Web Exclusive: A conversation with Forgive Durden's Thomas Dutton

FORGIVE DURDEN were a young, talented entry to the Fueled By Ramen roster nearly three years ago when they signed to the exploding label. They quickly gained the respect of the webzine community for their knotty, conceptual pop-rock sound that seemed destined to fill the eventually vacant shoes of a hiatus-bound Gatsbys American Dream. But in the two years since their debut, Wonderland, was released, the band continued to fly under the radar despite tours with Saosin and the Matches before eventually dissolving into the solo project of frontman Thomas Dutton. But now with complete creative control and an uninhibited love for musicals, Dutton spent a year writing and recording what would ultimately become Razia’s Shadow, a theatrical, hour-plus opus with a roster of guest musicians that reads like the best CMJ showcase ever. Brian Shultz recently spoke with Dutton to reveal more on his creation, the inspirations behind it and how Forgive Durden became a one-man band with an accompanying string section.




What’s the real-life story behind Razia’s Shadow? When did this concept first come to your mind and how did you go about it?

The concept for doing a musical came years ago. I’m obsessed with things like Moulin Rouge and Newsies and stuff like that-like, musical movies, and all the Disney movies. Once Moulin Rouge came out, in my mind, [it] was a game-changer as far as modernizing the way musicals can sound. That made me really want to bring that concept to this kind of music industry. That’s where the actual concept of the music came from, and I had the idea to bring in [people from] some other bands to represent the characters. As far as the storyline, I feel like I kind of just took my favorite parts of a lot of my favorite tragedies and romances and star-crossed lovers kinds of stories and was inspired by a lot of those, where there’s a lot of crazy twists and turns.




What’s the storyline of Razia’s Shadow?

Well…I could probably talk about it for an hour, so I’ll try [an] abridged [version] of it. The musical is split into two halves. The first half is the creation and ultimate division of the world. The second half is the story of destined love and the world being reunited as one.




What kind of specific tragedies and romance stories did you take inspiration from?

Like I said, Moulin Rouge was a huge inspiration as far as the style of it and the feel and the theme. I definitely tried to get some Shakespearean tragedy in there, like with Romeo And Juliet stuff. A lot of the Disney movies actually have really good, heartbreaking twists and turns–stories like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, where he pretends to be a prince and he goes into the kingdom saying, "I’m gonna be a prince!" That’s definitely inspired me to have my character pretend to be from the light and disguise himself and meet the princess and everything.



What did you actually play on the record, instrumentally?

I personally played some percussion stuff. I played bass, guitar and I played some trumpet, which I haven’t really played since eighth grade but I whipped it out [for this].




How did you round up all the other instrumental musicians on the record?

We did a lot of research as far as [things] that were really inspiring us sonically, like Moulin Rouge [and] a couple of the songs off Silverchair’s Diorama that Van Dyke Parks helped out with. The Silverchair stuff was all real, but the Moulin Rouge album, they used a hybrid of software and real stuff. And because we didn’t have a huge budget–we had a very small budget–we ended up doing that same thing, with a hybrid of really, really nice software that was amazing and actually sounded better most of the time than we could get any of the real players to sound. In the orchestral world, you can definitely do a thing where you have one cello player play eight parts and it sounds like an eight-part cello part. But it sounds way better if you actually have eight cello players playing together, because they’re all in unison, they’re all feeding off each other. It made it a lot easier to have the software where we could fill things out. We didn’t have a huge orchestra–we just had a few people that could play a few instruments here and there. [My brother] Paul, who co-wrote the album with me, is a music composition major in college right now, so we were able to get some people to play some things and mix it in with the software.




This will still be released under the Forgive Durden name, right?

Yeah. We were kind of up in the air about it for a while, because it is so different and the lineup is completely different and everything, but in my mind, it’s not a side project of mine. This is something I’ve been working on for two years and if I’m Forgive Durden, then this is Forgive Durden, basically. We’re doing it as a “Forgive Durden Presents…,” but yeah, it’s a Forgive Durden album.




The way you got all the guest vocal parts–were those just sent to you electronically by each person?

It was different for everybody. A few of them–more than half–I would send them the song and send them a version with me singing their part, or me trying to sing their part as best as I could–[sometimes] I was out of my range. They would send it back. Maybe we’d have a few little changes or things we wanted them to try a little differently, and they would send it back again. A few we actually recorded in person. I recorded Greta Salpeter [of the Hush Sound] and Brendan Urie [of Panic At The Disco] and I recorded Aaron Weiss [of mewithoutYou]–all the narration… Lizzie Huffman and Nic Newsham [of Gatsbys American Dream], and all the people who live in Seattle–Daniel Young [of This Providence]. So about half of them I actually recorded, and the other half just kinda did it themselves, which was awesome.




