Echobrain vocalist Dylan Donkin interviewed Monday, March 21, 2005 while hanging out at home in San Francisco

First off, I’m a big fan of Echobrain and I’d like to give other fans of the band a little insight into what’s going on with you guys and talk about your future plans.

Right on. I’m glad there’s still some people out there that like it.

Definitely.

It’s hard to tell. I’m really kind of detached from the business of it. I don’t know who the hell is listening to us out there. I’m kind of detached from the whole thing to tell you the truth. It’s been a few months since we even played together. Even, shit, it’s probably been like a year. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff, working on setting up this center in Hawaii and that takes up a lot of my time doing that, setting up a business and just doing my own stuff.

You say you’ve been detached from it. Have you been in a position where you’re like ‘screw it, I’m gonna put all my mental energy into something else.’

Yeah. Something a little more useful with my energy. Not that … I love playing in the band. But the music industry is a bitch (laughs). It’s just kind of cold blooded and grodie. Not something I’m really interested in being a part of at the moment. Just doing … as far as being in a rock band, trying to make a living doing that is really a pain in the ass. I’m kind of a laid back guy. I just liked doing it for fun. I like making music with my friends and writing songs and stuff. That was my main purpose for doing it. All of a sudden it becomes playing with Jason Newsted. It was like all this sort of expectations of making into this huge thing. It sounded really good at the time. It’s like ‘oh yeah, let’s go for it.’ After being in it for six years, it’s been. It’s great. I wouldn’t take any of the years back for sure. I feel like I’ve gotten it out of my system for a while. I just kind of like to do something that’s helping people and doing something that’s a little more community based work. I really like teaching music and I like teaching kids and I’ve just been spending a lot of time with that and it’s great. It’s a great program that I’m doing. I’m really excited about the future doing that more than anything. I haven’t really been thinking about getting the band back together or anything at this point. Who knows, maybe in a couple years or something. At this point, I’m just looking forward to hanging out on the beach, playing guitar. Doing that. Being mellow. It’s kind of my vibe.

Tell me a little bit about this. You’re moving to Hawaii to open up a center and teaching babies and toddlers music. How did you get involved in this particular aspect of it and what is the process of actually teaching music to a baby?

(laughs). It’s really … it’s fun. We’re not trying to do any real theory or anything. I get together with twelve families at a time and the kids’ age range from 0-4 and we hang out in a circle and sing songs and do rhythm exercises and tonal exercises to stimulate the musical centers in their brain. Babies actually have this huge ability to soak up information. A lot more than we do. They’re kind of a raw element that can take to any shape or form if you put the information in front of them. They’ll take to it like a sponge. Based on that, we just provide a musical environment. It’s kind of like a tribal kind of thing. Kind of goes back to the old hunter gatherer societies where we’d be in groups of 50 and we would hang around fires and tell stories and sing songs around the fires and there was this musical based community where the children would learn from and grow from. We don’t really have that in our culture. Especially now that they’re cutting all the music programs in the schools and everything. It’s really good to provide that for them now. Especially at an early age when they’re so valuable mentally. They can just take any shape, like I said. So I have them for about 45 minutes a week and after doing it for like six or seven months, you really start to see the kids develop musically. It’s wild. I get off on that. On watching the kids change and get more musical. It strengthens the bond between them. It feels good to just hang around with kids and babies in general. They’re a pure breed of people. They’re a purer breed of people than we are. They’re not all fucked up in the head. (laughs). We get all screwed up with our culture and our idiosyncrasies. And they don’t have that to deal with. They’re just totally living in the now, you know. You know, you ever try to meditate and you try to get to that moment where you’re living in the present moment and all your thoughts about the past and the future calm down and you’re kind of at that space where you’re just in the now? That’s how they are all the time. And it’s just great being around people like that all the time. I find it a lot more refreshing than hanging out with scummy music biz people (laughs). Yeah, there’s just a full of shit vibe going on in the music industry. I’m looking for truth now, you know. I like looking in the direction of kids and stuff, and Hawaii’s just a sick place to live, you know. It’s really cool. I’ve always wanted to go there. I’ve gone there a couple times and I just always felt like I needed to stay a little longer. There was an opportunity and I took it. I’m down to do that for a few years and we’ll see what happens. Let the business grow and hopefully it will be a good thing for the community out there and I think it will be. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’m looking for the fun (laughs). The industry is … I don’t know, maybe it was because we didn’t really fit a niche or something, or maybe because we sounded too retro or something, I don’t know. Whatever happened, it really got to be pretty grading just every day, still living at home and still in the same place and broke. After awhile you get kind of sick of it. You can’t really expect your art to keep you in business. The art business itself is a really fucked thing, to me. I think it can be done right. There’s definitely bands that have proved that. I don’t know how much sacrifice they’ve had to give. I can see it now. I don’t know if I’m willing to do that now. But, I love playing and I love playing with the boys. But right now, it’s just not feasible. I’d like to try a different adventure. For the longest time I was all about playing in a rock band, I thought it would be the coolest, sickest thing to do. That’s what I wanted to do all the time and now I’m kind of like, there’s other things I’d like to do. I’ve been playing with Brian, I just figured out the other day, for fifteen years, since we were twelve. That’s longer than Jason was in Metallica. And to be in a band that long and not to make any go after it and do it just for fun, and to try and actually make something out of that, if we were just doing it for fun it would be one thing, but since we were trying to make something out of it, for that long it was a lot of sacrifice. I don’t want to sacrifice anymore. I’d like to do it for fun. I love playing. It’s all about doing it for ourselves anyway. But I’d like to be able to put music out to people. We’ll see what happens. Definitely, it’s getting a lot easier to do that with things like the Internet. You don’t need to sell yourself to a label and become a product anymore. You can make your own web site. Make your own music. Put it on your own web site. That’s it, you don’t even have to sell it. You can just give it away, which I’d rather do anyway. So that’s something that I’d like to eventually get into. I don’t know if I want to get into the whole trying to be on MTV and all that horseshit. It’s just horseshit. That’s a genre I’m not a big fan of anyway.

