The Jerry David DeCicca Interview
Jerry David DeCicca is a songwriter, record-maker, and producer that lives in Bulverde, Texas with his wife, 2 dogs, 3 cats, and 5 toads. He has produced records for legendary artists like Larry Jon Wilson, Bob Martin, Ed Askew, Chris Gantry, Will Beeley, and Ralph White, and curated many other musical projects. His former band, The Black Swans, released records and toured between 2004-2011. He owns and operates a vocational rehabilitation agency that serves the Texas Hill Country and surrounding areas.
Are you originally from Texas? What was your childhood like? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Was this something that was relevant growing up in your household? Do you have any siblings?
I grew up, mostly, in Ohio. My childhood had the usual teeter-totter of trauma and positive supports that drives someone to make things creatively, but still not lose themselves in the abyss. I was sick a lot as a child or, at the very least, missed a lot of school, which allowed me to watch a lot of TV, especially reruns. There was no music in our house, so I found music there. TV shows had theme songs by musicians with cool voices and points of view. John Sebastian with Welcome Back, Kotter, Harry Nilsson with Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Waylon Jennings with Dukes of Hazard. The Muppet Show had great guests. Hoyt Axton was everywhere. Even Lee Majors singing The Fall Guy theme. Then, there’s MTV with Prince, Springsteen, Dire Straits, Culture Club, Bowie, Bryan Adams, Huey Lewis. I loved MTV. It wasn’t until I was 9 years old that I’d use my allowance money to buy cassette tapes. I’d walk to K-mart once a week. Song Hits magazine published lyrics and I’d study them, since most cassette tapes didn’t include them. This was all before I turned 12. It wasn’t much of a childhood, really. I spent a lot of time alone.
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 very first concert? When did you realize you wanted to spend your life pursuing music?
I was arrested for trespassing and painting someone’s shed with out their permission when I was 10. We threw rocks at cars, played mailbox baseball, other things I’m not proud of. It was a long time ago and rocks were made of different things back then. We skateboarded the summer of Back to the Future, walked in creeks, hid in trees, chased girls. I was really into my Walkman and reading. There may have been some CBS tape club nonsense, the 12 cassettes for a penny deal, that involved using addresses to vacant houses. Things are weird when you’re an unsupervised child of divorce wandering around carports and condos, living some Midwestern version of Over the Edge. That was when I was a kid-kid. By high school, when I was 15, I had a fake ID to get into adult shit- rock shows and jazz clubs, the Mapplethorpe exhibit to see Piss Christ. Stuff like that. Between the ages of 14-18, I was obsessed with Springsteen, Dylan, Lou Reed, Grateful Dead, Zevon, Neil Young (who always had good opening acts like Sonic Youth, John Hammond, Shawn Colvin). Seeing Jimmie Dale Gilmore open for Dylan in ’91 was significant for me. I saw all of these musicians play between 8 th -12 th grade.
Somewhere in there I saw Beach Boys, Robert Palmer with Steel Pulse, Don McLean, BB King, Bonnie Raitt, The Who, The Stones, Robert Plant, Joan Jett, Bob Weir, Chris Isaak, Ricki Lee Jones, Sinatra, Edie Brickell, Blue Rodeo, Lindsey Buckingham. I’d try to see anyone that played guitar and sang their own songs, so lots of local and regional musicians, too. I worked in a chicken restaurant and, then, a dry cleaner/tux shop so I had some money. My car, this ’81 Buick Elektra, didn’t have reverse, so I had to park on hills, but I always had money for shows and records. In college I was going to see Townes, Guy Clark, Prine, Joe Ely, Steve Forbert, Tom Rush, and all those great and singular 90’s songwriters that benefited from the trickle- down of major label wealth, like Mark Eitzel, Vic Chestnutt, Richard Buckner, James McMurtry, Iris Dement and pretty much any band on Merge, Matador, Siltbreeze, Drag City, and Thrill Jockey. I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot. I used to go out every night. I don’t know if I’d say I’ve spent my life “pursuing” music so much as my misspent youth just developed from an obsession into a fairly high-risk lifestyle that I’m still trying to manage.
When and where did you play your very first gig and what was that experience like for you? Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to setting off as a solo musician? Tell me about writing and recording your debut album “Understanding Land” that was released back in 2014. What was the overall approach and vision for this album? I understand you self-released this work.
