Moneyballs and Moneybags: Dutch Interior’s Label Debut

‘None of us are Dutch, sorry to inform you,’ they say when I tell them I’m going to the Netherlands this evening.

Their name, Dutch Interior, apparently causing confusion for people who didn’t expect them to be from Huntington Beach due to their name that was borrowed from the series of paintings by Spanish artist Joan Miró of the same name.

Composed of close friends, Conner Reeves, Jack Nugent, Noah Kurtz, Davis Stewart, Shane Barton and his brother Hayden, there is a coherency within the music that could only work through knowing each other so well. All of them except Hayden write and sing on their records — Hayden’s songs are coming, don’t worry. With them all writing songs, there is an excitement within their records, as each song brings something different. Listening to their most recent, Moneyball, their third album but their first released with a label, you’re met with forty three minutes of unexpected twists and turns, each song, different, from country songs, to songs, slow and emotional. The only certainty of Moneyball is that you’ll enjoy the next song just as much as the last. 

Every piece of media on Dutch Interior — including us now — mentions the closeness of their friendship. Video calling into their studio where they had just been playing a run through of Moneyball, I saw it first hand, all six of them piled up on the couch, arms around each other, passing around a vape, giggling, and talking so lovingly on each other, it’s not just a cute little act. They are really all best friends and it is really sweet.

Dutch Interior are about to go on their first US headlining tour starting on the 29th of May in Santa Ana and their Europe tour at the end of August, check the dates here and go see them live if they’re in your city. 

Moneyball was your third album but your label debut. How was it working with a label on the album versus doing it by yourself?

Davis: There were a lot more group chats, but it is really nice to have outside opinions, we trust them, and we really love our team.

Jack: It’s cool to have someone believe that your music is good, because I think that sometimes you get lost in your bubble and sometimes feel like you’re delusional. Having someone say, ‘This music is worth this much money’ is really affirming.

Davis: Or when we send a demo, and they emphasise it in the chat you’re like ‘Wow.’

Shane: It’s nice having a team that we like, they’re all our friends, I could see a label situation being an absolute nightmare if you didn’t vibe with the people but they’re friends, and it feels natural and seamless. We’re really lucky.

That’s so nice to hear. You guys have been friends since childhood, is Dutch Interior your first band together?

Noah: There have been iterations between all of us in different ways throughout the years.

Shane: This is the first time with all of us together, this exact group.

What were the names of the other bands you guys had?

Noah: Going back to freshman year of high school, Conner and I had a band called Coastal Access. 

Conner: We made surf rock if you can’t tell by the band name, it echoes all the way to New Zealand [laughs].

Shane: Everyone except, Hayden was in a band called Skin Mag at some point which we had during college. Which was our last band before Dutch Interior.

What music did you guys make with Skin Mag?

Conner: It was just psych, indie rock, a lot more chorus pedal vibes than this band.

How did you guys end up morphing into Dutch Interior?

Davis: Covid happened and we all sort of gave up on music. At the time a bunch of us were living together, Conner brought over a tape machine and we just drank really heavily and made songs. We eventually put those songs on DistroKid, some people liked it, and someone asked us to play a house show and we were like ‘Fuck it we could be a band for one show.’ We played it, then realised we all missed this, and sort of fell back into being like, ‘Maybe we should make another record.’ It happened very organically over time, it wasn’t like ‘We’re a fucking band.’

Conner: It has become more intentional over time; it’s been gradual, and I think it still is slowly becoming more intentional.

Davis: We were pretty silly about a lot of it, there was intention and work put into it, but we have a lot of fun.

Hayden: A lot of it revolves around Conner.

Jack: Conner was the big reason for this band, he produces all the music and I feel like he has a big hand in why all this happened.

How do you feel about that Conner?

Conner: Yeah, I mean I’ve known Noah forever and it wasn’t until Skin Mag where I got introduced to these guys…

Davis: Not true, we met at a party in high school.

Jack: Conner doesn’t remember it, but we remember.

Conner: I was kind of doing my own shit, that was inspired by music I love, like Americana music and classic song writing, which is what everyone else is into that too. When I came into their group, and we first started making those early Dutch Interior recordings we found a really cool combination of leaning into earnest song writing while sprinkling in these elements of experimental stuff that we all have been experimenting with in our past projects. I can’t take all the credit; I do a lot of the recording but what we really did find is a good sound and workflow.

Jack: This band taught me it was okay to write songs with cowboy chords, which was something that I convinced myself was dead when I was in high school, and I think that revitalised my song writing really heavily.

Can we talk about the sound of the band, even speaking about your earlier projects Dutch Interior has a lot more mature influences and a mature sound than a surf rock band. How did it turn into this?

