by Niccolo Porcello (@niccoloporcello)
I recently had a chat with Kane Strang, the guitarist and songwriter for the excellent New Zealand band Office Dog. I caught up with him as the band was preparing to play the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, as part of the tour they just wrapped up supporting Nada Surf. I wrote at length here about why I’m really loving what the band is doing, and I wanted to hear more about the genesis of the project and how the band was faring on their first US tour.
Our chat, lightly edited for clarity, is below.
photo credit: Violet Hirst
Post-Trash: Hey, how's it going? Where are you walking?
Kane Strang: Good. How are you? We just dropped our stuff off at the venue in San Francisco, so I’m just walking out onto the street.
PT: Is this your, or the band’s, first time in the U.S.?
KS: I've been once before, probably about six or seven years ago. But, yeah, for us as a band, it's our first time touring, it's been great. To be honest, I never really thought I would come back, for music anyway. Now all of a sudden we're here and playing all these shows. I'm really glad I got to do it again.
PT: Tour has been good?
KS: Yeah, really good. Pretty full on. I think we had eleven sets in eleven days to start with. So, that was pretty intense for us. In New Zealand you can't really play that often. There's only sort of, I don't know, four main centers and people don't really go out on a Monday as much as they seem to here. So it's been a whole different thing. The venues in particular that we've gotten to play so far are just amazing, Webster Hall and places like that. We're feeling pretty lucky.
The US is definitely a little bit of a bear, but there's a lot of people and they will come out for stuff they like. It's been very surreal. I think it's even now, towards the end of the tour, still kind of sinking in that I'm actually here and I'm getting to do this again.
PT: As I was writing about Doggerland, I realized what I’m fascinated by in your songwriting is how much your songs do seem to really be of a place. I haven’t been to New Zealand but I wanted to hear you talk a little bit more about where you’re from - it seems like you have a real connection to where you're from in a way that I think some Americans lack, because the country's much bigger and people move all the time. What is your relationship to where you're from?
KS: Yeah well I mean, to start, my hometown of Dunedin is like… it's a very small, beautiful town, really romantic on the surface. But also, on the other hand, it's very cold and dark a lot of the time and also quite isolated. New Zealand itself is a very isolated place. That brings its own sort of intensity to being there, if that makes any sense. I spent the first twenty years of my life in Dunedin without really leaving too much at all. It’s a town I love a lot and it's also got a huge music history.
It's a place that's really punched above its weight creatively considering how many people are there, and how many great bands have come out of there and are still coming out of there. When I got out of high school, I just kind of plunged into that.
I think during high school, I knew that there was a bit of that going on, but at the same time, I didn't really realize there were kids my age, like, playing gigs already and things like that. I lived over by the sea and didn't really go into the actual town that much, which sounds crazy because it's not a big place, but I was a pretty anxious kid and I just sort of stuck to my little suburb a lot of the time.
The first couple years after high school for me was this amazing, foundational time where I was going to so many gigs and I started sort of handing CDs I’d made out to little cafe or bar owners being like, can I please play here? Then I'd meet more and more people who’d start to come. Sometimes there would be old Dunedin legends hanging around.
I feel very lucky for it because - I know now, it's kind of happening all over the place but - especially in Dunedin, there are a lot of venues shutting down. At that time, I was often playing like three nights a week with my early bands, which now seems like it would be quite hard to do. That town is an intense place, but very beautiful, and I'm definitely glad I grew up there.
PT: Is there an increasing problem of funding in the arts? Or are venues closing more because rent is getting jacked up?
KS: I think it's just really expensive to run a venue all the time. It probably comes in waves, like, there are times where lots of bands were playing Dunedin. Because the town has a bit of musical history, and a few of those bands had, like, cult followings, for a small town we got a lot of really interesting shows.
