Sunday Conversation: The Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli On Their New Album, Songwriting, Steely Dan And More

Being an Afghan Whigs fan, regardless of your age, takes you back to that high school or middle school student who wrote the name of your favorite band on your notebook or wore buttons or stickers with the band’s name proudly displayed across your ripped jeans or leather jacket.

For Whigs diehards, being a follower of the band is both a badge of honor and something you will carry with you the way Deadheads or Swifties do. It is a lifetime commitment, one you are happy to keep.

Just look at the band’s May 7 show at L.A.’s Gold Diggers bar. For every fan lucky enough to get a ticket for the intimate warm up gig for their 2022 tour it was the show. For Whigs followers it was like seeing U2 or Foo Fighters when they played the Roxy. And if Pink Floyd reunited and played Coachella with Harry Styles, Taylor Swift, Beyonce and the Pixies the same day, Whigs fans still would have chosen to see the band at Gold Diggers. In part because the Whigs rank as one of the greatest live bands of all time.

There are many reasons for the intensity and devotion of the band’s fandom. And it can all be encapsulated up by the band’s brilliant new record, How Do You Burn? (out this Friday, September 9). Featuring guest appearances by the late Mark Lanegan, as well as old Whigs collaborators Susan Marshall, Van Hunt and Marcy Mays, How Do You Burn? is, as I discussed with frontman Greg Dulli, like a Whigs family reunion.

More than 30 years into an incredible career, the band and their fans have formed a family bond. One that frontman Dulli is well aware of and incredibly grateful for as he explained.

I spoke with Dulli, at length, about songwriting, when he knew he would have a successful career in music, his fandom of Steely Dan, why he covered the Eagles and Don Henley just to screw with a friend, and so much more.

Steve Baltin: Such an interesting time for music, and art in general. You do the best you can individually recognizing the fact that we’ve lost our collective minds as humanity.

Greg Dulli: Well, maybe not as humanity, but as f**king North Americans, I could definitely say that. We just played a festival in Basque country and we went a week early to just have a vacation. And like Bilbao, San Sebastian, Victoria. I mean, clean, together, respectful, fun, cultural, safe. I was like, “What is going on here?” Here’s how you can do it and you talk to people and they have healthcare and they have free education. They don’t understand how it works here and how the allegedly most powerful country in the world can be a s**t show. And now, with the Supreme Court stuff, it’s just embarrassing and f**king pathetic and something has to be done because that’s not the voice of the people.

Baltin: They’re not even pretending that it is and that’s the crazy thing. You get caught robbing a store and you’re like, “Yeah, I got a gun. What about it?” Or you get caught cheating and you’re like, “Yeah, I did it.”

Dulli: Yeah, I know that and also that a conman was able to become president and then try his damndest to become some sort of f**king strong man warlord and that it came inches with it getting pulled off, and the gerrymandering and the behind the scenes. It is a scary time here and it’s f**king sad, and sooner or later, what your friend was enjoying might not be able to be enjoyed any longer.

Baltin: I interviewed Bananarama in England. As two women in the UK, they’re still so cognizant of what Roe V. Wade being overturned in America means to them. As an artist, you can’t ignore all the stuff that’s going on and pretend that this isn’t having direct impact on everything going on.

Dulli: Oh yeah, I have female friends in England, Belgium, Germany and Spain, and they were all just like, not only shocked, but distraught, and I got it. It’s not a country thing, it’s a human thing. And if that happens to one woman, it happens to every woman. So, I don’t know what happens next.

Baltin: It’s interesting that How Do You Burn? is this really raucous, electric, energetic record that was made during such dark times. Was that very conscious or was that something that as the record started to unfold that’s what the music was telling you?

Dulli: It was completely unconscious and pretty wildly abstract too. It was in a lot of ways, like always, well, in particular, the Random Desire solo record and then this record, where I was traveling from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree at least once a month. I’d go out for a week, 10 days and then come back and absorb what I did. But it was almost ritualistic. And it had brought me a lot of calm and a lot of peace, it was very meditative to drive back and forth, and Christopher [Thorn, engineer], his property sits on 30 acres, you’re off the road. You’re in the middle of nowhere. And that’s a great place to be when you’re trying to record. So that was my escape, and I was building my escape on a daily basis. And able to do it with Patrick [Keeler] who lived in L.A., could come out and play the drums, and Christopher was there. The other three guys were back East, but very good at Zoom. For the situation we found ourselves in it was better than the alternative, which was not making a record. But I think that all kind of feeds into the vibe of the record. The record to me is bright, it has light in it, more so than several of the others, but it’s not without its portent or darkness.