Davis: We got more focused, and everyone became a songwriter, rather than the single band approach.

Shane: In the pandemic I was writing songs solo on the acoustic guitar, just because that was the vibe, then the solo song writing on a conceptual level lent itself to styles like that.

Davis: We all have different backgrounds with what we are obsessed with so as each person’s song takes shape through the lens of Dutch, whatever you lean towards whether it be punk, hardcore, noise, Americana, indie rock, it moves across each person in different varying amounts. We all would exercise on our own individual instruments but it's cool to have the main seat and alternate that between everyone.

Jack: Towards the end of Skin Mag, we were writing Skin Mag songs which didn’t feel natural to me, then with Dutch whenever I write a song, I don’t feel like I’m writing a song for Dutch Interior it’s very much just writing a song. It can be whatever it comes out as, which is super freeing and it’s nice knowing when I bring it into the band it’ll become a Dutch Interior song in its own way.

Conner: A great example is that we just got out of the studio recording a batch of songs and one of Noah’s songs for example, we had demoed it a few times, it had always been a great song, but we were like we need to make it more Dutch, and it went under a massive transformation and then we were like ‘That’s it’. The songs are written on their own, then once we are in the studio, we figure out the proper arrangement to make it to where it feels like all our voices and minds are on it.

That’s really cool especially with five of the six of you guys writing songs. Have you found that to be a helpful way to keep the music you’re making interesting?

Davis: Yeah, for sure, anything can happen. Everyone has a really good attitude about it, and nobody is hyper protective, we’re all open to collaborating and letting it take shape separate from what your original intention might be for it. Everyone is down to try a hundred different things to serve the song in the best way. 

Shane: It takes a lot of pressure off of it and makes it pretty easy for us to be prolific because I can write two songs and feel happy about it because if we each write two songs, we have more than enough for another record.

Conner: Yeah, it is so good not having to write a whole record. I feel by our fourth record we will all have written a record worth of music each.

It’s nice listening to Moneyball because it is all quite different but is coherent. For example, with “Science Fiction”, is this slow, emotional song, then later in the album you go into “Horse” which is this cool cowboy sounding song.

Noah: We are just making the songs we want to make and putting it all together and people are like for whatever reason it works.

Hayden: The cohesiveness is kind of a miracle because while we were recording it, I didn’t think it was going to work.

Shane: The production is consistent, and our lives are intertwined enough which is where that stuff comes from, not to get be like, ‘Oh we are all such great friends’ but it’s just the truth. If we were a band of strangers, we wouldn’t have the same sound.

That makes sense, it’s the same with everything where if it's organic and natural you can tell by the output.

Jack: Also, our team with the label and our manager had a big hand in making it work as an album. We recorded sixteen or seventeen songs for Moneyball and cut it down to ten.

Shane: Yeah, finding the list was a big discussion that took a long time.

Yeah, how long did it take for you guys to come down to the records track list?

Conner: We were told that we could have a ten-song record, it had to be one disc, so it had to be 43-minutes.

Davis: I think we were on tour when we decided, right?

Conner: Yeah, we were in the van, listening to the songs when we decided.

Hayden: All in all, it probably took three weeks from when we got it.

Are you guys happy with how it all came out?

All: Yeah.

Davis: Put that in print!

Conner: It’s part of the vision to start as an 8-track band and introduce more layers, but we were quite blindsided by Moneyball. We had just started demoing, were three songs in and all of a sudden, we had a manager and were signed to a label. It was like ‘Holy shit we are making a record right now.’

Davis: They were like ‘Turn in a record by this date.’ It caught us off guard.

Shane: Our manager was not expecting a label to bite when the album wasn’t done, there was a weird vibe shift suddenly where we were now making a record for a record label.

Conner: It kind of worked in a way because we didn’t want it to sound perfect. The whole record minus one or two songs was done live in our tiny space that we are in right now. There is tons of bleed across mics, we were sticking to completing a song a day ethic so if it wasn’t perfect it was like move on. It was not like we were making our debut label record to show people what we’ve got, but I think that makes it cooler because along with all the press of ‘Dutch Interior are releasing their label debut’ and it comes out and it’s kind of sloppy I think is really cool. There are also a lot of unwanted things that are byproducts of being lazy, if you listen carefully on one of the songs you can hear click bleed.

Jack: Yeah, I remember listening to it on my nice headphones after the mix came back and was like ‘Oh my god.’

Conner: There are like little unwanted noises like if someone is strumming on an acoustic guitar you can hear their shirt hitting the guitar. A bunch of organic sounds that we wanted.