I remember Stephen Malkmus and stuff would play at little 200 capacity rooms, and they'd do a couple nights. Parquet Courts would come and play. But then, I guess like anywhere, Covid was probably the nail in the coffin for venues that were hanging on by a thread. But still, things pop up, and there has been this new wave of gig spaces that have come about recently down there [in Dunedin] and even in Auckland. There's a big new 400 capacity room, which has been amazing. I think we're getting back slowly.
In particular, I would like to shout out one space that was amazing when I was growing up. It was this all ages space called The Attic run by Daniel Blackhall, who actually does all the Office Dog artwork now. Having something like that, it was just so important.
One of my dreams is to one day open up a similar space back home and create something like that again. Those smaller venues are where the good stuff gets made, right? I wasn't thinking about the outside world at all, you know, I was just thinking about what my friends were doing. I didn't even think I'd get to play in Auckland anytime soon.
I was just so content making music down there and playing to twenty people, cause it just felt so potent at the time. It kind of felt like the center of the world, you know?
PT: Is everyone in the band from Dunedin?
KS: Yeah. I've also been living back there, but Ras [Tolovaa] and Mitch [Innes] are up in Auckland. I'm sure I'll wind up back up there soon, especially when it comes to recording the next album.
PT: I saw in the bio for Doggerland, you guys mentioned that you felt like this was a bit of a transitional release between the first record and what's coming next. I was listening to Doggerland, and I thought it was transitional but also an evolution. It seemed like you were sort of expanding and trying new sounds. Can you talk a little bit about that, and how Doggerland's not an album but it's also not an EP. What was your thinking with this release and how it fits into the band’s larger oeuvre?
KS: The thing with Spiel was that we recorded that before we had ever played a gig.
PT: Oh wow.
KS: Yeah, we were literally just writing for ourselves for a year and a half. Then we just decided, you know, we're ready to record some things. We did it so quickly. With Doggerland, I think it was about showing that we're still, in the grand scheme of things, quite a new band, and the last thing I would want is to be pigeonholed as this grunge throwback kind of thing.
I'm always paranoid about that, about just being put in a box. I guess the idea for me with Doggerland was to, just to try some new things. In particular, a softer side of the band, because Spiel in general is pretty, you know, heavy and dark a lot of the time. I enjoy that a lot, and it's fun to play, but I still also enjoy more songwriter-y songs, if you know what I mean?
For me with Doggerland, that was my thinking. Let's try a bunch of different things and see what works, and not worry too much about how people are going to perceive it, or compare it to Spiel. See what works and what doesn’t. I think people are scared to experiment because it's scary to put yourself out there and release things. I have been trying as I've gotten older to push that voice down and be like: just write music. Just write what you want to write and if things don't work, that's okay. You just keep learning, keep experimenting.
PT: Totally. I think that makes a lot of sense. Obviously a very different band from you all, but a band that is also from somewhat your part of the world, King Gizzard, has built a huge following by seemingly living through that mantra. Every one of their records is pretty different, right?
KS: Yeah, totally.
PT: I think that’s a ton of their appeal to people is that they'll put out a jazz record and then they'll put out a, whatever, like super distorted blown out guitar record.
KS: Exactly. Yeah. We could have easily just done Spiel Two, you know what I mean? But I don't think that's what it's about for us. We're really trying to keep it interesting for ourselves more than anything.
PT: There's a recent wave of post Pavement-y bands that I can hear a little bit of in your music, even though, you know, influence is a nebulous thing. Were you guys listening to anything consciously being like, oh, like we really like this band? Or was it more just... this is how we write music.
KS: Obviously everyone's heard Pavement but, no, not so much. I've never really been someone who's listened to bands and thought okay I'm gonna I'm gonna do that. If anything I've been far more inspired by what was happening very close to me. I had friends who were super into bands like Pavement, but I think maybe a lot of the time those influences were filtered through band mates and flatmates and things like that.
With Office Dog, the main thing for me was learning how to write music in a three piece, and how to write guitar parts and songs that were interesting on their own, essentially. Whenever I've made solo music, I would layer things endlessly and add harmonies and it was just about, the core songs being strong and the core parts being strong.
