Love Buzz: Brody Dalle on balancing motherhood with recording her solo debut

With her first solo release Diploid Love set to confirm her as an increasingly accomplished songwriter, Brody Dalle explains why the dual demands of family and music are a problem she's happy to have

Feature by Gary Kaill | 28 Apr 2014

“Oh, I’m so sorry about that,” says Brody Dalle from her LA home, as screams and shrieks cause her to put the phone down for a few minutes. “I have a two year old and an eight year old and I had to step in. So, where were we?” Where we were, indeed are, is discussing the creative process, more specifically hers, and how it sparked Diploid Love, Dalle’s imminent solo album and arguably the best thing she’s put her name to yet.

A distinctly more measured beast than the ragged punk rock of The Distillers, the band she formed in the late 90s after moving from Australia to the US, and yet a gutsier brew than Spinnerette, the post-Distillers outfit she made just the one album with, it smartly manages to splice the best characteristics of both. With Dalle now happily ensconced in family life with Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, she reaches her mid-thirties as less of a firebrand, more of – certainly on the evidence of Diploid Love – a developed and developing artist.

“I’ve always written my records in a particular way,” she says, when asked if these days she sees herself as songwriter first, performer second. “I’m not like Nick Cave where you go into the office and you sit down and you work from 9 to 5. I’ve never been that kind of artist. It just happens. You go through a phase when ideas come and they to start to flow through you. You can hear music all the time and you think ‘OK – it’s time to make a record.’ And I experienced that this time, but I have two kids, so you know…” Is Diploid Love more about the songwriting than the punk rock ruckus? “Yeah, definitely,” agrees Dalle, and goes on to explain just how it was stitched together over time. “It was made incrementally. So when I could sink my teeth into it, I really went for it.”


"Sometimes I won’t want to pick up an instrument for like two years!” – Brody Dalle


It’s quite a cliché to assume that the artistic process can’t be pushed, that you just have to grab inspiration when it gets up in your face. “Yeah,” says Dalle, “but I think all songwriters are different. For me, it’s a phase thing. I’ll be in phase and out of phase. Then sometimes I won’t want to pick up an instrument for like two years!” She laughs. “But, yeah, I’d like to get more Nick Cave about it. I like the idea of freeing up some time – because family takes up all my time – and going somewhere to sit and tinker on a typewriter. I do like a typewriter. I dunno, it just sounds really romantic to me.”

It’s not easy to picture Dalle dashing back from the school run before heading off to her study. The wild abandon of the early Distillers records seem somewhat at odds with her life now. It’s hard to imagine her ever again writing a line like “If I was you I’d fucking hate me too.” She’s not entirely convinced. “I don’t know,” she ponders. “It’s a different time. Maybe. I think that if I listen back to the first Distillers record and then the second and the third, I definitely think I’ve evolved. The lyrics on the first record make me cringe.” Really? “Yeah… There’s a song about Berlin [epic album closer The Blackest Years] I like. I like those lyrics, and the older you get, the more you know, the more you have more of those kind of songs. When you’re younger you might write just one.”

Does she see herself as a figurehead? There’s a portion of her fanbase who admire her with a deep passion. “No!” Really? “Well, not really... I like it, I like the idea. It’s interesting.” Often, artists become hyper-aware of their impact or of their perception amongst their adoring legion, particularly, as is the case with Dalle, when that following is devout and loyal. She offers sober perspective. “I mean, look at Patti Smith. I found her really late in my life. Yeah, so when you get a woman like that, who has this legendary status…” She pauses to laugh again. “I don’t generally apply it to myself!”

She ponders the debilitating effects of fickle fame and how it can drain the youthful purity of artistic ambition. Janet Weiss recently remarked in these pages that she was satisfied to have made a compromise-free living from music for so long, but worried that the new generation of female pop stars were more than ever constrained by the demands of the dollar – a very male dollar. Had Dalle faced similar hurdles? She’s slightly taken aback at the quandary. “Whoa, that’s really intense,” she says, and stops to consider. “I don’t really have to deal with it. If you’re at a certain level in the music industry, there’s a lot of compromise. And usually it’s you who’s compromising. I’m really lucky because I was liberated from my record company [Warner Bros] and got to keep my record – the Spinnerette record. They let me walk away when they could have made it really difficult for me.”

“So since then,” she continues, “everything’s been on my terms. I haven’t really had to compromise at all. A little bit, but that’s normal. I’m signed to a label now [Caroline Records] and they’re music people; they love music. I’m the kind of artist who comes with everything. I’m the full package. There’s a lot of artists out there who aren’t really that and there’s a lot of bands who are, bands who know what they want. I think the more independent you are, the better. And if you are, you don’t have to compromise. You can just make it happen.”

With the underground, if not the mainstream, allowing emerging female artists to grow at their own pace, is there a young new Patti Smith who speaks to Brody Dalle? She’s enthusiastic in response: “Yeah, I’m listening to this band called Dark Times. They’re from Oslo. Do you know them? It’s rad, it’s raw. It sounds gritty and thrashy and the singer, she’s got these shriek-y vocals, but to me they sound they’re really onto something. I was really excited to find them because the other day I was downloading some X-Ray Spex, all the old stuff I grew up with, but I’m always looking for new stuff. I guess you just have to search it out.” It’s there, though, right? “Oh absolutely. Totally. It’s totally there.”

Sometimes artists struggle to shake off the glories of youth but Brody Dalle (a veteran of the scene at a mere 35) appears to be navigating the future by way of her past. Certainly Diploid Love makes a convincing case for a developing, maturing vision. Still, she’s good enough to indulge one more back catalogue query. The song Colossus USA from The Distillers’ self-titled debut contained a line that seems to encapsulate her there-and-back-again journey. In the song, Dalle meets someone who tells her to “Live in the world, not for gain.” It’s an appealing epithet – is it one that still chimes with Dalle? “That was a guy I actually did meet,” she recalls. “He was, how do I say, a street person. He wanted some money and I told him I wasn’t gonna give him any. I could tell he’d been up drinking all night. So I took him into this café and bought him lunch. He was just a regular person. It was really trippy to see someone so dishevelled and dirty and smell so bad, and yet have all their faculties intact. Yeah, that’s gnarly, dude...”

A lesson for us all, perhaps? “Yeah, definitely. It depends on what you’re trying to gain, you know? You could be trying to gain all kinds of things. I think that as long as you’re not trying to hurt or exploit anybody… If you’re trying to gain love or experience, those kinds of things, then that’s cool. It’s all about your intent. What are you here to do? If you’re here to create, whether that be a life or something that can help people; art, even, that’s good. If you’re here to destroy, well…” She tails off at the thought. “But I’m good, regardless. I’m in a good place now.”

Diploid Love is released via Caroline Records on 28 Apr http://www.brodydalle.com