Interview Dietrich Gosser and Dan Kuemmel

The terms “singer-songwriter” and “musician” usually seem worlds apart. It’s a pleasant shock these days to find a lone singer-guitarist holding off on clumsy strumming and passive melodies, instead focusing on real musicality. For Dietrich Gosser, a former Madison resident who moved to Chicago in 2006, much of that owes to good old patient songcraft, and the rest depends on Gosser’s partnership with drummer Dan Kuemmel. The two met about 10 years ago at an open mic in Madison and kept up their friendship even as Kuemmel spent five years in the U.S. Virgin Islands as a stringer for the Associated Press. At night, Kuemmel kept playing in bands, picking up on Caribbean and African rhythms and augmenting his drum kit with an assortment of noise-making junk.

On the 2006 EP City Of Windows and this year’s album What The Buzzsaw Sings, Gosser crafts sparse, folk-based tunes that can subsist on their own, but gives Kuemmel plenty of room to supply the atmosphere, from the calypso clatter of “Ocean” to the ominous creaks and swells of “On The Beach.” It took a year and a half to track in Buzzsaw’s additional strings, vocals, guitar, and effects, but throughout, the duo keeps the record grounded in do-it-yourself scrappiness. Gosser’s vocals, slipping from frail whispers on “Keep It, Keep It” to jolly twang on “Bird Of Paradise,” assist the record’s emotional ebb and flow even in a solo-acoustic setting. Gosser and Kuemmel spoke with Decider about the new record and the origins of their respective playing styles.

Decider: On this album, you’ve got “Ocean,” “Slowly Sinking Ship,” “On The Beach,” and “Noah’s Ark.” Is there a water theme running through it?
Dietrich Gosser: With Dan living in the Virgin Islands for five years, it definitely influenced the record in terms of the rhythms, two calypso songs, and also just the idea of the ocean. He responds very much to those songs, like “Ocean” and “On The Beach.” I think the lyrics and the music [of “On The Beach”] are linked in a grand way that feels very water-like.
D: That “grand” feel contrasts pretty strongly with the intimacy of your songs. Is that deliberate?
DG: I think intimacy can be this really grand gesture. You have this quiet, intimate interaction with somebody, and that can only go so far because eventually you’re gonna run out of things to talk about, and you have to have this big release, and then you can get closer again. It’s like, I don’t know, a relationship with one person, like sex or something. It’s this thing that allows you to get intimate again.
D: How did you develop your guitar style? You seem to favor sparse guitar lines and go light on the strumming.
DG: Since I was 19 or 20, I’ve only played in my home, in apartment buildings, living next door to people. I play really quietly because I don’t want to be disruptive to other people.
D: So what’s next?
DG: We’re gonna record again in September. We’re just gonna do a six-song thing. [The title track is] “The Man Who Invented Gold,” it’s a really short song that has a long instrumental introduction and then there’s a short haiku of a song. There will be six songs kind of thematically linked to that. We’re gonna knock it out in a day or two and not mess around the way we did with this record. Our intentions [on Buzzsaw] were, “Let’s go in and learn how to make a really good record. Let’s go in and figure out how to pick it apart and put it back together and work with putting these parts in and getting the sounds we want to get.”
D: Dan, how did your time in the Caribbean influence the way you play on the record?
Dan Kuemmel: “Ocean” is a straight-up zouk calypso beat. “Charlotte Amalie” was named after the capital of St. Thomas, and it was just basically an attempt to re-create the feel of Carnival, where they have these bands that set up on the backs of flatbed trucks. It starts at, like, four in the morning and these trucks roll down the street at four miles an hour, and it’s all these people drinking and dancing and following the trucks.
D: Can you inventory what all you used on one of the songs? How about “Buzzsaw”?
DK: [Laughs.] That’s, like, 8 billion tracks of percussion. I used a Tibetan singing bowl, a concert bass drum, various cymbals, and reco-recos [a Brazilian percussion instrument consisting of springs and a piece of metal]. It’s hard to remember. I used crotales: Those are tuned discs. They’re almost like a xylophone, only they’re little circles. Various pieces of metal, mixing bowls. We dumped a bowl of bolts down the stairs. I used a hammer on a piece of wood. I used a drum called a cajón that is native to Peru, to kind of come up with that hammering sound.
D: Are there any songs that Dietrich won’t play when he’s just doing solo-acoustic without you?
DK: I don’t know, but I always try to push him to do at least a couple songs on his own. One of the things that I can tell makes a great drummer is knowing when not to play. It’s about, what is this gonna add to the song? That’s more important than saying, okay, I have this huge collection of stuff, and I’m gonna use it all within the course of a record or of one song.