You made a blog posting on January 27 that described an album you recorded with Rudy Gajadhar of Gatsbys American Dream on drums. Was that Razia’s Shadow?

Yes, that’s us. He played drums on the whole record, and he did an extremely good job.




It also mentioned your brother, Paul, helped write and record it. Are he and Rudy now full-time members?

Rudy is married and has a full-time job, and as much as I’d love to have him out touring and playing drums and everything, he’s got his real life going on. My brother, Paul, has a year left in school, so he wanted to get that finished before venturing into the music world. I do have a full band of players for tour, but unfortunately it doesn’t include Rudy.




How long was the entire recording process?

It was long. We went into the studio in about October [2007] and we only had about two-and-a-half songs totally done. [Paul] was still in school, which is about an hour-and-a-half north of the studio, and so I would live in the studio and I would just write all during the week. They’d come down every weekend and we’d track stuff, and tweak stuff and come up with some new ideas. He’d go back up Sunday night, and I’d just work all week and demo stuff. Then he’d come back down and we’d hammer everything out. It was a month of that, and Rudy came in two different times. We finished [several] songs–he came in and [recorded] them. Then he knocked out another four or five songs. So it was kind of a month of that and we basically had pretty much the whole record [done]. For the next six months, [producer] Casey Bates was very cooperative and patient with me because I was very, very nitpicky–very hard to satisfy as far as the record went. I wanted it to be perfect. I kept coming back in, and back in, and back in and changing things and redoing things. We ended up adding one last song months later. The record finally got completely done with all the guest vocals, I’d say, in about July.




So from October to July, I wasn’t in there constantly, but at least probably once a week or a few times a month, I was back in the studio tweaking things and fixing things and getting vocals and stuff. So it was really kind of a strange and long process. It wasn’t really like any record I’ve ever recorded.




Ever since that blog in January was posted, you went silent on the subject of the record. Intentional?

I really wanted it to be a big [surprise]. I feel like I should’ve kept my mouth shut even more. Razia’s Shadow [hadn’t even been announced and] people had already kind of put together the pieces that it was probably me, Forgive Durden. But I really wanted it to be [a surprise] because of the nature of the project and how different it is. There’s hardly any guitar on the whole record; I think there’s probably a total of a minute’s worth of guitar on the record. There’s all these different singers, and given the nature of that, I really wanted it to hit everybody as a huge surprise and this really special thing, because it was really special to me and so I thought it would be best if I remained pretty silent about the whole thing until it was ready.




You originally cited personality conflicts as to why the other three members of Forgive Durden left the band. Can you elaborate on that?

A lot of bands, in my experience, who are just starting to tour are the kind where they’re all really good friends, which is great. They want to do everything together–every town they stop [in] they want to all go to the same restaurant. Every time they have a day off they want to do the same stuff. I feel like as bands grow up and the people grow up, people are into different things and are interested in different things. A band has to learn how to separate those personalities a little bit. When everybody has a day off, some people want to go see a movie, and other people just want to hang out at a coffee shop and read a book or whatever. We had a hard time realizing that [and] transitioning through that… or maybe it was just me that had a hard time realizing that, where I thought that us growing up and being interested in different things, and not wanting to always do everything together, kind of meant that we were almost growing apart. Just growing up. At least in my mind, I was trying to kind of almost force it back to the way it was when we first started touring, and I think that some resentment grew out of that.




I still totally get along with all the other guys. I just… I don’t know. What I think about lately is that time of transitioning from just that group of guys that was really, really good friends that happened to go on tour together to a group of guys that was into different things. You have to be able to respect that.




A lot of [the problems] also stemmed from the fact that we had an album, Wonderland, that we were all really, really proud of and we thought was gonna do some great things and really make some waves, and it really didn’t. We were really frustrated because we were on tours with bands who were making run-of-the-mill music, and they were just blowing by us. We were making music that we thought was much more interesting and it wasn’t going anywhere. That was a huge source of frustration that I’m sure we took out on each other. We’re all totally cool with each other now. We’ve all sort of grown up and ended up growing apart a little bit.




Did you ever pitch the idea of Razia’s Shadow to them?