PT: I think it works really well. It’s really cool when you get a trio that you're not immediately sure how many people are in the band, because you managed to make it sound expansive. I think it’s some of the most interesting stuff in, whatever, indie rock.
KS: Thank you. That's so nice.
PT: How did you guys get in touch with Flying Nun?
KS: Well, I mean, New Zealand's a very small place, and Flying Nun actually released some music of mine years ago. So I've sort of had something to do with them for a long time. But, with Office Dog, we were actually going to self-release it. That was the plan originally. The plan was to put it out ourselves, and I don't know, maybe part of that was because I've worked with labels before, and since then have become fiercely independent.
The last solo thing I did, I just chucked out online. I didn't want to do any press, really, or like, work with proper distributors or anything, or even do an actual pressing, I just wanted to chuck stuff out and move on to the next thing. But maybe it's because I was so proud of Spiel. It was the first time I made something that I wasn't sick of by the end of that process. It still had a freshness for me that the other things I've done never had, and I think thats because we did it quickly. We worked on the songs for a long time, but the actual recording was a matter of days. Because I was feeling so good about it, I felt like it deserved more of a release, and I wanted that physical copy. I reached out to Flying Nun saying I've got this new band, I don't know if you're interested... and they were, and then from there New West got involved in America. I've said this a bunch, but it's really just snowballed into this much larger thing than we ever planned on, which is probably part of the reason why I'm struggling to comprehend that I'm actually standing in San Francisco right now, about to play the Great American Music Hall. Two years ago we were just in a basement with no real, like, goals or ambitions outside of just making good music.
PT: Maybe sort of obvious, but a lot of the time that's how the good stuff gets made, doing it for yourself, right? If it's the music that you pour your vision and yourself into, people respond to it. Part of what drew me to the records is, sonically there are influences that you pull from, but I've rarely encountered records that sound so much like they were like written by someone. I think that's super cool and a remarkable thing.
KS: That's the highest praise for me, because all I'm trying to do is be authentic to who we are as a group and not make music for the sake of being popular or cool or whatever. Its just about dragging the music that is inside of us out in its purest form possible.
PT: When you guys get back you said you're going to be working on a new one at some point?
KS: We did some demos right before we left for a bunch of songs, and there's a few more we need to flesh out, but yeah, essentially the plan is just to go back and go all in on album two, which I’m really excited about. I think we've learned a lot over the last year or so. Both through playing more shows and the recording of those two things we've put out. I’m pretty excited to see what kind of thing we're gonna make next. I think that's summer in New Zealand for us, buckling down and getting on to that next one.
PT: What's been the craziest experience you guys have had on this tour? I've driven around the country a lot and like, I'm from here obviously, and yet every time I do, I see something that I'm like, oh my god.
KS: I mean… the whole thing is crazy to be honest. I know that sounds like a cop out but, I think more than anything it's the little things for us that stick out. We pulled over and got some food somewhere in the middle of like, Montana. We went into this town, it was like a 300 person kind of town. We obviously just stuck out like sore thumbs. Everyone's in cowboy hats and there are photos of all these past patrons all over the wall and the bar lady, like, talked us through who was who and how they were connected to this little bar.
It's moments like that I think I'll remember a lot longer than seeing the Empire State Building or something which is surreal, too. It's walking the streets and hearing people on their phones and how they talk so differently to people back home
PT: They're incredibly loud.
KS: Yeah, exactly. A lot of people in New Zealand are very reserved. Even when it comes to fans here, it's such a different thing. People are so open and just say what they're thinking. I think like, it's sort of ingrained in a lot of New Zealanders to not do that. That sort of stuff is the culture shock that sticks. I've been here about three weeks or something and it feels like I've been here a year. I think I'm going to need some good processing time when we get home.
PT: To be honest, I also sometimes feel like three weeks in this country is a year of my life.
KS: Yeah for sure.
PT: Enjoy the last couple of days of tour, and thank you so much for chatting.
KS: Yeah. It's great talking to you. See ya.