The Dave Heumann Interview
Dave Heumann is a guitarist, singer, songwriter, and composer based in Baltimore, MD USA. Known for his work as the founding member of the band Arbouretum as well as many other projects, he has been active for over two decades as a bandleader and collaborator, writing, recording, and performing music in North America and Europe.
Are you originally from Baltimore Maryland? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically the guitar and keys? Was this something that was relevant around your household growing up? I understand you're also a visual artist and poet!
We moved to the Baltimore area from the Chicago Suburbs when I was 5, or 6. My childhood was not incredibly eventful I don't think, but as formative as anyone else's, I suppose. I played in the woods and read a lot. We had a piano and a guitar in the house, which I plunked around on a bit, occasionally trying to sound out melodies. My parents didn't actively play music, though my dad would sometimes bust out surf rock tunes he learned in college when he was feeling particularly festive, and my mother could sight-read piano music and loved to sing, particularly in church. Turns out neither of my parents were particularly religious; I think that the music was a big part of the draw for them. Sometimes my uncle visited from Chicago and brought his banjo. I thought it was cool as shit. He knew some Bill Monroe tunes and stuff like that, and had a fine voice. I started playing music because I had an aptitude for it, and that turned into an obsession later on. I took piano lessons when I was 12, but switched to guitar lessons when I was 14 and got my first real guitar. It was a Kramer Striker Strat copy, and I still have it. I'm not actually much of a visual artist, actually, though there was a period of time where I dabbled in photography. As for poetry, I don't really consider myself one. I sometimes write lyrics, but it's not the same thing since it's mostly about how they sound with the music, not on their own, or read from a page.
Do you have any siblings? What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your first show and when did it dawn on you that you wanted to be a musician yourself?
I have two sisters and a brother. I'm the oldest, and the next oldest is five years younger than me. Growing up, my friends and I would hang out outside a lot, before anyone was old enough to drive. BMX bikes were a thing, and we had trails going through the woods with jumps and such. We also made stop-motion movies with super 8 cameras. I didn't get into playing sports much personally and got into artsier or headier activities. I alternated between wanting to grow up to become a filmmaker or a parapsychologist until I was 14 and decided I wanted to be a musician. When I saw my first show really depends on what kind of music we're talking about. I saw people play bluegrass when I was really little, also saw symphony orchestras and a bit of jazz. When I was 16-17 I saw The Grateful Dead, The Who, and Pink Floyd play at stadiums.
Did you participate in any groups prior to Arbouretum? How did you initially meet your bandmates? What were your earliest impressions of everyone? What led to the decision to first form the band in the early 2000’s? When and where did you guys first get together to jam and what was the initial chemistry like between everyone?
Yes, I was always in a band, usually one I fronted, ever since getting out of high school. We would usually slowly develop a set of songs, and then the lineup would change, the new band would develop some new songs, and the cycle would repeat itself. Not much of it was recorded and/or still exists, but that's ok. It took me a long time to get comfortable with my own writing, and I was trying a lot of different things back then. In 1999, or 2000, Ned Oldham, and later Will Oldham, moved to Baltimore. I played with Ned's band, The Anoamanon, and with Will's band in those days, and I saw how being a musician who released music and toured nationally and internationally could be an actual, viable thing. I started Arbouretum in late 2002, which at first was a solo-oriented project with no fixed lineup. In that sense, I was taking a cue from what Will was doing, as he was putting different bands together for each album and tour back in those days. Some time later, I found it to be easier to have a consistent lineup together.
When did you guys make your liver performance debut and what was that experience like for you? Tell me about writing and recording the group’s self-released debut album “Long Live The Well Doer” in ‘04. What was the overall vision for this album with it being the band’s first release?