Yeah. They all knew about it and Thomas Hunter, who played guitar in the band before, co-wrote, like, a song-and-a-half for the musical. We originally did the first demo for the musical, let me think, two Januarys ago, [so] two-and-a-half years ago. In January, we did an original demo for it, and me and Thomas wrote that song totally together. At that time, I wanted to it to be a side project thing, so Jesse [Bauer] and Andy [Mannino] were totally cool with not being included, but they knew about it, and were cool about it and that we’re gonna work on it. We got about another half of a song written by the time everybody left the band. So that’s when I asked my brother to come in and help me write the rest of the record.




How do you plan on performing these songs live?

It’s gonna be interesting. I pieced together as large a band I can really fit. I don’t have the means or the room [or] funds to bring out a 30-person orchestra. We have six people doing our best to recreate [the album], and some of the songs will be rearranged. I think it’ll be cool. I’m really trying to not lose the substance of the musical. It’ll definitely be a little different.




How will you integrate the older material into your live set?

My brother and I just recently went back in the studio and took two songs from Wonderland and turned them into songs that sound like they’re from a musical. So we took out all the guitars, left all the drums and vocals in, and just replaced everything with orchestra arrangements. The core of the song is still there and people that are there to hear some Wonderland songs will be able to hear them, but they definitely sound like they’re from a musical now.




What are you gonna do with those recordings?

I don’t know. We were talking about maybe using them as B-sides, but I don’t know. We just finished them. I’m going up to the school today to finish the second one. But we finished one that sounds really cool, so we’re gonna finish the other one today hopefully.




Speaking of performing these songs, is anything in the works to actually bring the musical itself to life?

I don’t know as far as an actual Broadway production with kicklines and everything, but we definitely talked about every idea possible. We’re even in talks to sell movie rights and everything, but I think the first goal that we really want to try and get to, if there’s any amount of success, we really wanna try and bring in as many of the guest singers as possible with a real orchestra and be able to perform in a theater in L.A. or New York City or something, and try and put on the full thing live with everybody there.




How do you even go about following up something like this?

Umm… [Laughs.] I don’t know. That’s interesting. I mean, I think that if the musical is successful and there are people [that] like it, that I would definitely want to do another one. I’ve already been thinking about ideas for a second one. My mind has been kinda churning in this musical realm for the past two or three years, and once the record was done, it kept turning and more ideas were coming out still. So I already have some ideas if we were to do a second one, but I mean, the change that we went through from Wonderland to here was pretty drastic. I think I wanna do a pretty dirty rock record before I get too old and hate distorted guitars and loud music. We’ll see. It all depends. One reason I’m really glad that I’m putting this out under the Forgive Durden name is that it really allows me to just do whatever style that I really feel like, and I don’t really feel like that I’m confined to any genre or any subclass of a genre or anything. A lot of people write music and they’re like, "Oh, it doesn’t really fit with my band." I want to be able to just write any song that I write–to be able to release as mine and Forgive Durden’s. It all depends where my head’s at in a year or so.



Are there any updates on Zero Cool, your side project with former Gatsbys American Dream guitarist Bobby Darling?

Oh, Zero Cool! Well, Bobby and I just randomly… [Laughs.] We originally tried to record, like, a full-length in a whole day, but it went a lot slower than we were hoping. I play drums on it and I’m not that good of a drummer, so that’s the part that was taking the longest–my drum takes took a lot longer than I was hoping. It started as, not a joke, but [with] no expectations whatsoever. We just really wanted to have fun, and Bobby and I really enjoy each other’s company and writing music together and talking about music and music ideas. So we really wanted to do something that just he and I really enjoyed doing. Mostly it was something that we wanted to do together. It was never something like, "Let’s make this band and try to get famous together!" It was never that vibe whatsoever. It was just us wanting to play together. He has a full-time job now… We started working on a second song, but especially with the musical in motion here and me going on tour, it will probably be a little while before we’re able to get back in the studio and mess around with things. We never had any serious plans to release it under a label or anything. The last we talked about it, we wanted to just sort of release a song or so every few months…keep it moving along that way. Just something for him and I to do.



I suppose it’ll be nice to not have quite as many Gatsbys American Dream comparisons with Razia’s Shadow.

Yeah. [Laughs.] I mean, we have Rudy playing on it, so I guess there’s definitely a direct comparison with the drums [at least]. I never minded those comparisons; [Gatsbys] definitely were a huge inspiration for me and they definitely are one of my favorite bands of all-time. I don’t think too many people thought that we were ripping them off at all, because we weren’t. But I think that they thought we were in a similar vein of this sort of technical, intellectual pop-rock music. I guess I’ll be ready to hear comparisons to Moulin Rouge or something. Whatever. alt