Pete Droge – Busy being born
“It ballooned into something bigger than what the original intention was,” Droge says. “The original thing was like, hey, you guys make a quiet little low-key kind of moderate-budget record by major-label standards. We won’t bother with making a video or going to radio or any of that stuff; let’s just be this kind of cool little thing.
“But that all kind of changed as the demos circulated around. More and more people got excited about it, and it became more of a priority. I mean, they spent ungodly amounts of money on the record.”
Meanwhile, Droge had been sitting on a new solo album, Skywatching, that he’d put together during rare spare moments over the past few years. His decision to release it independently in the summer of 2003, in the midst of the Thorns’ most hectic stretch, meant that Skywatching essentially got buried.
“I wasn’t really able to do much for that record,” he admits. “I made the choice not to really use all the access that I had from the Thorns to sort of be, ‘Oh, by the way, here’s my record.’ I didn’t feel like that was fair to Matthew and Shawn; it just felt a little jive. If people asked about it and wanted it, I’d give it to them. But if we were at a radio station — which we did tons of radio, and tons of press and stuff — I wasn’t like actively thrusting my record out there for people.”
In the long run, that may have worked out fine. Though Skywatching showed promise as Droge’s first self-produced album — his three 1990s discs were done with major-league producer Brendan O’Brien — in retrospect it sounds more like a learning-curve effort when compared to the fully realized vision of his new record.
Part of that vision was to play all of the instruments himself, which he nearly pulled off. (Elaine Summers, who co-wrote five of the album’s tracks and is credited as co-producer, contributed harmony vocals, and Eyvind Kang added cello.) This represents major growth in Droge’s musicianship; he has long been proficient on guitar and passable on piano, but mastering the rhythm section was a much more daunting challenge.
“I had a conversation with Stone Gossard about nine years ago — we were talking about drumming,” Droge relates. “And he made a comment that he’d put himself on a ten-year plan; he figures, ‘If I practice, in ten years I’ll be good enough to play on a record and get it done.’ And I felt like that was a really reasonable expectation. I kind of put that same sort of mode to myself…and that was almost ten years ago now.
“That’s the instrument everybody is probably the most impressed by, that a songwriter or a guitar player can actually pull off,” he continues. “But for me the area that was probably the most challenging was bass. For me, it’s a process to get to thinking and feeling like a bass player.”
Everything Droge has learned from playing new instruments, producing other artists, and scoring films is bound to strengthen his own music — even as he’s found a way not to depend solely on making records as a career anymore.
“If I can make my living without having to worry about making my living as a recording artist, that’s the best scenario for me,” he figures. “That way, I get to do whatever the hell I want. There’s no commercial attachment to this record — I don’t need this record to make me money in order to live. I have work as a producer, and as a studio, and co-writing and having songs out on the radio and the movies and on TV and stuff — all that other stuff keeps my head above water.”
The result is that Droge finds himself dealing more directly with the art of making music than he ever did as an aspiring singer-songwriter trying to make a name for himself. “I’m doing more of the stuff where you’re actually in the studio with your hands on the board and your hands on the guitar and pencil on paper and writing songs and making recordings happen,” he says. “That’s always where I’ve been the happiest.”
ND co-editor Peter Blackstock first saw Pete Droge perform in October 1991 when he was fronting a Seattle alt-country band called Ramadillo. Though nobody called it alt-country back then…