Darian Zahedi Gives Us An Anatomy Of Writing Solo Single "Dancing" During Lockdown
Darian Zahedi is an active member of the band CRX, sometimes dives into work with CRX bandmate Jon Safley as People on People, and even has some work coming up on a project called Cadeaux with Briana Lane, but that's not what we're here to talk about today. Today we're talking about the development that Zahedi has released his first solo single under his own name, a track that he had, basically, all the time in the world to work on during quarantine.
What would you do to craft a song if you had all the time in the world? In Zahedi's case, it came down to trying out a whole cash of synthesizers and working on layers day by day until the simplicity and force of the idea of "Dancing" came to the fore. It's a song that stays in your head by capturing something familiar yet haunting, something we can't physically do right now in public, but also something that's also typical of our human experience no matter the state of the world: the realization that we live two lives via our private life and our social life. That division is overcome, if temporarily, by the mystery of dancing.
Darian Zahedi spoke with Tower's PULSE about his new single, and also about his memories of Tower Records, as well as why he feels vinyl just sounds better.
Hannah Means-Shannon: Have you wanted to put out some solo songs for a while, or is it something that quarantine helped push you into doing?
Darian Zahedi: It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, and I’ve always half done it. I have a project with another bandmate from CRX, Jon Safley. Up until now that’s been my solo venture that’s not a solo venture, as a collaboration with Jon. I put out a project out years ago that was under an alias, called Mack Winston and the Reflections. This is the first time I’m saying, “This is me. This is my song.” I guess this has been the time for a lot of people to do the things they have always wanted to do. It’s now or now.
With the other band I play with, CRX, we haven’t been able to get together in months. We tried writing over Facetime and things like that, but it’s really hard to fully realize songs that way.
So I figured that one person I can be in the room with is myself, so I might as well make something and put it out.
HMS: Absolutely. The processes people are having to use to try to create music at a distance can be painful. I can imagine getting rough material, but not finished material.
DZ: Exactly. We’d get things to a certain point, where we’d feel like we’d done something, but in order to finish something, we’d need to get in a room and pick up instruments. I feel like you can go back and forth for days about something on Zoom, but if you’re in a room, you can solve it in ten minutes instead of having to send stems back and forth. All these little things separate you further and push you away from each other. All that makes it difficult to get into the zone and finish a song.
We actually just, in the last week or so, started getting together. We’re all getting regular COVID tests so we can be part of a pod and start making a new record.
HMS: That’s wonderful to hear! Do you tend to record with more of a live sound or would you just rather be together to make decisions more easily?
DZ: With CRX, we decided that whatever our next record is, we wanted it to be more of a live, spontaneous thing. Ironically, we decided that just before lockdown hit, which made that impossible. But it was the perfect time for me to do my song in my bedroom, basically. CRX is progressing more the way each record, becoming more live, and collaborative, and improvised. Hopefully we’ll be able to realize that at some point.
But for now, I might keep trying to do my own thing in my bedroom since now I have a rhythm going for it.
HMS: The fact that you’ve decided to put something out during this time at all is amazing. But also, from what I can tell, you also put a tremendous amount of time and thought into “Dancing”. Can you tell us a little bit about the recording process and some of the decisions that you made?
DZ: To go way back to the beginning, like a lot of musicians, I have hard drives full of ideas from over the years. It’s like being a surfer, with false-starts, “Not that wave, not that wave, not that wave…” Then you’ll have an idea and ride it all the way in, and it feels great. So this was one of the ideas that I hadn’t follow through with, alongside many others. I just kept coming back to it in the early days of lock-down because there was something about the groove and the melody that felt like it was worth pursuing. Initially, I had worked on it a little with Jon from CRX and People on People, but we had never followed through with it. I thought, “I should follow through with that.”
As always with this kind of thing, you think it is going to be easy, but it’s never easy. So it did take a lot longer than I wanted it to. But for the first time, that felt totally okay, because it was like being in a spaceship in the middle of space, like, “Well, I have about a year and a half before I make it to Mars. So I might as well finish this song.” I started stripping things down, piece by piece, replacing things.
I have a little studio here at home, with a ton of analog synths, and a guitar set up. Most of it was analog synth parts that started coming together. As I started building them up, I would go back to the first ones and start deleting them. It was like building layers, then erasing the bottom layers. This was a process of analog synth erosion, though that sounds so nerdy. That’s basically what it was.
