𝐵𝓁𝑒𝓈𝓈𝒾𝓃𝑔𝓈 𝒯𝑜 𝒜𝓁𝓁 𝒮𝒾𝓂𝓊𝓁𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃𝓈: An interview with Dear Nora

The latest Dear Nora record, human futures, finds the singer-guitarist Katy Davidson embodying a timely cast of characters: a billionaire space-racer, an Airbnb-dwelling content creator, a musician with a fried attention span. It’s part wry, trickster indie pop and part sincere, poetic social critique.  

On the title track, Davidson sings with solemn, premeditated nostalgia for a world where things like bodies of water and seasons once actually existed—I remember rivers, I remember streams—and elsewhere alludes to the so-called progress that arrives with all the destruction: data servers humming, barges carrying overnight deliveries, plastic-wrapped plastic spoons. Their deadpan humor only stokes the dizzying complexity we're living through. “This is all one subject, essentially,” they told me. “How capitalism is ruining the environment.”

Davidson released records as Dear Nora from 1999 until 2008, mostly for the homegrown Portland indie label Magic Marker, and toured through those years with West Coast fixtures like the Blow and Mirah. After about a decade, they retired the name, moved to L.A., spent time playing in The Gossip and YACHT, among other pursuits, before moving to Portland, where they formed Key Losers. (That group did a great record in 2011 called California Lite, engineered and released by Phil Elverum.)

Perhaps owing to the modern feel of Dear Nora’s incisive, minimalist songs, a surge of interest in the project from a younger and more online generation of indie songwriters led to a 2017 repress of 2004’s Mountain Rock, which in turn led to a tour and a formal reprise of the moniker. Skulls Example arrived in 2018 on Orindal Records, reintroducing Davidson as a new and blunter songwriter, with uncanny melodies and meditations on corporate-sponsored sunsets and cactus worshippers.

Following the release of human futures and its subsequent tour, we spoke in late 2022 about the books and concepts that inspired the album … the odd reality of being algorithmically-perceived as a “legacy” artist and a contemporary band simultaneously … drawing influence from the geography of their current home in the desert of Joshua Tree, California … all this and more! Dear Nora plays in Queens tonight, embarks on a solo East Coast tour next week, and will play full band shows on the West Coast later this spring.

Liz: How was the rest of your human futures tour? On stage in Brooklyn in November, you said the Burlington show was particularly good.

Katy: So fun and so tiring. I'm completely in the recovery phase. There are so many places that I played solo 15 years ago that were always fun, but back then it would have been a quiet show at a college with Mirah or something. It was never lit. To bring a full band to what's essentially a college town for the first time, and to have different waves of fans from different eras all in the same room—it was so lit. Cambridge was off the chain too. We haven't played these places in at the least four years, or at most 20 years, which I think made it extra special.

You mentioned these two waves of fans: There are Dear Nora fans who go back to 2000, and then Dear Nora fans who found out about the band in 2017.

There's one more category. It's actually three waves. We had some level of indie popularity between the years of 2000 to 2002. That was an early peak, when we were doing things like getting flown to Japan to play shows during the apex of the compact disc era. And then there's the fans who found us later, after Mountain Rock got reissued in 2017, and after we released Skulls Example in 2018.

But if you start at the very beginning [in the late 90s], there's also the core Nora heads, maybe like 150 people that have been there every step of the way. The ones who were there at the beginning and then stuck with me through all the weird, differently-named side projects and still come to the shows now. I keep saying Nora Heads, but that's so boring. I really want to find a better term for the hardcore fans.

The Dear Nora stan army needs a name.

It really does. I'm gonna keep working on that.

Thinking about the big picture of human futures, it feels so current. When did you write these songs? What is the time and space that this record comes out of?

I wrote most of them during the pandemic. A couple were written pre-pandemic. But I wrote a lot of the lyrics pretty close to the quote-unquote deadline. In fact, some I wrote like the week I recorded the vocals. And so the extreme temporality of it probably comes from that type of energy.

The song "scrolls of doom" feels very 2022.

I'm glad people appreciate that song because it's pretty weird. It has a funny first line. Musically, it's pretty different. We wrote that one collaboratively in the studio. In fact, that was the very first thing that happened when everyone showed up. The Omicron wave was raging outside. We got everyone together, and it was sort of like a miracle. Everyone was prepared for me to be like, “Okay, let's listen to the demos and get started.” And I was like, “No, absolutely not. This is not the energy we need… Let's make something completely new.”

