As befits a rock'n'roller, last night was a late one for Kristen Gundred, or Dee Dee Penny as she's more commonly known. It's little wonder that she's slept through her alarm.
As the lead singer, songwriter and main protagonist of Dum Dum Girls, LA native Penny (the product of half-Irish parents, incidentally) originally intended the project to remain a bedroom band, but it didn’t quite work out that way.
Her first release, I Will Be (2010), established Dum Dum Girls as a major player on the garage-pop/shoe- gaze scene, a reputation cemented by a couple of EPs and a second album (Only in Dreams) a year later. Now album No 3 has inadvertently brought her back to her bedroom, albeit via Hollywood. Having written most of the tracks intended for Too True in 2012, Penny found herself in the situation every singing musician fear most: her voice was shot.
“It was completely anti-climactic,” she says when we eventually rouse her from her slumber. “I’d played some shows prior to going into the studio and I’d just kind of strained through them. So the idea was to go into the studio and just work out everything instrumentally so that the momentum and enthusiasm was kept going. So we finished everything, and all that was left was the singing. But two notes into it, I knew that there was no way I could commit what was coming out to record. It was devastating, to some degree. I ended up taking the bulk of last year off.”
There was a silver lining to the cloud, however: the enforced hiatus meant more time could be spent on the songs, which meant that in some tracks were partially rewritten. The end result is a cohesive album that Penny is fully satisfied with.
“I had written 10 or 15 songs that were done or partially done over the year prior to recording – but I just knew that they didn’t feel like what the next record could be,” she says. “And so I kind of had an idea that I needed to sit down and do the whole thing all at once. I needed it to be this cohesive but spontaneous sort of thing. So the first opportunity that I had some time off and I had the apartment to myself, that’s what I did.
“It was a little bit different this time around, because I demo’ed everything on electric, instead of writing songs on acoustic guitar and then fleshing them out in demos electrically. It happened very spontaneously, but it was kind of like a controlled chaos, I guess. I was able to take advantage of the forced extra time to really make sure that everything was exactly how I wanted to be. I’ve never really had that sort of time with a record before, but I think it was really appropriate for this one.”
When it came to recording the vocals, Penny took the least stressful option. Although some recording had been done in the same Hollywood studio in which The Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds, she decided to return to her New York apartment to finish the album.
“I felt like, okay, I can’t deal with the stress of going into a studio again. It’s not that it’s a bad thing to record vocals with producers, but it had just been such a stressful endeavour up to that point and I just needed to be in a place where I was comfortable and I could work at a slow pace – whatever I needed without interference. So I recorded all of the vocals in my bedroom this time around with proper equipment.”
When they released their debut, Dum Dum Girls were saddled with a "retro revivalist/girl band" label that they've found hard to shake. Perhaps it's a result of having more time to craft Too True, but the album ably displays their myriad other influences, including Suede, The Stone Roses and The Cure, as namechecked by Penny. Songs such as Evil Blooms and Rimbaud Eyes are especially reflective of their move away from the hazy dream-pop tag that hung over them for so long.
“That definitely drives me mad,” she says, laughing, of the “garage girl group” comparisons. “If it was ever appropriate, it was when I first started making music – but I think with each record, my intention has been to make some sort of progress. I’ve attempted that not just via songwriting, but also via a production style; to do something different and better, I guess, than what I’d done before. I’ve always had a pretty varied taste in music, so I would hope that with this record it’s maybe not totally easy to pin down for people.”
A fresh perspective was also gained during her time off last year with a new collaboration involving her husband, Brandon Welchez who is guitarist/vocalist with noise-pop band Crocodiles. They collaborated on side project, Haunted Hearts, releasing a single in 2012 and recording an album during Penny's downtime from Dum Dum Girls. The release of the End of Daze EP in 2012 also helped to close a chapter on a certain period of Penny's life that she had said was "confused, difficult, disastrous, and at times, redemptive".
After the personal themes in Only in Dreams, written in the wake of her mother's death, Penny says she was ready to try something a little lighter – although lines such as "There's nothing you can do to make all your bad turn good" (from Trouble Is My Name) may suggest otherwise. Yet all in all, Penny says, her confidence in her ability – buoyed by regular production collaborators Richard Gottehrer and Sune Rose Wagner (he of The Raveonettes) – has helped make her most personally and professionally significant album to date.
“This record is the one that I’ve worked the most on, the one that I feel the most . . . it’s hard to explain. It’s the most intentional, even though it came across spontaneously in terms of most of the songs. But I approached it differently than I had any other record before. It just felt more significant to me. I mean, it’s always the goal for any musician, isn’t it? To keep doing this, to keep building on what I have and to keep doing better work. And I think that I’ve done that, this time.”
