01/24/24
Ahoy hoy friendos! This week we had a whole lot of NOTHING going on in the show department. Some of our homies had shows, but we didn’t run any sound, record anything, or do any actual art related to music. Here’s what I did over the weekend just for a laugh. They are Artist Trading Cards done at the request of a couple random folks on the internet.
Have you ever seen a more luscious potato? I think not.
Now for the real business this week. Since we didn’t have anything going on, I thought this was a good opportunity to try out an artist spotlight interview. I haven’t really streamlined this process yet, especially given the difficulties in scheduling between myself and our artists. That being said, my good friend Doug Strange agreed to let me try this out on him first. What a guy, right?
Doug is special to blackhat. If it weren’t for the rather serendipitous way Doug met all of us, we may not be here doing all of this today. Who knows, Matt may have still become an engineer without meeting either of us, but I certainly wouldn’t know any of you. So thank you Doug for meeting a silly bassist from Craigslist at Del Taco, and finding a tall, loud, gregarious newbie vocalist in a VVC piano class 12-ish years ago that happened to be my roommate. Since then we have shared so many moments with this “guitar guy”…a full spectrum of them if you will. We’ve laughed together, argued, cried, ignored each other a smidge, and created some really great music together over the years. He’s one of the reasons I gathered enough ballage to open my mouth and sing in front of people at all. He’s also the only homie I’ve (somewhat) regularly performed with.
So who the hell is Doug Strange? Let’s get to our chat.
I asked him first about how he got into guitar and when he first started playing. I recalled that his father had played guitar at some point. He confirmed that his father did indeed play guitar back in the 60’s and 70’s, but started playing again around the time Doug turned 10. By 13, Doug had picked a guitar of his own. He mentioned having a “really eccentric guitar teacher” that taught him a lot of scales. The first thing he was taught was how to make a motif which he credits not only to his killer guitar playing skills, but also to becoming an effective songwriter.
Any time I hear an interview the person always asks the artists who they are listening to and who they were influenced by as musicians. I had to ask Doug just for shingles, even though I knew at least part of the answer already. When he was younger and first playing guitar he really liked grunge rock, like a lot of us older millennials did. He mentioned being a fan of Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins in particular. If you listen to Doug’s solo work you can definitely hear Corgan’s influence not only in some of Doug’s guitar playing, but also a bit in his vocal work. (If you ever hear me sing there’s some hard evidence I listened to a lot of Green Day, Fiona Apple, and Alanis Morrisette as a kid…and musicals…sooooo many musicals) It wasn’t until later that Doug got interested in 80’s hair metal and guitar shredders. Now, he listens more to trippy/jammy stuff and plays less heavy stuff more often.
When it comes to what he likes to play nowadays, the basic sound boils down to rock, but he doesn’t leave it comfortably in the rock lane. He likes to mix it up and lay some blues, or country, or rap vibes into his songs. The conversation quickly devolved into discussing the evolution of his guitar playing over the last 12 years. I thought he could play well enough for a 20-something-year-old back in 2012. He thanked me politely for the compliment and said, “I can actually play now, so that helps.” His alleged sloppiness aside, the guy had already been playing for around a decade when we all met. He played well, but he attributes his current skill and creativity to lots of practice, playing lots of live shows, and playing with lots of different people.
Talking about all the people he’s worked with and the band he was in when we met got me wondering how many bands he’s actually been in.
Pi: “How many bands have you been in over the course of your music career so far?”
Doug: “I don’t even know how to quantify that anymore.”
Between all the bands he has done work with, all the bands that almost were, the solo projects, the different people that he’s jammed with, it’s become difficult to really put a number to that.
His current projects include, Troy Story Band, Loose Affiliates, Humble Crumb, and possibly a new group called Cassanova Jonez…ALSO, he’s working on his own new Doug Strange EP along with Ian Seabolt and others, he’s worked on a millennial blues project with Ocho Gatos (a blackhat group) that has a single coming out this year…and the list just keeps growing. The man is a creative powerhouse on guitar right now. I can’t wait to see what he writes and releases this year. He’s really trying to grow into a collaborator/producer role within the blackhat group.
Cortisol Brain is going to be the new EP from Doug Strange. The title song was written by Ian Seabolt for Doug or with him in mind for this EP after he and Doug had some conversations about stress, workloads, and having too much cortisol on the brain. It will be a collaboration project that will have a few different artists on it with him including Ian, Jenae, Troy (possibly), and maybe even some backing vocals from myself. I’ve heard another song or two that will be included, but not the entire thing.
The last thing we talked about was actually the pet project the two of us are developing for blackhat. We are looking at launching a monthly studio podcast. We thought it would be useful to have a place where we can talk to all the artists under the blackhat umbrella, as well as those on the periphery and even potential or prospective blackhat collective artists. There’s an entire music community we work with regularly that we would love to give more of a platform in our own special blackhat way. We would love to give a louder voice to some of the folks we work with. This is still in the early stages of development, so we don’t really have a solid plan yet. We would like to get it off the ground sooner rather than later, but we have to make a plan and acquire some gear.
At this point during the interview we’d been on the call for over 30 minutes and my goblins began to goblinize my house. I missed phone calls, my kids yelled, the dog wanted dinner, and it totally derailed my ADHD choo-choo brain during the last topic of our interview. This is why it was good that I tried this from home with this fella first. I can randomly speak completely off the wall phrases without offending his sensibilities. I will see a bunch of the fellas this weekend and figure out some more content for next week, because guess what kids??? We don’t have any shows this weekend either. I will have Ian Seabolt at hand this weekend so perhaps I can get some semblance of an interview from him. Thanks for joining us this week. See y’all next time.
TL;DR He plays guitar awesomely, will be releasing music this year, in lots of bands, and might be doing a blackhat podcast with me in the near future. woot…
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