Dean Wareham
Dean Wareham
Michael Dean Wareham is a New Zealand musician and occasional actor who formed the band Galaxie 500 in 1987. He left Galaxie 500 in April 1991 and founded the band Luna. Since Luna's breakup in 2005, Wareham has released albums with fellow Luna bandmateBritta Phillips. He also works as a film composer, notably on the Noah Baumbach film The Squid and the Whale. He released a self-titled album in 2014 and reformed Luna in 2015...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth1 August 1963
CountryUnited States of America
Writing songs does not get any easier, and that might be because I am harder on myself than I was twenty years ago. Hopefully, as we grow older and change, there are fresh topics, new perspectives, or at least there should be.
I'm tired of being in a band, but I do want to continue making records and performing, at least a little bit. Making the records isn't always fun. It's fun to be finished with them. Making beautiful things can be quite painful.
Galaxie 500 broke up because it was time. We broke up as a result of internal contradictions.
I've never played in Vegas. I've only been to the airport, but even the airport was exciting. Just flying in, looking out the window, you feel the pull of it, like it's some evil force pulling you in, like Mordor.
Rock is periodically pronounced dead by clear rock critics - killed by world music, or by hip-hop, or electronica, or the Backstreet Boys. But if you wait a year, it comes back to life.
I have a slightly bourgeois upbringing, I guess. My parents paid for me to go to school, which is nice, but I haven't gotten a dime since then. I have no trust fund. I wish I did.
I know I get a real kick, an emotional charge, out of playing a song I haven't played for 10 years. It just takes you back to that point in your life.
I really like the last three Luna records a whole lot, especially 'Penthouse.' I think of all the records I've done, that's my favorite. I don't know why, really. I don't know why some records turn out better than others. It's not a science.
I've come to see that these politicians that release books - no way are they actually writing those books. Not when they are working fulltime, too. There's no way. That's their name on the book, but it's not their work. I'm sure of that. There's no way.
Writing a song is a long road. Or it can be.
One of the nice things about being in a band is that you depend on each other for ideas, so it's not all up to me to do everything myself. There's always that fear that you'll run out of stuff. The most difficult part for me is writing lyrics, and that starts to get difficult after you've written, like, 120 songs.
My standards are higher than they used to be, I think. They don't necessarily have to make sense, but I certainly work on them a lot harder now -- partly because I do them on the computer, and I print them out and fix them, and print them and fix them over and over again, whereas in the early days I used to just scratch down a few things on a piece of paper.
I guess I could be singing about Superman, or about Zarathustra coming down from the mountain, but in my mind I was singing about Julian Assange. I wish I could say that Nietzsche inspired my lyrics but all I can honestly say is I was inspired by the graphic design of these '70s paperback covers for Beyond Good & Evil and The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science.
You have to love yourself or you'll never be able to accept compliments from anyone