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

Popshifter: I hope that at some point you’ll be coming out to the West Coast again.

Dick Valentine: Generally, I think we’re scaling back to doing the West Coast once a year. If we’re gonna do two tours a year, it helps to have one of them be made up of short drives. Because a lot of times those drives between like, Omaha and the West Coast are just soul-crushers.

Popshifter: Yeah, that is pretty hardcore.

Dick Valentine: And not only do you have to go out, you have to drive it back, too.

Popshifter: You’ve got that to look forward to, right?

Dick Valentine: Yeah, so we do one tour for the country and one tour for ourselves, and that’s what this next one is. And now we’re going back to Florida, too. We skipped Florida on the last tour, so. . . We always feel like we owe somebody something.

Popshifter: (laughs) The self-imposed pressure.

Dick Valentine: Yeah. We’re going to be doing five shows in Florida, that’s going to be great.

Popshifter: That’s a lot, that’s great.

Dick Valentine: That’s terrible. It’s the worst state.

Popshifter: (laughs) I got it wrong, I would have guessed Texas.

Dick Valentine: (laughs) I like elements of Texas. I guess I don’t mind Austin, but . . .

Popshifter: Florida, the whole state?

Dick Valentine: Florida, the entire state. Top to bottom. (laughs) That Bugs Bunny cartoon where they saw it off and let it float. . .

Popshifter: Let it float off into South America or Cuba.

Dick Valentine: (laughs) That’s the one.

Popshifter: We’ll submit that plan to Congress and start working on that.

Dick Valentine: It’d probably be the easiest state to saw. . .

Popshifter: It would! Come on, I mean, from an engineering perspective—

Dick Valentine: (laughs) I would pay good money to have Obama address that at his inauguration somehow.

Popshifter: (laughs)

Dick Valentine: People wondering what he’s gonna say, and he talks about sawing off Florida.

Popshifter: The Chief Justice looks at the script and wonders where that came from.

Dick Valentine: That would be an amazing inauguration.

Popshifter: Yeah, definitely looking forward to it. I don’t think, at my job, anybody’s gonna get any work done, on Tuesday.

Photo © Jae C. Chong/AP

Dick Valentine: Yeah, it’ll be a good day. I’m excited to sit in front of the television, which is something I do often anyway.

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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