We wrote a ton of brand new material that day based on some creative prompts that I gave everyone, but that was the actual literal first thing that my bandmates played. Nick Krgovich sat down at the piano and plunked that out. I felt like it had to go first on the album, because that's just how it naturally occurred. I did have the topline melody ready. And then I wrote the lyrics later. I was just trying to have fun and mock the insanity of what we have to stomach every single day, if we open up any app on our phone.

What kind of creative prompts were you giving your band?

I took everyone into the control room and we listened to five songs in five disparate styles that were resonating for me right that very second. I had just watched this movie from the ’50s called Wages of Fear, which has a beautiful, tense soundtrack. So we played the opening credits sequence. And we played a Frank Ocean song, and this French jazz song. One of our guiding lights making this in terms of production was an EP from this Australian musician named Karen Marks that came out in the 80s called Cold Café. We listened to that as well.

After I listened to the record a few times, I noticed you had recently retweeted something from the author Shoshana Zuboff. All of a sudden it clicked that “human futures” might be a reference to her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

I was reading her surveillance capitalism book—and the album title comes from a sentence in that book.

What are some of the big ideas that stuck with you from that book?  

Her description of what she calls "human futures" just kinda pried my brain wide open, and helped me further connect the dots between technology, social media, endless growth capitalism, climate change, and us.

Her phrase refers to how these tech and social media companies let us use their services for "free," but instead we "pay" with our very souls. Like, we're thoroughly, disturbingly surveilled by these companies—and purposely psychologically manipulated to stay online at whatever cost—and then their AI tracks all of this intimate information about us and makes predictions about what we might do or buy next, then sells that information to advertisers, who then advertise to us in deeply personal ways, which ultimately makes us stay online and buy more crap, which ultimately keeps capitalism chugging along, which ultimately drives climate change. So, our very futures are the actual product because the real power and money resides in predictions of what we will do next.

But my poet brain was also drawn to the multiple meanings of futures—like, complex units and ideas traded speculatively on a stock market, but also like, our LIVES. Something we consider important and special, our futures, where we're headed next, our dreams and goals as individuals and as a society.

What else were you hoping to capture in the title song?

I tried to tell a short science fiction story from a narrator who lives in the future. The person is sorting through foggy memories of what rivers and streams were, what autumn and spring were—natural things they vaguely remember from long ago. Those things slowly disappeared because of the trade-off we all made. We sold our souls to the devil, we traded our literal and figurative human futures for this new world we have, which has fallen into ecological ruin. No more rain, no more wine, but capitalism, at all costs, marches along. Gigantic barges are docking with all of our purchased items, and online shopping persists. All of these vaporous online interactions, purchases, exchanges and their real world consequences—the narrator is reminiscing and ruminating on this … But the song isn't only about the lyrics. It's music. Entertainment. The chord changes, the melody, the tonal palette, and the production play a co-starring role to the lyrics.

Do you often draw inspiration from books or journalism that you’re reading, though?

I read a lot and this is definitely the subject matter that I am extremely drawn to: how is this technology affecting our brains and society? It’s a huge subject. I would say the principal way I am writing songs is just by living my life and being observational. Just living in the world and being present with how surreal it feels. I sort of extenuate that by seeking out books that help illuminate that feeling.

Another one was Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari. It's kind of like a dystopian beach read. It's basically telling people not to feel bad for not being able to put down their phones. He's basically like: you don't have control, it's stolen from you by people who have completely engineered the takeover of your brain.

This record feels really grounded in observations of the world around us, but also sort of acknowledges that “the world around us” includes both the physical and digital. There are songs where you are describing changing landscapes and environments, and then a song like “Fruitful Streams,” which seems to comment on the streaming economy.

I say the word stream at least two or three times on the album. It's a very intentionally chosen word. This actual natural feature is drying up as we’re sucking down music from these massive servers. This is all one subject, essentially: how capitalism is ruining the environment.

What else inspired “Fruitful Streams”?

I'm not going to divulge too much, but the title itself is a phrase someone at my work said during 2022 at some point. I work at a music licensing agency and have been happily employed there for almost a decade. But you know, we have to think about things like back-end royalties, for us and our artists. A phrase like “fruitful streams,” which is pretty funny and weird, just naturally rolls off the tongue of my co-workers and no one flinches except for me. I had the song title before I had the song. So I just ran with it.

