Text: Anne-Marie Forker
Photography: Satellite June
Hi Pablo, thanks for your time today, especially on a Friday afternoon.
Of course, I have nothing else to do!
Quiet day? That’s rare for you actually, given your output!
We’ve been having some rest for the past couple of months. We’ve had rehearsals and stuff like that but today I had some other interviews but otherwise not much going on.
Congratulations on the new album, it has such a great vibe to it. Some of our readers will know you already and some won’t, so for those who don’t, can you explain where you got your band name from?
Yeah, we started DeWolff back in 2007. We were very young, I was 16. My little brother was 13 and Robin was 17. And we were a little obsessed by the movie “Pulp Fiction”. There’s this character called Mr Wolfe. He solves problems and, we had the arrogance to see ourselves like that, as there was not much going on in the Netherlands back then, musically, not a lot of interest, so we saw ourselves as solving that problem – of not much happening.
That’s the Harvey Keitel character, isn’t it?
Yeah!
Although there wasn’t much there back then, as you say, do you have any artists from your own country that you admire?
Definitely. We have many great artists. In the past couple of years, the past ten years, a lot of artists have emerged that do terrific stuff, such as the Dom Brothers, we’re big fans of them, and The Grand East and Minko. A lot of these bands are playing at DeWolffest, the festival we’re hosting next week, and which also will be the album release. And Mooon, they’re great. We have quite a lively scene these days, which is great.
DeWolffest, that is an inspired idea and quite unusual for an album release. Where did you get the idea from, to do a whole festival, rather than just a release gig?
Well, there are a couple of things. It’s also kind of a little coincidence. We did this once before, DeWolffest, back in 2017. And then we did part one and a half a couple of years ago in 2019. When we started talking about when the album release was going to be, we also had the same thought – maybe a cool way to celebrate would be to organise another DeWolffest, and to do this in close collaboration with Tivoli Vredenberg which is a venue in Utrecht. For 10 years we have had a very close connection with those guys. The past couple of album releases have all been in Paradiso where we would just play a gig, but this would seem like an extra festive way of celebrating the thing.
Winter is a great time for that as well, because it stands out more. There are so many summer festivals, so to have something like this in winter is really cool.
Yeah, it is kind of a dream of ours too, also, one day to organise the DeWolff Festival outdoors, but it’s more complicated because of all the facilities, and running a festival outdoors means things like sanitation, food and all that.
A lot more to consider. How did you end up recording of the legendary Muscle Shoals? And Fame Studios as well?
We’ve always been fans of recordings that were made there, like Otis Rush and The Allman Brothers, their first ever rehearsal took place at Fame. So many legends have recorded there. We’ve known about the city for a long time. We know it was a key ingredient in the whole Southern Soul story, and back in 2019, I went there to do a tour of the studios as a tourist. This also happened while we were recording, sometimes a bunch of tourists would come in while we were working. I was on one of those tours and that’s when I realised, if we really want, we could actually record here someday and it’s something that I’ve wanted to do ever since then. But then COVID happened, we can’t do it and we made another album, and then as a reaction to that COVID album we wanted to make an album where everything would be played live, so we would have to bring a lot of people. Logistically and financially, it would not be feasible to bring them to the United States. But when we were writing this album, at first, the idea was to record it with Chris Robinson producing, from The Black Crowes, but at the last minute he couldn’t make it. So then we thought this would be the perfect moment to try and record at Muscle Shoals. We got in touch with Dylan LeBlanc, who’s an artist and a friend of ours. I asked him because he grew up in that area if he thought that would be a good spot for us to record the record. He said, “Hell, yes. And you should contact Ben Tanner.” He’s a producer and also the keyboard player for Alabama Shakes. So all these things perfectly collided.
Why was Ben Tanner the guy for you?
When the Chris Robinson thing fell through we thought we should go to Fame and Muscle Shoals and then produce ourselves, but we always produce every album ourselves. I thought it would have been really nice to work with a producer once more, but then when the name Ben Tanner appeared, I thought “of course!”. When we got in touch with him, he lives there and he knows all the people, he knows all the studios. He was a staffer and engineer at Fame for ten years. So, he could he give us nice deals, for example at Fame and at Muscle Shoals Sound they have these tours coming through, and in the case of Muscle Shoals, that means you can only start recording at 4pm. But because we had Ben on our side, he could arrange that we could start at 1pm or 12pm.
When you went in did you have all the songs already perfected in construction? Or did you do any improvisation in the studio, that was unexpected?
Yeah, we did some improvisation. The songs were more or less finished but definitely not perfected. They never are.
There’s a bit of a live feel on the record in some places, which I love.
If you go to a place like that, it’s a shame to really rehearse the fuck out of those songs. We wanted to keep it open and we also felt some songs weren’t heading in a good direction, so we thought “Well, it’s not really working right now, but I think if we go to Muscle Shoals and work on it a little more and let that place inspire the final dots of the is of this song it could work”, and it did.
What was the inspiration for “Ophelia”?
Ophelia! Robin and I were both reading the same book. It’s a Greek mythology book. I had it in high school but I had forgotten about it for a long time – by Stephen Fry. So we were a little into the mythology stuff and then we figured that we would write our own little mythological story and that’s where the name of it came from. I was also reading an autobiography by Jim Dickinson, who of course is a character from the old Muscle Shoals story. He was the keyboard player on Wild Horses that was recorded at Muscle Shoals and it starts with this random passage about Ophelia and I thought “Oh, that’s a cool name for a song” and we took that and just let our imagination flow. Later I discovered that Ophelia is also a character in a Shakespeare story, and I didn’t know that.