At some point towards the beginning of lockdown, my girlfriend moved in with me, who is also a musician. Her name is Queen Kwong. She has a ton of musical equipment that we collectivized. All the sudden, there were more analog synths and pedals. I started playing with her analog synths and suddenly that became the intro that I was going for.
I would just do versions of the song during the day, then at 6pm every day I would go for a walk and listen to what I made, and say, “No, that doesn’t work.” Or “Yes, that’s working.” It was having time to overanalyze something, but being find with it. I got pretty much done with the song, then was thinking, “There’s something about this that I hate.” I couldn’t tell if it was because I’d listened to it too many times, or was too into it, or whether it was a valid hatred. But I came to the conclusion that what I needed to change was the beat, the core of the song.
I erased the core of the song and did a whole new thing that made it what it is, something that feels really good to dance to. Once that happened, it was there, and everything else was adding a little shine here and there.
As far as the lyrics went, the chorus had always been “dancing” from the beginning. But I felt like, “I can’t keep that.” Since it was the first thing I came up with. But the more I worked, the more I couldn’t get away from it or separate it from the song. It felt like everything else just needed to cater to that. And that became the song, the vibe, the beat. The verse lyrics came as a kind of opposition to that. The idea of dancing was not a possibility all of the sudden, which had never happened in my life, or in the lives of the generation before us. It was so weird, and I wanted to contrast that with the isolated reality that we are all living in.
But I also wanted it to have meaning beyond this time that we are living in, for any time you are feeling isolated and alone. We are all living in our own separate worlds, then we go out at night, come together, dance, and have fun. Then the next day, we find ourselves separated again. It’s a weird thing we don’t always think about. We have two lives: We have our separate, internal lives, that we all live. Then we have our collective, social life, and then can be at odds with each other.
HMS: Yes, for sure.
DZ: I feel like it’s very meaningful now, but it doesn’t have to be about now.
HMS: The core of the idea, then, is about the difference between those two worlds, and that just happens to be particularly relevant right now when there’s a wall slammed down between the two?
DZ: Exactly. I think that’s why I felt like I could pursue this idea now, specifically.
HMS: Does the song represent any radically different directions for you in terms of sound for your solo work? You said that the idea came from the same hard drive where you keep all your ideas, so maybe you don’t particularly differentiate between possible projects. I realize that’s kind of an unfair question to ask you when you’ve only released the first song!
DZ: It’s hard to say. The first thing that you do with solo work is something you can let define what you will do next, which is easier, since it’s a blueprint of sorts for the next thing. But that might just be because of what you are into at the time, also. For me, I’ve always been into the late 1970s and early 1980s vibe of music, from Disco, to New Age, to Punk, and that is always there. Not to mention being stuck in a room with a bunch of analog synths, a 70s guitar, 60s and 70s guitar effects.
I think that’s just the situation but it’s also the aesthetic that I’m into in general. It’s a sort of representation of things that I love and things that challenge me. There’s a ton of synth stuff in the song that’s layered on top of each other because I love those sounds, but also because I have hours and hours to twiddle nobs.
I do think about it, wondering if I do something next, should it sound like the B-side to “Dancing”? Or should everything be a stand-alone thing right now? We live in a time where we’re not necessarily making a bunch of singles that will one day be on a cohesive record that someone will one day buy on vinyl or listen to in their car. You can do anything you want.
You can make a bunch of singles and they can sound different. I would hope there would be something that would tie them all together, but I think that would be my aesthetic and what I like to hear and the things that I find interesting to sing about. At the end of the day, my voice is my voice, and hopefully even if it’s not a bunch of analog synths and a dance groove, it’ll still sound like me.
HMS: I agree that there’s so much choice right now in terms of music formats and engaging fans. And our times have thrown that even more into question.
DZ: I think it’s hard for musicians because there’s a formula that was given to you for making records. If that hasn’t been rendered meaningless by digital downloads, it’s definitely been rendered meaningless by the fact that no one can go on tour for the time being. People think of both as a negative change, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that the best thing you can do is embrace it.
You can put out a bunch of songs with a bunch of different vibes, and make videos, and put them online. The possibilities are daunting and it’s hard not to have a clear-cut road to follow, but once you stop trying to swim upstream, it’s a lot easier. It’s easier said than done, but it’s become glaringly apparent now, if not before that the possibilities are great and really exciting.
I was really excited when I heard I’d be speaking to Tower Records because I grew up going to Tower Records.
HMS: I was definitely going to ask you about that!