The first Arbouretum show, if my memory serves me right, was December 27, 2002. We had David Bergander on drums, Beth Varden on bass, Jennifer Hutt on violin, and Rob Girardi on guitar as well as myself. I was playing baritone guitar at this show. We drew from the songs on Long Live the Well-Doer, which had been recorded at this point but not released and maybe not mixed yet either, and we did a couple covers, which I believe were "No Fun" by the Stooges and "Isn't it a Pity", by George Harrison. It was at a small club but a good amount of people came out and it was well-received. I wrote all the songs to the album that year, in 2002. My mother had just passed away from cancer that July, and I suppose writing these songs was my way of dealing with the grief from that experience. I'd go over to Rob Girardi's house- he had a home studio at this time, and we'd started recording the songs. It always started with just guitar and voice. Then we'd need some other stuff, maybe some synths, maybe piano, and invariably there'd be a need for bass and drums as well. So David Bergander had the rather difficult task of playing drums to my somewhat erratic strumming. The timing was all over the place as I didn't record any of it to a click track, but he did an excellent job with what he had. The final two songs on the record were recorded live though, with Bergander, myself, and Walker Teret, playing drums, baritone guitar, and bass, respectively.
‘07 saw your debut on Thrill Jockey, a label that has become a home for your music, with the release of “Rites Of Uncovering”. How did you guys initially want to ultimately approach this record now that you were signed to a label?
When we recorded “Rites”, we didn’t know at that point that we’d find a home for it at Thrill Jockey. What had happened was that we had been playing shows in NYC and Matt Boynton approached us and said that he had been recording people at the Magic Shop and that he could record us there after hours and do it for a very low rate, just because he wanted to be the one to record our next record. Some months before, maybe even a year before, we had recorded some songs with Paul Oldham in Kentucky, but not a full album's worth. So we took Matt up on his offer and recorded a bunch of songs. Those sessions ended up being very fruitful, and we did them as a trio consisting of Bergander, Teret, and myself. Some time after this, we realized that we still needed a couple more songs, so we set up another session with a friend of ours named Jeff Duncan in Baltimore, who for a period of time was recording people in the basement of an apartment building his dad owned or managed. This was with a different lineup which included Corey Allender, who ended up playing in the band for nearly 15 years afterwards, and Mitchell Feldstein, the drummer from Lungfish. So the album was the result of 3 versions of the band recording in 3 spaces in 3 states, over a period that spanned nearly two years.
Then we started shopping the record. I really wanted us to be on Drag City at first, but Dan wrote me back after listening to the album saying essentially “I thought the first song was really cool, but I’m not a huge fan of the rest of this”. I was bummed, but I respected that he was as forthright as he was. At least he got back to me and was honest about his impressions. Then I thought about Thrill Jockey. I didn’t think we really fit in with the rest of their roster- at the time it was mainly post-rock bands while we were more rock rock, but I remembered meeting Bettina at our 2004 show in Chicago, being one of about five people who had come to see us, and she’d seemed nice. So I sent her a CDR of our mixes through the mail. She liked it and offered to have John McIntire remix it in Chicago. I had never met him, but I liked Tortoise and Stereolab, and at least this way everything would be summed through the same console by the same engineer, which would give the album the consistency it needed. So in 2006, we signed on with Thrill Jockey for this record. We had so much fun with the artwork and packaging. My friend Eon had this crazy cover design concept that he worked on for over a month, and our friend Jay did the title lettering entirely freehand. We worked with Sheila Sachs, the graphic designer who coordinated the artwork for the LP and CD, to make the center disc image look like an old ‘50s or ‘60s record, but instead of saying “Columbia” or “RCA Victor”, it said “a Thrill Jockey Record”.
The band exploded after this with many incredible releases such as “Song Of The Pearl”, “The Gathering”, “A Gourd Of Gold” and so many more. I want to back up real quick to your 2015 solo debut, “Here In The Deep” on Thrill Jockey. How did you approach writing and recording this album with it being just you? What was the overall vision and approach to creating songs such as “Cloud Mind”, “Here In The Deep” and “Holly King On A Hill”?
