“Dude, where’s my guitar?”

Keegan DeWitt looked up, eyes wide, from unloading the battered SUV in the parking lot behind the Lizard Lounge.  The look on Keegan’s face indicated that his acoustic guitar, which should have been nestled alongside his piano, amps and other assorted instruments and equipment, was not where it needed to be, and that this was a most inopportune moment to discover an unfortunate fact such as this as he was scheduled to hit the stage in about 45 minutes.

“Yeah, man.  I definitely left it outside the studio back in New York.”

Instead of letting loose with a stream of profanities or exhibiting any behavior one would expect from a musician whose instrument disappeared before a gig, Keegan shrugged, grinned broadly, and said that he’d make do borrowing Annie’s guitar (Annie being Annie Lynch, of Annie and the Beekeepers, who Keegan was opening for that night).  His laid back attitude transferred effortlessly to the carpet beneath the lights at Lizard, where he held fast to the attention of concert goers with songs from his new album, Islands.  Before he realized his guitar went AWOL, Jessie and I had the chance to chat up Keegan in the parking lot about his film scoring projects, the many tours he had the chance to do this summer and why Paris is hopefully on his horizon as his new stomping ground.  Keegan’s back in town on September 12 to play a keys-heavy Ryan’s Smashing Life showcase at Café 939 along with Parachute Musical and Wakey! Wakey!, so make your way to Back Bay on Saturday night and see for yourself if Keegan’s got his guitar this time.  (We’re sure he does, and we’ll definitely be there to see him play!)

-Hilary Hughes

OPENING ACT: KEEGAN DEWITT AND THE TEAPARTY TEN

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Coffee. (Laughs) Black coffee.

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles”, or Mouth from “The Goonies”?

You know what? I’ve never seen “Sixteen Candles” which is really not cool.  My favorite effin’ song in the entire world is “Try A Little Tenderness” by Otis Redding, too.  Anyways, I HATE “The Goonies.”  I find it intolerable because of Chunk just because he’s always ruining everything.  I’d punch Chunk if I had to punch anybody.

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

A French press.

You go to bed, wake up, walk into the bathroom to brush your teeth, and you look in the mirror and you realize that you’ve turned into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

Sam the Eagle.  “YOU.  ARE ALL.  WEIRDOS.”

Say you have a crazy night, you black out, and you wake up feeling like crap the next morning and you realize… you got a tattoo.  What’d you get inked?

It would be somebody’s name or some inside joke that happened at the bar that night.  I’d look at that tattoo and I wouldn’t even know what it means.  It would say, like, “Winnebago!” and I would be really confused.

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

Sumo wrestler.  Japan is amazing!  Even though I would be morbidly obese…

If you were a particular style of facial hair, what would you be?

Itchy beard.  That always happens to me.  One day I’ll be fine and I’ll be like, “Oh, I don’t have to shave for days!”  Then that same day around 2 o’clock in the afternoon I’ll be in line at the post office or something and then I’ll be like, “I HAVE TO SHAVE IMMEDIATELY. I NEED TO GO HOME.  EVERYTHING IS WRONG ABOUT MY FACE RIGHT NOW.”

If you were a type of cheese, which cheese would you be?

Tillamook White Cheddar.  Extra sharp.

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY SKIVVIES AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

“Me and You” by Cassie.

What’s your favorite word?

Motherfucker.  That’s my number one curse word.

THE MAIN EVENT: THE KEEGAN DEWITT TPB INTERVIEW

Hi, Keegan!

Hey!

Tell us a little bit about yourself.  Where are you from and when did you start playing music?

Well, I’m originally from Portland, Oregon, born and raised.  Then, I moved to New York when I was 17 and I lived in Brooklyn for six and a half years, and I just left Brooklyn and moved to Nashville.  My sister is in a band called Roman Candle also from Nashville, so we’re kind of a big musical family.  She’s married to the lead singer and his brother’s in the band as well.  I just toured with them playing guitar for three months.  Growing up in Portland, my best friend was this guy named Aaron Katz, and he wrote and directed two films, Dance Party USA and Quiet City.  Both were South By South West picks and were New York Times critic picks and Quiet City got nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.

You scored both of those, right?

Yes.  There are kind of two parallel things for me, this artist side, which is where I’ve got this new record coming out, and then there’s the film score/composer side and that kind of happened by accident just because I was best friends with Aaron growing up.  Everything kind of like fed into the other – Quiet City going to South By South West was really exciting at the time, and then Quiet City got nominated for the Independent Spirit Award, so that was exciting, and now I was just in New York for two weeks writing the score for a brand new movie that we’re hoping to have premiere at a couple of festivals we want to go to.

Are you going to be playing selections of your film scores tonight?