Yeah, you don’t need that.

Yeah. (laughs). There’s bands that do it without that too. I think you need a lot of things. You need somebody that really believes in you on the business end and I don’t think I really have that. You need somebody that’s also willing to do it for as long as it takes and as hard as it is. I don’t know if I’m willing to do it anymore. I’m kind of burned out on it. But, the music’s fun. It’s always good to play. I’ll always be playing.

It’s like, with “Glean” once I finally found it, I couldn’t believe how good it was. I personally feel it’s better than the first one. My issue with the whole thing is why was it so difficult to find it? I assume it has something to do with the label and promoting and marketing it.

They didn’t believe in it. What happens, just so you know how this works with a label. You gotta have somebody that’s really into the record and really understands it. They didn’t get it. They were going for the guy from Metallica in the new band kind of trip. I think that’s what kind of helped nail the coffin. Everyone thought we were a metal band. When the first record came out, they invested a lot of money into it and trying to make it this big thing by highlighting, ‘Jason Newsted of Metallica’ on the front. That wasn’t smart because we weren’t. We’re a completely different band. Once none of the metalheads were buying it, which I don’t blame ‘em for not buying it. If I was a metalhead, I probably wouldn’t buy it either. I like metal music, but if I thought it was gonna be something heavy and it wasn’t, I could see myself being like ‘what?’ If I wasn’t into that, if I wasn’t into the music like Echobrain. Once they got burned on the first record, they didn’t want to do anything with the second record. Jason left and I was like, okay, we’re gonna cut this second record. They were trying to get us to put out a hit song. We had this song, you know the one “Tommy Boy” that I sent you?

Yeah.

They had this producer come in and they tried to make it into this pop song, this big hit, and it sounded so weak and fake. All their ideas, I kind of shot down (laughs). They were trying to make it a pop record and I was trying to be like, no, I want to make this something I’m gonna be proud of for years instead of something I never want to listen to again. Since we didn’t take any of their ideas, we kind of miffed them a little bit. Then when it came time and the album came out, they didn’t really do anything to promote it. They just put it out. They couldn’t get us a tour, they couldn’t get us anything because they didn’t have the enthusiasm and also I don’t think they had a lot of moxie. If you don’t believe in something, it’s really hard to sell it somebody. To sell it to like all the promoters and all the booking agents and everybody else involved, distributors and all that enthusiasm, it’s not gonna sell. I think ‘cause they didn’t get it, that’s why. That made a big difference. They didn’t have the enthusiasm for it. Now, nobody believes in it. Distributors … I don’t know, they didn’t get it. Nobody got it really. So, I’m like, fuck if nobody gets it, fuck it. I’m not gonna try to sell people a bunch of shit they don’t want.

How frustrating was it for you? You had to know somewhere in your heart that was a really good record. How frustrating was it for you to see it just sitting there and not being offered up? I don’t know how difficult it would be to find it in stores or if it’s even out there.

Nothing. They didn’t do anything. It just sat there. It was tough. It burned us all out. I was kind of like, well, fuck it. Fuck this. I believed in it. I still believe in it. I still think it’s a great record. I’m glad we did it. I’m really glad we did it. I’m glad we didn’t take their shitty pop suggestions (laughs).

Definitely. So many bands take that route and say fine, change it up, whatever you think’s best. I definitely gotta give you respect for saying no.