I started off playing open mics in college, wherever I could walk to with my guitar. The type of places where in the middle of your song, while your hands and voice are shaking, someone over the loudspeaker says, “Jason, your wings are ready.” Then, I started to get some gigs with the help of Jerry Wick from Gaunt, Mike Rep, Jim Shephard from V-3, Don Howland from the Bassholes. They all helped me out. Then, I moved to New Mexico and played with Scott Derr from Monoshock as a duo and we called ourselves, Hand of God, but we only played one gig when some band let us borrow their instruments before their set. Then, I moved to Philadelphia and Tom Lax from Siltbreeze and Jack Rose shaped a lot for me. It wasn’t until 2000, back in Ohio, that I started my first proper band, The Black Swans, with Noel Sayre, who passed in 2008. The Black Swans made 5 albums, toured a ton, all mostly DIY records on micro-labels. We got a lot of great reviews, most of which don’t exist on the Internet anymore, scrubbed out, like most underground music history between the early 2000s to the advent of streaming. Around 2007, I co-produced the final recordings of Larry Jon Wilson, with Jeb Loy Nichols. Larry Jon was in Heartworn Highways with Townes and made some great records in the 70’s. That led to working with Ed Askew on his album, For the World, with Marc Ribot, Mary Lattimore, Eve Searls, and Sharon Van Etten, plus some other musicians from the Black Swans and Ed’s band. Around 2012, the Black Swans were winding it down. I felt like we expired artistically and we were all getting older with different priorities. The last album we made was called Occasion for Song, songs about my dealing with the death of Noel.
Felt like proper closure, and our contract was up with the label we were on. We ended a tour in Spain, and I flew to England to stay with a friend for a few months. I wrote Understanding Land there, and used the demos for the final album. You can hear my friend’s parakeet, Mittens, on a few songs in the background. I sent the demos around and everyone cut to that - Will Oldham, Kelley Deal, Sven Kahns, Andy Hamill, and Spooner Oldham, who I think was the only person who used a studio. It was a super cheap record to make because so many people did it for free, or close to free, to help me get my solo thing going. I like how raw it is, but also how musical it sounds. Stuart Sikes mixed it and did a great job, especially considering how crude it all was. I can’t say there was much of a vision, except I knew I wanted to express both the end and the beginning of something in a way that was more lyrically metaphorical, less graphic than my writing with the Black Swans. It was a self-release for the same reason many of my albums are a self-release- I sort of weigh the pros and cons of working with a label and if I can meet their expectations or if the trade-offs seem fair for what I want. If you’re not a musician that is very clearly earning income for a label, you’ll never be their priority; no one can afford that. And I lose people money every time I look at my guitar. And sometimes doing things yourself is the healthiest way to keep moving forward, especially if you want to continue making music. I’ve had a lot of windows of opportunity that I’m glad I didn’t pass through, few to none that I regret not passing through.
Would you mind walking me through some of the songs that are featured on the album? In 2018 you released your anticipated follow up “Burning Daylight”. Tell me about writing and recording this record and how you wanted to approach this material compared to your previous work. How did the deal with Super Secret Records come about?
In between Understanding Land and Burning Daylight is Time the Teacher, which Jeb Loy Nichols made from my songs with Benedic Lamdin in the UK. They took my songs out of my acoustic guitar world, and framed them with jazz and gospel musicians. It’s probably my best solo record and the one people seem to keep finding. They released it on Benedic’s label. The playing is really beautiful and the sensibilities are very non-American, so it has a nice contrast to my voice and the imagery. Burning Daylight resulted from a dude in Austin seeing one of my gigs. He was sending bands and musicians out to Sonic Ranch to make records for his label. One of those situations where someone has too much money and then they don’t. But because there was a budget, I hired my friends and one of my favorite drummers, Gary Mallaber, who played on Moondance, a couple Springsteen records, the best Steve Miller hits, the first Gene Clark, some Warren Zevon and Bonnie Raitt songs. I’ve always loved his drumming, the groove, the personality, the way it moved songs. So we cut that record live with him in a couple days. Whereas Time the Teacher was more meditative and different spin on the identifiers of cosmic music, Burning Daylight was more of an homage to the late 70’s pop-rock singer-songwriters that wrote these personal songs with socio-politics in the periphery, sort of driving character and voice.