Hayden: We are trying to improve now, we are crossing that line, of like before we were trying to be a little bit sloppy and now we are trying to catch up to what we can actually accomplish, we are trying to be good at what we do and it’s a lot harder to do that now.

It’s also a part of the organic thing we were talking about earlier, where this is how you want it to sound.

Hayden: We always want to preserve that in one way or another, whether that is a fully produced record or something. We are all huge fans of organic ambient sounds of a chair creaking in the room while you’re getting a live take or something that brings you into the recording. Hopefully just the songs get better.

Jack: There are some genres we haven’t hit yet that could be fun to move into.

What are those genres?

Hayden: Uhh, worship Christian music [laughs].

Shane: We’ve always talked about doing a traditional krautrock song, we’ve never tried but that would be pretty sweet.

Davis: That’s another thing, we don’t really have intention of making an xyz song, Hayden would just make a krautrock sounding drum beat and it would assemble into something like that. That’s sort of the way it is with everything, it happens a little more organically.

Jack: We gotta make more shoegaze, that shit pays the bills. Before the shoegaze bubble pops, we have to invest.

Can we talk about the idea of “Freak Americana”?

Davis: I just like the word “freak” and I didn’t know what to call it but I was just like, ‘It’s Americana but we just kinda fuck it up a little bit and it’s a little less self-serious.’ It’s not like a tag we stand by, it's just an early way of explaining it. I think our approach is a little bit weirder than the traditional sense of Americana and we are open to being silly. We’ll sing about dumb shit but put feedback on it and we like Willie Nelson.

Jack: It’s Americana but new and chill.

Hayden, how come you aren’t writing songs? 

Hayden: I appreciate you asking, nobody has ever asked me that. I do, but I never have had a song where I was like I need to bring it to the guys. I’ve never been confident enough on a song, to be like I need this on the next album. I am also the latest addition to the band so by the time I joined Moneyball was pretty much done.

Conner: Hayden is also a ripping piano player.

Jack: He also has a beautiful voice, maybe the most beautiful voice of all of us.

Davis: I’d also say the most handsome.

Hayden: Thank you guys. What I really want to happen is I just want to write a song and get it released so all the media doesn’t have to keep being like ‘Five of the six band members write songs.’ It would be so much easier if they could just say ‘All of them’.

Jack: Fun fact about Hayden joining the band late is that his first ever time playing drums on stage was opening for Explosions in the Sky to a thousand people.

Can we talk about Dutch Interior’s visual aesthetic too? With the album you released live videos that look like CCTV footage from the studio session, your recent tour posters are a Google Images search, on Spotify the album’s visual is a Grailed listing of the album. Where does that all come from?

Shane: That’s all Davis.

Davis: I spend a lot of time online, and the ethos of it is we write earnest songs and I really like the visual pairing between having a very weird, cold, non-central aesthetic. I’m disgusted by my screentime, and I like to integrate that into the earnestness of our songs. Especially with the Moneyball stuff that’s what I have been interested in, just like American signifiers that makes me sad that I always have to be around, I like using those because it feels like my everyday life in this weird little world.

What are those signifiers?

Davis: Knives, guns, weapons and data mining, all of this shit. The idea is just the world around us.

Jack: The Procession of Simulacra.

Davis: There you go, he reads the books, I go on Twitter.

Shane: Sometimes I think of your art as reclaiming American culture.

Davis: Yeah, we make Americana music, I’m just trying to find what modern Americana is.

Jack: Davis, I think you make really good post-ironic art which is really hard to pull off and a lot of people try. The music isn’t post-ironic, it is really genuine, personal and heartfelt. Then pairing that and putting it in context with this post ironic internet moment that we are in which is scary and alienating, there is something there, but I don’t know if we’ve figured it out fully.

Davis: Yeah, the zeitgeist of hell it feels like sitting on the edge of something. Could you condense that into three nice sentences and then text it to me?

Yeah, I can do that. What’s your screen time, I’m also embarrassed of mine.

Davis: It’s down 58% from last week, so it’s 3 hours and 49 mins. It’s usually at 8 hours a day. I’ve been really healthy this week.

Damn, that’s good, proud of you. To wrap this up, can you each describe the band in one sentence?

Shane: A hodgepodge of disparate influences that works most of the time.

Noah: A good time with my friends.

Conner: Not your everyday indie rock band.

Davis: Summer just might last forever.

Shane: I regret going first.

Jack: You said hodgepodge.

Hayden: The best first band I could’ve ever joined.

All: Awww.

Davis: But you don’t really know.

Hayden: That’s true, I’m pretty sure though.

Jack: Stumbling through our influences.