They’re probably better businessmen than we are. You see them all the time on bands that are putting out that same stuff that they just know is gonna make the record label’s happy and fit the niche. I don’t know how they can do it. I just couldn’t see myself being in a band like that. I don’t know, if they can do it, they’re good businessmen I guess. We’re not good at this, obviously. I thought it was smart to do it that way. Because if it’s something unique and original, people would be more likely to be interested in it than just having it be something that sounds like everything else. I don’t know. I’m definitely stoked that we did it that way because, like I said, I’d rather put out a record that I believe in than not. Even if we didn’t make it, if it didn’t sell, in my opinion, it’s worth doing it.

I find it baffling that you guys have had to go through any of this kind of stuff. When the first one came out we listened to it regularly at work and my theory was always that maybe the whole Jason thing was too much of a distraction.

Jason really believed in it. The thing is, we never would’ve happened if it wasn’t for Jason. He really put it all together. He was the rocket fuel. Make shit happen, you know. He’s the one that got me and Brian to wanna do music for a living in the first place. ‘You guys can do this.’ He’d really pump us up and make us feel like, ‘yeah, we can do it.’ Let’s make it happen, instead of just doing it as a garage band. Right from the beginning when  we were in high school, I’m talking about way back like fifteen or sixteen when we first met him. He was always really behind us. We were really grateful. When he wanted to play on our record we were fuckin’ stoked. He’s a great guy. Great musician.

That’s how you guys got involved with him? He was kind of like trying to motivate you to get things going and offering up his services?

Yeah. And he’s great collaborating with. I think it ended up being, the first record was a little bit more. I think we compromised a little bit. Jason was coming from a different world than we were. That album definitely sounds different from the second one. That one has a different chemistry with Jason. With Jason he wanted to have, it wasn’t just an Echobrain record. It was Jason’s record away from Metallica. He wanted to have all his friends come in and play. He had all these great people come in. He did it big time with like a big studio, which was fuckin’ cool as hell. We had a month in the studio, we lived in the studio. It was like a hotel slash studio just for us. With a fuckin’ chef and a fuckin’, they flew in this guy from Finland to tune Brian’s drums. Just crazy. All this very excessive environment we were in on all levels. It was awesome. It was total rock star dream kind of stuff. He really wanted to show us what that life was like, which was a really, really good thing. But, I thought the second record is a little bit more pure us and kind of like where we were coming from. Our ideas. I like the second one better because it’s more pure, what we’ve always kind of been into and about. But I’m glad we did the first record with Jason too. I think, like I said, it was marketed wrong. If we would’ve downplayed it, like given Jason a fake name or something or done something really off the wall … but there was all this huge, I guess there was a big hoopla going on in the press because he had just left Metallica. No, he was still in Metallica when we did it.

That’s how I first heard about you guys, pretty much like everybody else. There was this huge story about Jason Newsted quitting Metallica to join this other venture. Automatically people think of a metal band, I’m sure.

Yeah totally. I think it’s kind of circumstance really. I guess I can’t really blame the record label for doing anything else than just going with the flow of things. It would’ve been pretty ballsy to just not promote it that way. It probably should’ve been the way to go, it would’ve been cooler. But, it makes sense, I guess on a stale business level. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty. I’m glad it all happened. I’m definitely a stoked individual. I’ve seen a lot of cool shit and had a lot of fun doing music with good friends. Still am. What can I complain about?

Did you ever look at the situation and say we gotta get us a new label, or was that an option?

We were kind of tied up with them. We talked to some other guys. We were talking to Neil Young’s label for a little bit. There was a lot of bullshit with the contract and blah, blah, blah. It was tough to get out of that. It would’ve been cool to hook up with them, I’m sure it would’ve been a lot of fuckin’ fun. Maybe we still can. I don’t know, like I said, we also kind of got burned out on each other and were kind of taking it out on each other and it got kind of ugly at the end too. Me and Brian have been playing together for so long, like I said when you’re playing together for that long and have nothing come out of it, you just kind of take it out on each other after awhile. I didn’t want to do that. I love Brian and I love my brother. I’d rather keep them as friends than as shitty friends and business partners, you know what I mean? I kind of felt like it could go that direction if we kept doing it too. That was another kind of thing. If something would’ve happened, just a fuckin’ tour would’ve been great. We didn’t have that. But, hey that’s the way the universe works. The universe says, no, you’re gonna put out a couple records and then you’re gonna do something else and so we said ok. Can’t really question the universe.

The good thing is, obviously you’re the catalyst for the band. It’s your voice. It’s your music. As a fan I hold out hope that eventually there’ll be a chance for you guys to come back in a better situation.

Thanks, man. I definitely keep it up to let’s see what happens and who knows? I still want to put out music, that’s for sure. Right now, I need to regroup creatively and musically and do something different for right now. We’ll always be musical. Those guys are all still doing tons of stuff. I’m sure we’ll get together at some point again.

Dylan it was really nice talking to you and good luck in the future.

You too.

Hopefully this next venture is a good thing for you.

Yeah, come back creatively charged in a couple years and put out number three (laughs). Take it easy Pat.