That’s what I wondered, if it was Shakespeare.
This figure of Ophelia, she’s the keeper of all the secrets and lies in the world, and she has this endless well, a bottomless well, that she throws all of these secrets and lies into but the protagonist of the story is in love with her and that is also a secret. It’s too much of a secret – it doesn’t fit in the well anymore and when the well overflows, that’s when the world will be covered in darkness. That’s what makes the night happen. That’s the story. That’s the origin of the night.
There’s a lot of powerful imagery there, you should do a music video for that.
Definitely, we have to ask Tim Burton to do it! I very much love that aesthetic, kind of dark, gothic.
Why did you choose “In Love “and “Natural Woman” as the singles?
There’s gonna be a third one out soon, “Let’s Stay Together”. Why do we choose them? Well, we write all these songs and then we record them and then we get together with our manager on the record label and we say “we love all the songs equally, they’re all our children” and they say “We think this one would be a good thing” and I’m like “Okay, sounds good.” You find it hard to choose the single because you love them all. I must say, I think those were my initial choices as well because they’re compact and they have a strong chorus or melody. The only one we had to fight for was the third one being “Let’s Stay Together”. It’s funny our manager and the record label always lean towards the rock songs. I mean, if it’s going to be a single, I don’t hear rock music on the radio, so we might as well go for a ballad or whatever. It evoked a lot of strong emotions from some people that I showed it to, so we thought – well, let’s try that one. People, especially record labels, underestimate the power of the niche. I think there’s somewhere deep inside, there’s also a part of me that just wants to release the best song of the record as a whole, which for me would be “Snowbird” and then it’s eight minutes long. So, it will never be played on the radio, but if people like that song, they like our band and that’s more important.
“Out On The Town” is a stand out track. What inspired that song?
When we were touring with The Black Crowes, I had some really good conversations with Chris, and he told me he was into collecting records and books. So I asked him what kind of books, because I’m very much into reading. He gave me a list and one of the books on it was “The Man With The Golden Arm” by Nelson Algren. It’s a classic book from the 40s, and takes place in Chicago. It’s by an American writer and it’s very beautiful. It describes the lives of all these low lives that live in the ghettos of Chicago, Polish immigrants. It’s very sad and hard, and I love that book. This song was very much inspired by some of the random events that happened in that book, and also some of the colourful characters that appear out of nowhere.
Have you always been inspired by books regarding songwriting?
Not always, but for the past 10 years or so, very much so because being inspired lyrically just by other music is kind of limiting. There’s so much more to language than just “oh baby I love you”. I take a lot of quotes directly from books or I change them a little bit, and sometimes even write my story around that.
You would incorporate more personal elements as well?
Some of this record for me is the most personal, literally the most personal one I’ve ever made. My relationship of nineteen years was not going well at the time that we made the album and now the album’s finished, we broke up.
Oh, I’m sorry, that’s a long time. You were writing this at that time?
I was writing it when things were not going smoothly but we were still together. So yeah, that’s where “Let’s Stay Together” comes from, but we didn’t. I’m okay, we’re okay, it’s better for it and we’re on good terms with each other. It’s just it’s a large chunk of time.
A similar thing happened to me in the past. You are freer now to see what the future holds, which is liberating. Did you feel any pressure making this album because your previous album was quite successful?
No. We’ve embraced the power of effortless writing, so whatever comes to mind, play it. Whereas ten years ago, we would sit down with our instruments and try to come up with something, we would think “This is nice but it’s too easy. It should be more complicated and then we would make it more complicated” and then we would just endlessly sculpt these songs. Whereas now we are letting the inspiration flow freely and the instances where we did that turn into some of our most memorable moments. So, we’ve embraced that. You write something like a “Snowbird” and “Snowbird” is fucking crazy – it has all these crazy time signatures. But even that came just from out of nowhere. We were just jamming it, and one of us started singing those lines and then I had something on my phone, “oh, maybe this would be nice to put in this part” and then we kind of juggle around with that and then we had this epic eight minutes song, in a 9/8 time signature and added in a 5/8.
No 4/4 for you! You’ve toured with The Black Crowes and you mentioned Chris Robinson earlier. What’s your favourite memory from that time?
The after-party! We were on that tour, and we were super excited of course, they were our big heroes. But the kind of venues we were playing, they would often have their own floor in the backstage and then we would have another floor. We were a very polite bunch of guys, so we were not going to intrude on their privacy or whatever. So, for a bunch of shows in a row, we never really saw him until they walked on stage and every time it happened we had these nice little interactions, but then we played the show in Madrid which was not the last day, but the one before the last day. And at the end of their show me and Luca were walking around backstage and we thought “Fuck it, this is the end of the tour. We’re just gonna go to Chris Robinson’s dressing room and see what happens”. So we were waiting with Craig Ross, Lenny Kravitz’s guitar player and we say “hey what’s up?” and then Chris came out of his dressing room, and he said “hey guys you want to come in?” “Yeah!”. We had a bunch of beers and some really cool conversations about the Dutch language and about Steve Marriott, among other things. More people started turning up “hey, can we come in?” and then at one point there were thirty or forty people in his dressing room, and we had this party, we’re blasting music. We were dancing, somebody was breakdancing, it was fucking crazy. I was dancing with Chris Robinson. I was drunk out of my mind and it was fucking legendary. The party went on until 3am or something and then their tour manager asked us, because they’re not allowed to end the party, “can you maybe end this party? Because we really have to get going” and we were like, “no, are you crazy?” That was a pretty legendary night.
Originally published i Norway Rock Magazine #1/2025