Baltin: As you look back on the experience of making How Do You Burn?, are there things that you got from that experience that you now want to continue to do going forward?

Dulli: Some, but not all. As somebody who’s made 20 odd records by this point, I love to be in a room with all the people, I love the interplay. So hopefully, we’re moving into an era where that can return because that really is like my favorite part of making music, playing with other people and hearing what they have to do and watching their face. But at the same time, I know that it can be done another way, because also I was in New Orleans after Katrina as well. And we had to get remote recordings from other people as well, because people weren’t either able to or did not want to come into New Orleans at that particular moment in time.

Baltin: What was the first song written that kind of jump started this record?

Dulli: The first song is the oldest song, and that was done just the last time we saw each other until we got packed together at the tour. It was “Take Me There.” We were gonna start working on a new record, and then everything changed. John Curly went back to school. Patrick went on Raconteurs’ tour, and Rick Nelson was building a house. So I needed something to do. That’s why I made that record. The solo record. But before we left, before that happened, we laid down, “Take Me There.” The next song I want to say was “Catch a Cold.” That’s when the new batch started I think. That was September of ’20. September of ’20, and then the final song was actually the final song of the record “In Flames,” which was January of ’22.

Baltin: So it covered a wide range.

Dulli: Yeah, it’s actually 16 months from tip to tail. That’s pretty normal. Once a record gets going, it’s like a year, a year and a half for me anyway. Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I write slowly, but it all kind of evens out. You gotta have all the songs and I tend to take my time to write songs because when you write them all in one batch, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but I like this way.

Baltin: When I wrote the Forbes article announcing the new album, the way I put it is it’s like a family reunion. At what point did you realize that you wanted to bring back so many Whigs friends and family from the past?

Dulli: The first guest was Van Hunt and I sent him “Take Me There” and then later “Jyja” and he electrified both of those songs. He’s just such a unique person, his multi-tracking and his inhabiting characters and his voices and stuff like that. He was the key that unlocked that vibe of the record, and he, of course, sings on “Do to the Beast.” He sings on the song, it kills. And so that was a return to working with Van. That was the first one. The second one, Marcy and I had known each other since the ’80s. And obviously she sings on “My Curse” but we’re really good friends and we would talk, I don’t know, a couple of times a month during especially the height of the pandemic. And at the end of one of the calls, I just said, “We should do another song again. People would like that.” She goes, “I’d love that.” And I got off the phone. I’m like, “Man, you gotta do it. You can’t be the, let’s have lunch and not have lunch guy.” And so I wrote the song two days later, I want to say. I think it was sang and mixed within a week or two weeks. That one came together really quickly, and then I needed somebody to lift the second chorus on “Catch a Cold.” I had one idea, and that’s the idea that I used. It was send it to Memphis and let Susan take a turn on it and she crushed it.

Baltin: You’ve made the Whigs, which is your staple thing, into this really extended family that you can work with all these different artists on.

Dulli: That was my original idea for The Twilight Singers, to have a collective that I could pull from to like, “Hey, you’d be good here, you’d be good at this. How about, hey, can you help me with this?” I have an extensive network of incredibly talented and kind and generous friends. And in regards to Mark, it’s funny. I was actually telling Christopher,”Mark never heard these mixes and he’d be like, I don’t hear myself.” And I’m like, “You know what, Mark, you might not hear yourself, but you would hear it if you weren’t there because we did that.” I even said the same thing to Christopher and he goes, “Okay, listen to this.” And I was like, “Okay, what’s that?” And he goes, “Now listen again.” And we listen to it again. I’m like, “It doesn’t sound as good.” He goes, “I turned Mark up.” So you feel Mark. On the two songs he sings on, he’s in his lowest register, but whenever we took him out, it was like a giant hole in the song. So he’s the feeling of the song and plus that’s what he would tell me if I complained about not being able to hear myself on one of his songs.

Baltin: It has to be so fun that you can now bring all of that together into this world. So whether it’s Marcy who you’ve known since the 80s, whether it’s Mark, that when you go back and hear this record, it really is like 40 years of Dulli.

Dulli: Absolutely. We all have our own legacy, we all have our own history and stories that define us. And I’m really lucky to have had the history that I have had and to know the people that I know and to work with the people and collaborate with the people that I have. It’s been very much a gift.

Baltin: This came up at the Gold Digger Show. I told Kat Corbett I would ask this. Have you ever met Don Henley?

Dulli: I’ve never met Don Henley.