Not really.  So, this stuff, this is more the artist stuff: There are three tours this summer all supporting this record called Islands.  That’s kind of like, that has nothing to do with the film scores except my solo work still has a string quartet and the horn section and it’s all about the arrangements and stuff but it’s more exclusively it’s own thing.  The cool thing about it is like, you know, I feel like if you live in New York or Boston it kind of spoils living any place else.  You can’t really go any place else.  So, part of going to Nashville for me was eliminating a lot of the clutter of things that I was in the midst of and just being able to focus purely on my work and to be around my family and Roman Candle.  We decided with this record to focus mainly on the North East and the UK, so I do three East Coast tours this summer and a UK tour.

How does that mesh with being someone from Portland?

It’s different.  The whole time I was in New York it was very dualistic and I had a super love/hate relationship with New York.  I always want to be busy, but then I also grew up in a tiny town in the middle of Oregon, so that was something I always missed in New York.  Going to Nashville was to kind of get away from the city for a little bit because I had been there for six and a half years and I had tried to leave before.  I tried to get out, and I went and lived in LA for a year and I traveled to Fiji and Hong Kong and I came back, and I just kept trying to leave New York and it wouldn’t happen.  I would always end up coming back.  So, Nashville was my way of being like, “I’m going to focus on music for awhile.”

How has your move to Nashville been beneficial to your creative process? I know that it’s a hub for creativity.

It’s a hub for music for sure; I’m not entirely sure it’s a hub for the kind of music I enjoy or make.  It’s been really great in that it’s made music my full-time job, and it’s given me the opportunity to make music my full-time job.  Granted, that’s come in tandem with getting signed to a label and getting into South By South West and all this positive stuff is starting to take root.  It’s been nice in that you can live cheaply there.  Again, my New York thing, I had a huge dog, and in New York it was like, “I have a huge dog in this tiny apartment.  This is ridiculous.”  Now, I have a whole house with a front and back yard and it’s a lot better.  I guess to segue a little bit is that not only do I have my family in Nashville, I have a couple of friends there, one of them being Madi Diaz who’s from Boston and went to Berklee and that’s been really nice.  Having Madi as a friend there – because, well, Nashville’s a starkly different place.  It’s a little bit terrifying just as much as I’m sure going from Nashville to New York can be terrifying.  That’s what’s been nice about having Madi there is like, we can both talk about the stuff we miss about the North East but we enjoy the stuff that we came specifically to Nashville to do.  That’s been good, especially because when I was in New York playing it was really tough to get a substantial group of musicians that you enjoy.  I went to a high school in Portland where there were thirty kids and we made up our own classes and we didn’t have grades, and I went to a film conservatory in New York where there were twenty kids, so I never had that thing where it was like, me and all my friends move from Emerson to Brooklyn and they all come to my shows and I can pack shows.  That was a really tough thing for me is that I didn’t have a huge network of friends that I inherited from college.  The nice thing about going to Nashville is that I had this musical group of people between Madi and Roman Candle and all of these other bands down there where it was more of a network.  In New York, I’d play shows and it was so tough to sustain draw and sustain groups of people because everybody’s so focused on their own pursuit.

I feel like a lot of those pursuits are of a more professional nature than a creative one.  In the Boston vs. New York debate, a lot of the musicians we talk to who know both cities pretty well bring up that New York is a city to get signed in and therefore it brings on a whole different kind of pressure that you wouldn’t necessarily find in other cities.

I feel like another nice thing is that in Brooklyn my stuff is me sampling my voice over craziness, whereas in Nashville, the majority of stuff there is super commercial, so there’s a nice way of being able to put myself in the middle ground where I was like, you know, what I’m doing there is a lot more different and relative to that landscape than it would be in New York.

Have you spent time in Boston?  What’s your connection to our fair city, in addition to your friendship with Madi Diaz?

I really love Boston.  My sister went to school here for four years, so I’d come up and visit.  I’m a huge baseball fan, too.  I always have this big thing that if you don’t like baseball and if you come to a Red Sox game you kind of get the magic of baseball even if you don’t like it very much.  Boston reminds me a lot of Portland in a lot of ways and the atmosphere here is very similar.  I would always come up here and I would even just take trips up here and stay in a hostel for a weekend because it was a nice break from New York in general and it felt like coming home, in a good way.  Now, it’s funny because in Nashville of all places where I wouldn’t expect that, 90% of the people I interact with are from Boston or from Berklee, so that’s a little bit weird. (Laughs)

Can you put your creative process into words for us?  What goes into writing a Keegan DeWitt song?

The one interesting thing, I guess, about me, my mom says I shouldn’t tell people this but I think it’s interesting that I can’t read or write music, and all my stuff has horns and strings and so on and so forth, so it’s kind of like a mix of me having to be super resourceful in terms of that and also having to be really using great string players.  I have this posse of four string playing girls who make sense of the stuff I write, so it’s not crazy for me to give them an arrangement that’s in entirely the wrong key.

How did you come to be working with piano if you never learned how to read music!?