[I was thinking about] Spotify servers, and also how all the literal streams in Joshua Tree aren't running. It's about our attention just being decimated for so long. Even though these lyrics are commenting on something that’s honestly pretty dark, I did try to make them a little funny and light-hearted, a little bit like a stoner jam.

Musically, the chorus was a collab with me and my bandmates. The chorus to me feels very Pavement. We had just seen the Pavement tour come through L.A. I feel like there's some Pavement influence on this album, only because they happened to roll through L.A. like the same exact week we were recording.

One of the lyrics that stuck out to me is when you sing "so much to choose / and we all lose"; what is something you think is lost under the current streaming model?

I think so many different things are lost with this current model—and I'd argue that some things are definitely gained, as well. But mainly what I'm referring to with those particular lyrics is choice paralysis and attention deficit tendencies. Listening to music in a previous time in my life when I was constrained by the limitations of the 50-100 CDs that I owned, and whatever might be playing on a terrestrial radio station at any given time, it ingrained in me a gratitude and focus towards whatever music I might intentionally press play on. I formed deep and lasting relationships with those recordings.

But now, with limitations obliterated, how can we actually commit to pressing play on something and sticking with it? Getting to know it intimately? Forming a relationship with it? When we could just swipe left, trying to find something "better." What we lose is a depth to our relationship with the music we listen to. Sad!

You're an artist who is singing, at times, about surveillance capitalism. But the band also exists under an algorithmic shadow of Spotify and YouTube and how they are resurfacing your old music from the early 2000s—I’ve seen you write about that online.

It is so fascinating and also clearly so complex. Because I am extremely grateful for all of the ways in which people have found us. If I could sort of silo them, I don't feel any resentment. It’s cool. But it's just so complex. It's so difficult. Like, if you look at Spotify, am I happy that people really embraced the Three States comp with all of my old songs? Absolutely. That's so cool. If I wasn't excited about it, I wouldn't have reissued it on vinyl during the pandemic.

But it's so lopsided and like, not fair. That's kind of a dumb thing to say about computers, because of course they don’t care about what’s fair. But the Spotify algorithm does pigeonhole artists. This algorithmic Wizard of Oz person just has decided who you are, and this is the projection they're going to cast out into the world.

I feel like I've accidentally alienated fans by saying this. They hear me say things like this, and they're like, “Oh, you hate your old music. Or you hate it when we request your music.” And that's absolutely not true. I always try to clear that up.

There are a lot of serious heavy themes on the record but it’s also just really funny, like the lyrics on “Airbnb Cowboy.”

Those lyrics are so fun. It’s real, but it's also funny. I live in this desert community in Joshua Tree, where every weekend it's a complete infiltration by people who live in other metropolitan areas, and show up, and get out of their Teslas fully decked to the nines in cowboy wear, and they’re doing selfies. It’s depressing. But it’s also sort of sweet? If this is the way they can connect with nature, like, ok, fine.

I live right in the epicenter of some embarrassing technological things that happened during 2020 and 2021. Joshua Tree was like the epicenter of Airbnb culture and “van life.” It's funny but it’s just like, it's real. It was all these tech people who weren’t chained behind their desks anymore, like, “I’ll go take my 175k that I make and go to some beautiful rural area where no one wants me and live out my fantasy.”

Real estate agents pop up a lot on the record.

Yeah, I purposely tried to mention real estate multiple times, because … this is the world we actually live in.

Has living in Joshua Tree influenced your ideas and writing in any other ways?

I honestly love living here because I've carved out a corner that feels good to me, and I have a sweet friend group of artist weirdos, and my home life is quiet and pleasant. HOWEVER, Joshua Tree the place—or the concept in people's minds, or the Instagram geotag, or the gentrified real estate Airbnb destination, complete with the avatar of the silhouette of the Joshua Tree itself—can be extremely aesthetically cringey. There's a harsh class friction between the desert old timers and the remote-working tech-y oat-milk-latte people who have come here chasing a fantasy …

It’s like Blade Runner, but with blinding sunlight and scorching heat instead of noir/darkness and rainfall. I don’t think class, and class friction, is the first thing people think about when they consider my songwriting, but it’s definitely there.