Nothing Wrong With Liking A Flashy Man: An Interview With Dick Valentine

Popshifter: You’re kind of on a three-month break from your tour?

Dick Valentine: Well, we’re getting set to record the next album right now. . .

Popshifter: Fantastic!

Dick Valentine: . . . that’s gonna start next week, so we’ll do that through February, and then we’ll start touring again in March.

Popshifter: Over in Europe.

Dick Valentine: Yes and then April into May we’ll do more US, but we’re not going to the West Coast. Just Midwest, East Coast, down South kinda thing.

Popshifter: Well, we’ll get you eventually.

Dick Valentine: Maybe in the Fall.

Popshifter: Sounds good. You were, in September, you were signed to Round Records for distribution out there?

Dick Valentine: In The UK, yeah.

Popshifter: That’s cool. So, before that, fans weren’t able to. . .

Dick Valentine: They’d have to order via Metropolis, but now we’ve got a distributing arm in the UK and Europe.

Popshifter: Cool. On the recent tour, what’s been your favorite night?

Dick Valentine: Favorite night? Well, Portland was pretty cool because it was election night. I went to a party at about six o’clock and by the time I got on stage. . . I mean, it’s been a long time since I was that drunk on stage. It’s kinda cool, I felt like I was on stage for two minutes. Not that I don’t like being on stage, it’s just a unique experience where you don’t even remember any of the songs you played, or what you were doing up there. I don’t drink that much any more, but that was one night when I did, because of Barack Obama.

Popshifter: Exactly, it’s his fault.

Dick Valentine: Yeah.

Popshifter: I wanted to ask, who writes the copy on your website? Is that you?

Dick Valentine: I write a lot of it, and sometimes our manager gets in there, too.

Popshifter: The review for people who are lazy and only liked “Gay Bar,” I thought was awesome.

Dick Valentine: I think the deeper point of that was that, well, we get lots of good reviews, but when we get a bad review, it’s always the same one. They accuse us of being unoriginal, but any time there’s a bad review, it always looks like that.

Popshifter: Every time, so why not save them some time and get it over with.

Dick Valentine: Right, so that was the idea there.

Popshifter: But on the new album, Flashy, it seems that you’ve taken a lot of different directions with the music.

Dick Valentine: Well, yeah, I think we’ve taken different directions, at least from Fire. I think with the most recent album, we’ve intentionally used a lot more horns. I think the first song, “Gay Bar Pt. 2,” is the closest thing we’ll ever get to Spaghetti Western.

Popshifter: And then it kind of ends up with a fusion jazz series of solos and things.

Dick Valentine: Yeah, we just don’t really overthink what we’re recording, and at times, if you sit down and try to say, “let’s make a rock album,” then you tend to just tread water, I think. So we sit down, you know, day to day, and just throw things out there and you get a different sound, I think.

Click to read more from Dick Valentine on. . .

Touring and bad reviews
Vocoder and marketing music
Current lineup and Alexyss K. Tylor
“Heavy Woman” and Larry Craig
Sheffield and Austin
Alternative music and honesty
Florida and Election Day
The new album and “the heart of a lion”

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