I write music entirely based around moments. I know people who love writing songs about stories and it’s all about setting up stories throughout the course of the song, but for me, the entire reason why I’m in music is for mood and moments and capturing simple moments.  There’s this thing that I kind of talk about a lot in terms of the film scores, but there’s this author from the South named Walter Percy, and he’s got this famous book called The Moviegoer and he talks about the “sad little happiness” and that concept was always interesting to me, that some of the happiest and most pungent moments in your life, those tiny little moments you have with someone, it’s not like that big talk that you have or the moment that you met, it’s like, some other weird anomaly, like you’re both driving back from the beach and that person is asleep in the car, and it’s like, “This is the happiest I’ve ever been, in this moment right here.”  That, for me, is entirely from the place where I try to write music.  In terms of words and string arrangements and piano and guitar or whatever it is, I kind of like, I know this doesn’t translate directly into anything you could tangibly do, but that’s where I like, just began writing songs.  A lot of times I’ll think of a moment or I’ll have something musically that reminds me of a moment and then that’s what fuels that process.  Going to film school, my favorite film makers were these film makers who made super simple flat narrative movies where nothing happens, and the whole point is that nothing happens, you know?  Maybe life doesn’t deliver and when you’re waiting for life to deliver something that’s the sad, great thing about it, and chasing that and nail that stuff down is 90% of me writing.

In terms of what you’ve written and pieces you’ve done, are there any projects or songs that stand out as favorites to you?

Yeah!  There’s this- in terms of film scores it’s funny, I was saying to one of my friends the other day that it’s tough, because the stuff that’s really gotten traction for me and made me able to make film scores is a somewhat – not the ones I love as much, but the ones that I love are – I get a lot of people writing me because of Quiet City, because Quiet City is now on Sundance every night, and people write me to ask me to do stuff for his films, and this guy makes documentaries for Al Jazeera and he’s this Parisian film maker, and he was doing this documentary on keffiyahs, which hipsters can now buy at Urban Outfitters, and there’s one original keffiyah factory in all of the West Bank now because it’s all been exported to China with the exception of this one old guy on the West Bank.  So, he made this fifteen-minute documentary about this guy, and this factory, and about the West Bank in general.  He’s not even a filmmaker, he’s just a photojournalist, and that was great because I just got to do whatever I wanted and keep it as minimal as possible and pretty scaled back beautiful piano stuff.  That’s something I’ve done recently I’m excited about.  The record in general, this Islands record, is something I’m proud of in that when I finished it being like, “That was all the stuff I wanted to achieve.”  I wanted something that felt like a hard core delivering with strings and horns and pianos and guitars and it wasn’t instantly placeable, but there was something definitive in it for me.

What are you really looking forward to about the next few months?  Tell us where we can find Keegan DeWitt a month from now.

I’m excited about this entire experience in general, with these three North East tours, because it’s a way for me to spend time at home in a nice way.  I love Nashville and I haven’t been back to Portland in about six years, so home to me is definitely here.  It’s great, and then I get to be back in Nashville for a week every month to see my dog and slow down for a minute, but it’s nice to be up here and see all my friends and be able to be in New York and Boston because both cities are such a large part of me.  Then, it’ll be exciting to see what happens when this record comes out.  Ideally, what I’d like to be doing five years from now would be to live in Paris and make music and to do little tours.  It’s an exciting prospect to have this album come out here and in Europe.  I’m excited to either get my ass reamed by the press for the record or have everything go really great and to be able to solidify my trips to Boston and New York as something more permanent.  When I first moved to Nashville I was a little terrified that I wouldn’t get the chance to come back, so now the nice thing is that I’m solidifying a way to get to my favorite place, Paris, and to also come to my two home cities, Boston and New York, as well.

Let’s talk influences for a minute.  Who do you draw inspiration from, creatively speaking?

My number one influence for film scoring is Michael Nyman.  He scored Gattica and The End of the Affair.  His score for The End of the Affair is incredible – it’s like this super minimalist classical music that’s absolutely heartbreaking.   For my music, my primary influences, although I’m obsessed with music and constantly hunting down new stuff, a lot of my influences come from film.  There’s this guy Michelangelo Antonioni, he’s this Italian filmmaker, and all of his films are really amazing.  In terms of music, I guess I don’t write inspired by music but there’s music I really like right now.

Well, who are you listening to right now?  If we were to steal the iPod of Mr. Keegan DeWitt and check out your “Recently Played” playlist, what would we find?

Right now I’m really into The Dirty Projector’s new record and that Bon Iver record from last year, For Emma Forever Ago, is amazing.  Metric is great, too.  I love Emily Haines.  I have kind of a big soft spot for French dance music in general.  I’m really wearing out this Friendly Fires remix of “Paris” with Au Revoir Simone.  The reason why I like that Dirt Projector’s record is because it’s compelling.  When I first listened to it I hated it, and it also made me really excited to see them play live and to see how effortlessly kickass all the girls in that band are.  Also, Treasure Fingers!  I love that stuff.