Baltin: You know why I’m asking. Have to after you included both “The Boys Of Summer” and “I Can’t Tell You Why,” though that is a Timothy B. Schmidt song.

Dulli: Of course. I did both of them as a mesh and I can tell you why I did that. Because a friend of mine was there, hates The Eagles [laughter]. Almost as much as The Dude [from The Big Lebowski] does. I did both of those to tweak him and he was suitably tweaked. So tweaked that I’ve decided to keep them in the show. So there you go.

Baltin: Sadly Mark is far from the first friend you’ve lost as we’ve discussed. So, for you, do you feel like you are appreciating it more now than ever?

Dulli: Yeah, but I have to say my appreciation has really always been there, probably not with the perspective that I have now and the experience that I have now, but I have always been very grateful. I come from modest means and the riches that I’ve come upon have not been lost on me. And by riches, I mean very simply happiness, because happiness and fulfillment, that is the gift. That’s success. Playing music with your friends is just one of the greatest things that you could ever do if you’re a player, it’s a gift. It’s like, I still pinch myself that it’s happening. And the joy that I get and that I get to share with folks who like our group, it will never not blow my mind, Steve, you know, it never will.

Baltin: Could you have ever imagined. when you look back at the Sub Pop days in the late ’80s, that you’d still be touring 30 years later?

Dulli: I did. Probably around Congregation was when I thought, “I could do this for a long time. I’m good at this and I’m keep going with it.”

Baltin: So you knew you would be doing it, but did you know that the Whigs would be doing it all these years later, and there would still be such an audience for it?

Dulli: No, dude, we broke up in whatever, 2000. So ’99, 2000, and I would have never thought that we’d get back together until John Curley jumped in a van with us. He got up and did some songs with us in 2010 on my acoustic tour. And he always would get up with me in Cincinnati, and we’d have a great time, then, “See you later, John,” and we’d go to the next town. This time we were going to Chicago and I said, “Hey, do you want to come to Chicago?” And he was like, “Yeah, I’ll totally come.” I was taking a plane back. And so he went up, and when I introduced him, to come out that he was there and was gonna come out and play, dude, it was like the loudest sound I had ever heard up until then. They were cheering the history. That’s what it was, that’s what it meant to people, and that was when I started to melt a little bit.

Baltin: Obviously you and I did interviews during that time where you said it would never happen. But I got to interview Iggy Pop with Ron and Scott Asheton when they made The Weirdness. It took them 29 years between records and he never thought it would happen. But he’s like, “Eventually all the other stuff fades away, and you just remember all you accomplished together.”

Dulli: Yep. John and I grew up together, we went around the world together for the first time, for the second time, for the fifth time. These are shared experiences that you have, and it’s the depth of a friendship relationship of love itself. So I feel, and have felt, grateful to be doing this with my friends all these years later. But truth be told, I had no doubt that I’d be here. I didn’t know I’d be talking to Steve Baltin, but I did know that I’d be performing music and writing it and playing it for people, because I just knew it. I knew it.

Baltin: Was there one moment where you realized that?

Dulli: Yeah. By Up In It, I had written a couple songs that I felt were good finally, when I was like, “Okay, this is good, this can last.” But, being on Sub Pop, and being able to tour outside of the United States finally, your shows double, they triple, and all of a sudden you’re playing 150, 180, 200 shows a year. When you’re able to do that, you get to explore your abilities. It helps you gain confidence. And after we laid down Congregation and I heard it, we didn’t sound like anybody. We sounded like ourselves, we sounded unique. And once that we were able to carve out an identity and back it up with solid material, that’s when I knew.

Baltin: Was there like one song for you that sort of crystallized who The Whigs would become or who you would become as a songwriter?

Dulli: There are several songs on Congregation, but I will go a record earlier and say “You My Flower” was the first time where I was like, “Wow, these words are great. This melody is great. This arrangement is great. It has power in all the right places. I have written a great song.” And I can say that moment that was the song that unlocked me I think.

Baltin: What is the one song you wish you had written?

Dulli: It’s “Do It Again,” by Steely Dan. I’ve been listening to it since I was a child. I still not only love it, but turn it up when it comes on the radio. It’s sexy. It’s smart, great melody. The lyrics are phenomenal. The story that it tells and the killer chorus. It’s an R&B song in my opinion. The percussion on it is great. The instrumentation is great. That’s the song I wish I written and it made those guys a lot of money and that’s never bad.

Baltin: When you go back and listen to, How Do You Burn? start to finish, what do you take from it?

Dulli: It’s the tale of a once imagined apocalypse that ended up even worse.