Then, The Unlikely Optimist and His Domestic Adventures, which I was working on whenever I had extra time and money during these years. Augie Meyers is on that one. I released it digitally during the pandemic and Worried Songs label in the UK did the vinyl a year or so later- a great label over there that I produced two Ralph White records for and the final Bob Martin album, Seabrook. I also produced some albums for Chris Gantry for Drag City, Will Beeley’s Highways and Heart Attacks for Tompkins Square and some releases for Numero Group during this time. I should probably point out that I don’t make any money from any records I make. I actually work in social services about 40-55 hours a week. With my records, after I make an album, I always want the next one to sound different, since I’m documenting and capturing some next chapter. The downside of making solo records is that you aren’t spending a lot of time with your friends rehearsing and laughing and dreaming together. I miss that part of being in a band. The upside is that there’s less parameters and more ways to explore identities, which is important to me both in words and music. I mostly hate genre. So, in that way, I write and record all my records the same.
I’d like to jump ahead a bit to your most recent album “New Shadows” that comes out in September. Tell me about writing and recording this album as well as working with folks such as Steve Berlin, Rosali and David Hidalgo. How did the deal with BWATUE come about?
I wrote it on an acoustic guitar, and then wanted to flip it into a different world. So, Don Cento, a great producer/arranger/musician, in Austin and I replaced my guitar with his synths cut to a Linn drum machine. I wanted to evoke that 80’s emptiness, a decade of music I love in the way it feels connected to Motown and vintage pop music but also this minimalist version of new technology with a lot of space and decay. I like the locked groove of the Linn machine, but also that it has a slight wiggle programmed into it to give it that fake-human thing. I wanted to make a record that sounded lonely and dark, but felt almost fun. And evoke my favorite musicians that I had been listening to who are extremely American in their sensibilities but who don’t fall into that tired and dumbed-down version of what people call Americana or roots music. Aside from Brian Harnetty, the composer, they were all strangers, which was the other thing I wanted. I wanted to trust strangers. I can’t say I ever want to make a whole record where I don’t interact in-person with my collaborators, because this wasn’t a fun record to make in many ways, and having fun is a pretty important thing to me, but none of these amazing people would have been able to do it in person. It just wouldn’t be feasible. I love Rosali’s music - she’s one of my favorite singers, totally classic and timeless without sounding redundant, or already received.
She sings really fearlessly, lots of pathos that isn’t clearly defined. Los Lobos is one of my favorite bands since I first heard them in 7th grade in LaBamba and, then, the next summer in Colors, two soundtrack cassettes I listened to over and over. And Kiko is one of the best records ever made, love the Latin Playboys. Don Cento had worked with Berlin on some other record, so he made that call. Hidalgo was through my friend, Joe Trevino, who recorded my vocals, and also through Max Baca from Los Texmaniacs. Hidalgo is probably one of my favorite guitar players of all time. I asked him to use the Strat that Garcia gavehim, but he ignored me on that one- fair enough. James Brandon Lewis plays tenor sax on one song, someone whose music is as deep as you’re going to find. Again, lots of people helped me out here. And, Bwatue means “canoe” in Lingala. It’s the name of a Phil Ochs’ song he co-wrote with two African musicians; it’s the 45 he recorded in Kenya in the 70’s. I used that label name for a Black Swans release in 2006, and now resurrected it for New Shadows. Cory from 3 Lobed is helping me release this album, and we’re using Bwatue as the name of the imprint. I signed myself!
Anything going on this spring/summer? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
Oh man, I had done some touring with the Bill Callahan Band back in November, felt on top of the world, and then when I got home at my yearly physical, I found out I had a heart murmur. That was the last time I’ve had fun because, fast forward a bit, and I had open-heart surgery in early June and I’m still recovering from it. For the last 6 months, health concerns have dominated my headspace and day planner. I canceled some summer touring plans a while ago, and I’ve been off work for recovery, so I doubt I’ll be able to take more time off in the fall to do many gigs around the album’s release. I play all these songs solo acoustic; I don’t go out with a synth and drum machine and try to replicate them, so maybe I can do some small gigs around Texas once my sternum heals and then people can rub my scar for good luck when they buy a record. I also have a quarterly Snoozeletter and PO Box info on my website if anyone wants to stay in touch.