DZ: I literally grew up in Hollywood near the one on Sunset. I would walk there as a kid and the way that I would discover music was through listening booths. I couldn’t have imagined then that there would be different ways to discover music. Now you discover music on playlists, blogs. What you think to be the only way to do something eventually becomes obsolete, so embrace the present. But I was a big fan of Tower Records and it was a big part of my music obsession and education.
Also, my grandmother, when she was alive, used to live in Virginia, outside of DC, and there was a Tower Records in the strip mall down the street. That would be my thing, as a teenager, to walk to Tower Records and look for two hours, being lost in the music world, basically. I think it’s so cool that the brand and the name is active again. It’s doing that it did then in a modern way.
HMS: Thank you so much. I have heard about some of the stores in the DC area having a big impact on people, so thank you for sharing that. Everyone knows about Sunset, which in many ways was the beating heart of Tower due to its location and its events, but it’s really cool to hear about the impact on community in other places. Do you feel that you tried types of music you might not have come across otherwise?
DZ: Definitely, due to the listening booths. But also, if something had a cool cover, I would check it out. Aesthetics match music. I’m a very visual person, too, so if something had a cool, interesting aesthetic, I would want to check it out and see if it matched. I also lived in New York for many years, and there was a Tower on West 4th and Broadway that I used to go in all the time.
I was playing in a band at that point and all my friends were playing in bands and had records coming out. I would go and see if my friends’ bands had records in the listening booths. It was how I would stay up on things. It was so integral to that time, being in New York.
I play in CRX with Nick [Valensi], and we know each other from New York way back, and I went to see their first Strokes shows, when there were like ten people there.
HMS: Wow, that’s so awesome.
DZ: It was an interesting experience to be a part of that, and then walk into Tower Records and see it in the listening booth. In one year, it went from being a live performance thing to being in a listening booth at Tower. That was sort of how you knew something had become real. We don’t have that experience anymore, or not exactly like that.
You know something is real when you see the video on Youtube or see someone play on Fallon, or Kimmel, or Corden. But those were all there before. The tangibility of it is a bygone experience.
HMS: You don’t get that affirmation hitting you in the face.
DZ: It was such a unique thing. Up until a short period of time, I’d go buy vinyl at Amoeba, but Amoeba was kind of the last place to go, the last big record store where you would have that vibe and feeling. There are still little, boutique record stores. But Amoeba was a place to go and be a part of that world and that fantasy.
HMS: Kind of like the last outpost?
DZ: The last magical outpost where there was tangible music and you could see the aesthetic of records stacked together. Browsing is dead, or it’s been replaced by surfing, kind of like if someone was dead and their brain has been frozen and brought back to life in the future…Kind of like Futurama? It’s not dead, it’s just very, very different. The physical nature has changed to a robot, with a brain, in a glass case.
HMS: What you were talking about a minute ago, about the importance of the artwork on albums, is one of the possible influences in the resurgence of vinyl. No one really knows for sure why vinyl has come back so strongly, but one aspect is the ability to have an “experience” where you can look at the artwork, and the credits, and play physical media that you can’t personally create unless you have a vinyl press.
DZ: Then there’s the fact, in my opinion that vinyl just sounds better. It just does. People can split hairs, and yes, a high-res digital file does sound great now, but for me nothing sounds the same as a vinyl record. Maybe it’s a certain frequency that my brain has come to love and feel warm and fuzzy about, but I do think that’s a big part of the resurgence of vinyl.
HMS: And a lot of other people agree with you. Especially with older records, there’s much more of a sense of air and a feel of the human element.
DZ: As Brian Eno said, when technology changes, as soon as people have the ability to do something, they do. As soon as you have the ability to cram digital tracks together, you lose space, you lose air.
I put on David Bowie’s Young Americans on vinyl the other night and that record just sounds so good. There’s so much space in it, but it’s still huge and bombastic. The space and air in the production makes every element have so much more weight. There are a lot of layered backing vocals on there, but every single one is important. Every single backing vocalist is listed on the back and you hear every single one of them doing their thing. It gives you chills when you listen to it.
I wondered what they would have done if they had the technology to layer a hundred vocal tracks and slam the drums as loud as they could. Would they have done it? I’m glad they didn’t. I think that’s also because Bowie was always a man of taste, to say the least.
Not to be a luddite, but when listening to it, I thought, “Stuff doesn’t sound like this anymore.” Stuff doesn’t have that dynamic feel that allows 100% of the passion and emotion to come through.
I’m saying all this in an interview about a song that I made on a computer in my room! If I was in the situation that they were in, it might be a different story. But you take inspiration from these things and you try to let that influence you and what you have to work with.
Leave a comment