The Gathering was and still is a fan favorite, and I think that’s fair as it was a pretty focused record and the first to feature the longest-running lineup of the band. I look back on the sessions fondly. This one saw us working again with Matt Boynton, this time in a different studio called Vacation Island in Brooklyn. “When Delivery Comes” was one of my favorite songs on the album to write and record. I remember being hung up on a part. I met up with Matt Sweeney- I think I’d paid his cab fare for him to come into Brooklyn to work on the song with me- and he had the idea pretty much instantly to go to a Gmin chord and go up to a higher vocal, which became the second bridge in which I sing “When Delivery Comes”. It was a key change of a type I didn’t know how to write at that time, and it went right back into the D dorian that the rest of the song was in. Brilliant part. He also came up with the second part for “Oceans Don’t Sing”, released later on Coming Out of the Fog, which as also based around a key change, and also something I wouldn’t have thought of myself in a million years. So with regards to Here in the Deep, that was a very different process because I wasn’t writing it the same way. With Arbouretum I’d always bring skeletal versions of the songs to band practice, and complete the writing process based on the feedback of the other members, while I was mostly on my own for this one.
And the songs didn’t have to have a particular vibe to them which defined whatever could be construed as “The Arbouretum sound”. Some of the basic song ideas I’d actually had kicking around for years, and didn’t quite know what to do with them as they didn’t feel like they would ever be Arbouretum songs. I really enjoyed working on this record. One thing about it is that I’d asked Mike Kuhl to play drums on the record. Just a few days before the recording, he broke his right (kick drum) foot falling off a ladder, but I still wanted to have him play on it, so some of the drum performances were composite recordings of different pieces of the drum kit and/or were played on a cajon, which is one of those wooden boxes that you sit on and hit different parts of. I think this ended up lending a really unique sound to the album. John Parish mixed the record from Bristol, UK, while I stayed back in Baltimore listening to his mixes, making it the first time I’d ever worked remotely with a mix engineer. The impact he had on the sound of the record was a massive one, and really his role in many respects transcended that of a recording engineer and veered into a producer's role. He even had me take out whole sections of songs, which I initially resisted pretty much every time, and later came around to. I still think it’s one of the best-sounding albums I’ve done.
Last year you released “Guitar Tapes Vol. 1” with the fine folks over at Sun Cru. Can you tell me about that release?
Recording Guitar Tapes Vol 1 was something I’d done over the winter of 2021 into 2022. I recorded this at home, in the basement studio we have here. It was always at night, and it was raining about half of the time. There’s one window, and it has one of those plexiglass domes over it so that rainwater won’t leak in. When it rains, the rain very audibly and relentlessly taps on it. None of this got into the recording, as I have it set up so that I’m recording using a direct out from the amp into my audio interface, but it got into my head while I was playing. I kept up a near-nightly practice of recording myself improvising for two months, and the tracks that made it to the album were the best of what I’d recorded. I put the cover art together from pictures I’d taken hiking, and released in on Bandcamp in February 2022. Later that weekend, Josh Collins contacted me and asked me if I’d be interested in releasing it in physical formats on his new label, Sun Cru. I instantly said yes- I mean, this was just something I’d recorded as an audio diary of my guitar practicing, because at the time I felt like I needed to be working on something. I’d had no plans for vinyl or CD because I didn’t have the money to put into it, and anyway I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. It’s been a really positive experience releasing GTV1 with him. One thing to mention is that I’m a big fan of how the videos turned out. For the “Serpentine Sunlight” video, I shot the footage myself on my phone and Josh edited it. He did an incredible job of blending everything together, and it flows stylistically quite smoothly and naturally with the music. Then he used a similar style but with all footage he’d taken, for the “Through Ages Before” video. Really nice all around. I’m very much looking forward to having the vinyl out- I’ve seen the mock-ups and it's going to look amazing.
What have you been up to more recently? Are you currently working on any new projects for the Spring/Summer? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
I’ve been playing some improvised music with Mike Kuhl and having a blast doing it. He’s such an amazingly competent and expressive drummer, and always positive about the music and playing in general. We've developed a really close musical connection over the years and have gotten quite good at anticipating where the other might take things in the course of improvising. We’ve got an album out digitally, Live in Two Rooms, which is comprised of recordings of two shows we played, and I feel like this captures our music quite well, at least as a document of this music from a particular point in time.
