewitched (1994) and “Chinatown” from Penthouse (1995). That’s the Price of Loving Me leans further toward more saturnine topics, albeit without Wareham taking himself too seriously.
“I tried going into revolutionary politics when I was young. I wasn’t good at it, and I’m glad I decided not to do that,” Wareham laughs when asked about the politics of his recent work. “I am interested in sneaking politics into the songs, and I don’t have all the answers. I’m wary of lame protest songs like ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ or something like that.” He pauses. “Actually, that’s not such a bad song, but probably a lot of my fans are just like, ‘What?'”
I ask Wareham whether he sees such critical subject matter as ultimately incompatible with the pop song as a genre. Is it possible for pop music to convey such dark messaging convincingly? “I don’t know,” Wareham replies. “I want to be introspective, but I don’t want to be whiny and mopey. It’s also not just darkness, you know? I work pretty hard on the songs now; sometimes they come easily, and sometimes they don’t. I am harder on myself with the lyrics than I used to be. Nobody ever taught me how to do this. Even Leonard Cohen has said that, too.”
I mention his memoir, Black Postcards (2008), where he describes how the pop song “Georgy Girl” by the Seekers from 1966 greatly influenced his childhood musical imagination. Despite its brightness, the song is quite critical of the girl at hand, with the singer-narrator throwing shade with lines like “Why do all the boys just pass you by? Could it be you just don’t try, or is it the clothes you wear?” It further begs the question of whether pop music can be sunny and subversive simultaneously.
“The casual listener doesn’t take that away from that song,” Wareham remarks with a laugh. “I feel like my politics were shaped somewhat by, say, Joe Strummer and the Clash. Some people say artists have a special obligation to speak out or whatever, and I’m like, ‘Really? Do we?'”
“[Don] DeLillo is a big influence on my songwriting or has been at various times,” Wareham continues, reflecting further on Black Postcards and the influences on his songwriting process. “There’s a remark from [George] Orwell I wanted to use [in Black Postcards], drawing from a poem by someone else, in which he says nobody ever writes the true story of their life because it would be a tale of humiliation. What else am I going to do? I keep riding around in a van.”
I mention that he makes van life seem interesting. “But you’re in a van in places like Portugal!” “I’m not going to be 40 years old and riding around in a van, I say that in Black Postcards,” Wareham says with a smile. When I ask what’s next for him after his current tour for That’s the Price of Loving Me, he expresses some reservation and uncertainty, though tempered with the confidence of a lifelong musician.
“I don’t know what the next record will be. There will be something else. Maybe another Dean & Britta record. As the song [“We’re Not Finished Yet” from the new album] says, we’re not finished yet,” Wareham responds. “At a certain point, you think, ‘This might be my last album.’ How do you know when it’s your last album? Bowie went out with his strangest and most difficult work. As an artist, you’re competing against your earliest self. I remember running into David Berman, and he was with [Stephen] Malkmus in Portland. He was starting to record Purple Mountains [from 2019], and he said, ‘No one has ever done a good rock and roll record after the age of 50.'”
After a pause, “I think Philip Roth said once you’ve written seven books, you’re beyond influence. Hopefully, you’ve left that behind. You’ve gone somewhere else,” Wareham elaborates. “Britta says this is her favorite solo record of mine. These songs are pretty different from what other people are doing. It’s not like they’re setting the world on fire.”
The fire in Dean Wareham, however, is still there. “There’s this voice in your head. You make a racket, and hopefully you’re happy with it,” he continues with a feeling of contentment. I’m happy with this one. I was happy with the last one, and then somehow, the voice is like, ‘Now you have to go do that again.’ Really? Why? But the voice is still there.”
