Damn Tall Buildings will release its new album, “The Universe Is Hungry,” on Friday, Oct. 24.
The New York City trio will also return to the Wichita area, one of its strongholds, for two shows this week. The first is at Dyck Arboretum in Hesston on Saturday, Oct. 25, while the second is at the Bartlett Arboretum in Belle Plaine on Sunday, Oct. 26.
The band’s Max Capistran says that diehard fans can expect some variations between the two shows while fans new and old can expect to hear material from the latest, long-awaited release.
Capistran discussed the band’s funding strategy for the album as well as the trio’s continued connection with its dedicated audience.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I guess the obvious thing to start with is that you have this new album. You used fan funding for this project, but you didn’t go through the typical platforms.
We’d done two Kickstarter [campaigns] before, and it’s been kind of a great thing for us in a lot of ways. We were able to connect with our fans, and we raised a bunch of money to make our albums, and it gave us a better idea of how to best use funds to make an album. The first time you’re making a record, you’re just taking a bunch of different advice from a bunch of different people at different levels in the music industry. You don’t know the best way to appropriate everything. This time, we whittled it all down. We knew exactly what we could handle on our own and what we needed, and we wanted to leave that platform and feel even more connected with our fans in some way.
This is real direct donation. There’s nothing through another platform, which is kind of who we are as a band in some ways. When we play shows, we try to break that barrier of us and the audience. We want to feel connected with people. This was a way for us to feel connected with people in a different way. I think it worked out great.
I love that you did give fans a breakdown of the costs: Here’s the reality. Here’s what it’s going to cost us to make this. You included things like what it would cost to get the record on radio or to hire a publicist.
I think that stuff is important for people to know. When we first started making our records, we didn’t understand even how much you were supposed to put in for PR. I think we felt it was important to share with our audience. We’re a very open band. We like to share personal stories and all sorts of stuff, so we figured it would be good for other bands to know what we’re spending, what we’re doing and to see all that goes into making one of these records.
I can imagine there would be people who would say, “Well, why don’t you just go out and play a bunch of shows, rake in the money that way and then make the record.” But doing shows themselves is a costly proposition.
The band Garbage performed in Denver the other night and finished their show saying that they’re not coming back. They explained how it’s unrealistic to make money playing on the road. We haven’t gotten to that point. We’re a bare-bones band. We play around one mic, and we live in New York with cheap access to airlines. We’ve been able to keep it going, but we still have to eat and pay our bills, so that’s where a lot of that money’s going. We put a bunch of money into funding this album ourselves. It’s hard with the current landscape, with streaming, it just doesn’t pay. You’re investing $30,000 at a minimum into this project where it takes a long time to pay it back. CDs are dying, too! But the vinyl is coming back.
It is coming to a point where even people who are well established -- people we had posters of on our walls when we were kids -- are saying, “Oh, man. Getting travel, getting this, getting that [is difficult].” For a smaller band, it’s an interesting time because if you’re playing your cards right, you can still do it.
Totally. I’m kind of interested to see what happens moving forward. We’re always just hanging on by a thread. We’ve been doing this for 13 years. We want to continue hanging on and to try coming up with inventive ways to continue to have this middle-class musician still exist. We just live in a time where it’s just hard for that level of musician.
Today, I suppose it’s possible for bands to go out and only play live. They can still write new songs and share them with fans that way. What’s the importance, then, of having a record?
We wonder that every day! Honestly, the point of having a record is twofold: Your booking agents are always hounding you, saying that it helps sell you to markets. “They’ll be promoting these things.” That’s on the booking agents’ side, and they really only care about the live shows. Then you have the internet, which just wants you to put out singles. It doesn’t care if you make an album. I think you almost get penalized for making an album. Then you have the three of us who sometimes have to be businesspeople but who, at the end of the day, got into this to play music and try to make our form or art. We all cherish albums. We listen to them from front to back. I have a huge record collection. We’re dedicated to that. I don’t want that to die, and I don’t want to be part of that dying, so that’s why I’m making an album. We’d be doing it one way or another.
Plus, I’m sure you have fans who live in places where you don’t always get to tour or maybe they can’t always get out to see you for one reason or another.
We were playing in Kentucky one time. There were 20 people in the audience. You would not deem it a successful show. But this guy came up after and said, “I just hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. I downloaded 50 songs before I went on that hike and one of those was one of your songs. I have so many moments of seeing these beautiful vistas listening to your song.” That’s not on Spotify. We don’t know that metric. That’s part of the beauty of what we do, being able to share this stuff with people. You don’t know how it hits people. I certainly have bands that I listen to that are not very famous at all, and I cherish it. I try to remember that as I get caught up and frustrated when we only have so many streams on a song and all that stuff. I try to keep what’s important out front, which is sharing this music with people.
