Q&A: Dash Hammerstein’s “The Hammer” Brings Eccentric Indie Folk Pop to the Forefront
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY VICTORIA POLSELY ☆
Photo provided by Mora May Agency
FOLK-POP SINGER-SONGWRITER AND ACCLAIMED FILM COMPOSER—Dash Hammerstein returns with “The Hammer,” a left-of-center, breezy new single that grapples with the tension of living in uncertainty. Hammerstein is known for crafting world-building scores for Netflix, Hulu and HBO, as well as his decade-spanning catalog of Kinks-inflected folk pop and neo-classical releases. With “The Hammer,” Hammerstein uses his cinematic sensibility into creating a deceptively light song built around an existential narrative.
“The Hammer” was released alongside a mesmerizing and deliberately ambiguous music video The track offers a first glimpse into his forthcoming self-titled album, a deeply honest collection born from a period of creative sobriety, experimentation and renewed lyrical clarity. Written quickly in the quiet hours of the morning and recorded across a handful of Brooklyn studios, the album marks his most honest musical collection to date. It eschews overthought psychedelia in favor of directness, emotional clarity and stream of consciousness songwriting. With contributions from longtime collaborators and a renewed commitment to lyrics that serve meaning as much as melody, Hammerstein finds himself at a creative freedom, writing his best music to date.
In conversation with The Luna Collective, the songwriter offers readers into his creative world, filled with musical cliches. He touches on songwriting, visual interpretation, sobriety, and craft; revealing an artist newly comfortable with uncertainty and increasingly committed to emotional truth over aesthetic cleverness.
Photo provided by Mora May Agency
LUNA: Can you let our readers know about your new single "The Hammer"?
DASH: The question at the center of the song is: ”Can I pull back the hammer or am I waiting on a train around the bend?” Whether this is the hammer of a starter pistol or an actual pistol changes the meaning drastically (and darkly), and is up for debate. The race is either on the verge of beginning or on the verge of ending, depending on what's around the bend, which is unknown.
LUNA: The single is shared alongside a music video which is a visual masterpiece. What was the inspiration behind the video?
DASH: I wish I had a better answer for this. The video was made by Haoyan of America.I admire his work so I gave him carte blanche. When I asked what it was about, he simply pointed me to a poem by Richard Brautigan called “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace”, which sort of answered the question. But when I think about it, I’m not sure I’d want a more literal answer than that.
LUNA: How do you think the video mirrors the theme of the song?
DASH: Personally I just connected to the sort of ambiguity and suspended meaning of the imagery. Like the song, it asks more questions than it answers.
LUNA: Were there specific emotions or ideas you wanted the video to express that the song alone couldn’t?
DASH: What I like about the video is that it found emotions and ideas that really had nothing to do with the song but paired so well with it.
LUNA: "The Hammer" is off of your upcoming self titled album out next month. What can listeners expect to hear in this collection of music?
DASH: More musical cliches! I know that sounds facetious, but if there is one consistent thread throughout these songs, it is that they are not overthought. Each one went from nothing to a demo in under an hour, sometimes in a matter of minutes. I’d often start by borrowing a chord progression from an old doo-wop song, not worrying if the music is too predictable. That allowed me to have more fun with the lyrics.Listeners can expect to hear an album of songs that is refreshingly,for me, at least, unclever.
LUNA: You’ve spoken about a period of creative sobriety shaping this album. How did that change your relationship with songwriting?
DASH: I felt less afraid to be honest. The older I get, the less interested I am in complete irreverence. Nor do I connect much to complete self-seriousness. John Prine really set the bar for me in that respect. He was able to write about real things, heavy things, in a way that makes me smile every time. “It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.” Come on! I think being sober and working consistently every morning gave me the clarity to always keep John’s magical alchemy in mind as an aspiration. No shade to my old self but sometimes lyrics were just a way to give a song a melody. They served the music. For this album, the music is serving the lyrics more.
LUNA: What made you decide to make this album self-titled at this stage in your career?
DASH: It’s the first time I felt like I had a set of songs that reflected who I am. It’s not like I never wrote an honest or revealing song before but I never released a whole album of them. Usually my albums are peppered with songs about books or movies, or they are simply based around phrases I thought sounded good. These songs—some more obviously than others—are each about a real thing.
LUNA: Writing in the morning over coffee instead of late at night is a big change. How did that affect the emotional tone of the songs?
Photo provided by Mora May Agency
DASH: It had a counterintuitive effect. I think in general I have been an embarrassed songwriter my whole life. I never liked to reveal much about myself. But writing first thing in the morning, before breakfast, before I was even fully awake, really gave me this unbroken link to my subconscious. I wrote lines that were so honest to my real life experience that they’d make me laugh. I’d tell myself that eventually I’d change the line because it was too revealing but I never did. In one of the songs, “Sixteen Pages,” I even sing the line “Wake up, Dash.” In the past, I’d cringe and throw it away immediately. But I found that if you followed it with a line like “I wanted Skittles, but I had no cash,” it made it okay. A constant process of inflation and deflation of the ego balloon.
LUNA: You mix a variety of genres in your music. Tell us more about your own musical inspirations?
DASH: There are contemporary inspirations and there is the DNA. The nurture and the nature. When I was writing this, I, like everyone, was listening to that Cameron Winter album a lot. Bill Callahan, Alex G, Panda Bear. And then the DNA has always been The Kinks and T. Rex.
LUNA: How has working across so many mediums shaped your overall musical identity?
DASH: Working in film definitely makes me think more about the production—the elements that you might not hear clearly but which inform the soundscape. Bringing sonic material in and out of a song as a way to keep a listener engaged. But working in musicals has definitely had a more profound effect on my writing. I no longer let myself get away with meaningless lyrics. When you’re writing a song for a musical, you are writing pointedly and emphatically. Poeticism is fine but only if it serves the message of the song. It’s hard to go back from that.
LUNA: What's next for Dash Hammerstein?
DASH: I tend to vacillate between albums that are organic and honest and ones that are synthetic, weird and character-driven. This album is the former. The last one, Franklin, was decidedly the latter. I guess the next one will be inscrutable and weird. I also have a few musicals in development but are not yet at a phase to start yapping about!
