Interview: Dan Shaw of Landowner On The Band’s New Album ‘Escape the Compound’

Photo by innovancy!

The post-punk archetype can be a fickle one of familiar glum, but Landowner squirm their way out of it with a very anxious energy designed to zap your cortex and nervous system. It’s a kind of minimalist maximalism where instrumentation is lightweight, agile, yet the speed is turned up way past high, and it gets you thinking. Credit that to vocalist Dan Shaw who — alongside guitarists Elliot Hughes and Jeff Gilmartin, bassist Josh, and drummer Josh Daniel — is the embodiment of attempting to cram every intellectualized discourse of our modern day sociopolitical climate into the 12 tracks behind the Holyoke, Massachusetts band’s fourth and best full-length album, Escape the Compound.

+rcmndedlisten virtually connected with Dan Shaw via e-mail to talk about how the album’s darker themes emerged, history informing his songwriting process, aging rock guys, the ’90s, and where to eat and who to listen to while visiting Western Mass’ Five College area.

+rl: To its credit, Escape the Compound is a much more headier dive into political themes than the rest of the lot of post-punk out there angling to deconstruct society right down to its most toxic elements. It’s as if there is this whole overarching epic being shared throughout the listen, and like the album’s title would suggest, the listen’s ultra jittered, pogoing energy is like being player one in a video game, except the villain on the other end of the level is an evil doer in an elected position of power and not some fire breathing Koopa. Do you typically plot out the details of the storyline concept in lyric prior to, during, or after the music is written?

Dan Shaw: After. Usually I write the music first, and then spend a long time wrestling with the lyrics. Sometimes it goes the opposite way, where the lyrics come first and that inspires the music, and that tends to be a much nicer, faster process. But that happens less often.

Landowner’s music, instrumentally, has a concept behind it: abrasively clean, minimalist, aggressively dinky, like “Antelope covering Discharge.” It ends up leaving a lot of space for lyrics, since the lyrics aren’t drowned out by excessive volume or noisy distortion. That gives the opportunity for the lyrics to be noticeably exposed, which is a dynamic I try to take advantage of.

As this last batch of songs started coming together, I noticed a lyrical theme emerging. Unintentionally, about half the songs dealt with cults, reality-denial, or narcissistic behavior in one form or another, and the more I learned about these subjects the more I realized they’re the same dynamic playing out at different scales. I was writing a lot of this material during 2020 and 2021, and needless to say, those themes were in the air in culture and politics. So it felt like worthwhile subject matter to put out there.

Also, this was a case where I had more than an album’s worth of demos to choose from, so at a certain point I took a step back and said, “Let’s focus on these 12 particular songs, which feel like they fit well together.” So that was an opportunity to reinforce the album’s theme, by picking ones that already had something in common.

+rl: The album is also a very Massachusetts album with a track like “Witch Museum” traveling all the way back to colonial times and witch trials to find tangents between the Commonwealth’s dark history and how we’re still experiencing the same conspiracy theories and manipulative behavior out there except worn in khakis, neckties and Chanel dresses rather than black suits and brimmed hats. Would you consider yourself a history connoisseur, or just putting the emphasis on how in order to understand where we are today, one must understand past misdeeds?

I mean, “history” could be seen as “everything in the past,” whether that was four seconds ago or four hundred years ago. It all forms the foundation of the present moment. So to me, being interested in history isn’t something I consciously think about, it just happens naturally. Anywhere you live, you’re surrounded by physical traces of history. So that finds its way into the lyrics.

The song “Witch Museum” is very much a collage of imagery- there isn’t a precise message encoded in the lyrics or anything like that. It’s a classic case of “lyrics for interpretation,” meant to spark off reflections like the ones in your question.

That was actually the last song written for this album. I had the instrumental together, and in the fall of 2021 we got asked to play a couple of shows in Salem and New Bedford Massachusetts. On the way to the Salem show we passed this big spooky sign that literally said “Witch Museum”, and in New Bedford we passed signs for the “Whaling Museum”, so being in those two places within the same short time inspired those lyrics. The other non-history-related lyrics in the song end up having a kind of spin put on them due to their placement alongside the history stuff, since those references instantly bring a unique set of imagery and baggage into the song.

+rl: As someone who grew up in Western Massachusetts right outside of Holyoke where Landowner is from, I’m curious to know how you would describe the poor guy who misses the “Nineties”. In my mind, I’m envisioning some guy who lived in Northampton or Amherst during the era when SPIN dubbed it the next Seattle. “Real” alternative rock music was always an arm’s length away and he thought he was progressively ahead of the curve. And then time caught up to him until it passed him by, he was no longer in style, those screaming riffs stopped coming, and his views were no longer on point. But I could be wrong! How did you envision that character when you wrong that song?

DS: “The poor guy misses the nineties, when things made sense to him” is an anthem for our times. It’s a song that simply had to be written, so I put it out there as my civic duty. I first got the idea for this song about ten years ago, in Seattle where I lived for a few years. I noticed this random aging rock dude who seemed like he was clinging to his last shreds of youth, and I just thought in passing, “Huh, that poor guy looks like he misses the nineties.” He somehow looked like his era had passed him by. There was something almost archetypal about it, and the image really stayed in my mind and so did that phrase. 

When I began actually working on this song for the album, the 2020 presidential election was going on, and it just felt like, in this critical period where we so desperately need forward-thinking action, both candidates’ campaigns were all about “THE PAST!” One was like “It’ll be the Obama era again!” and the other was like “It’ll be the 1950s again!” Everybody was some version or another of “the poor guy misses the nineties.” 

In some ways I would have preferred the song to be “the poor guy misses the 2000s” since that’s the decade I came into adulthood, but “nineties” is obviously way more catchy. Plus there is definitely an aspect of the aging gen X-er, trying to stay edgy, slowly fading from relevance, bewildered by the state of present day culture and discourse. That is actually pretty funny. Sorry Gen X-ers. It will happen to me as well I’m sure — it will probably happen to all of us. There is a poor guy who “misses the nineties” inside all of us.

The more we discussed it in the band, we started to identify that “nineties” really is the best decade to focus on in a song like this. It’s recent enough that a lot of people around us fully experienced it as a foundational era. It was largely pre-internet. There was a pre-9/11 innocence. There’s this illusion that it was a peaceful, prosperous time, the pinnacle of a kind of Eisenhower or Reagan consumerist American dream before the consequences of unsustainable living started reaching the more privileged classes. The nineties is really a prime object of pathetic nostalgia, in a limited world view.

+rl: That being said, what’s rumbling in the Knowledge Corridor right now that excites you as much as your music moves just the same? WMass and Connecticut-based Hardcore punks Restraining Order just dropped a great new album. The Daily Operation is popping off with great food and shows. A certain deadbeat music venue landowner might finally be forced to give his spaces across the Valley a better chance at survival by selling them. What else would you like the rest of the world to know is hidden in the leaves of the 413?

DS: Well you nailed it by mentioning Daily Operation, that’s probably my favorite restaurant, and has become a great spot for excellent occasional shows as well. We just had our record release show there, which was really fun. There always has been and continues to be a great underground local music scene in Western Mass, with shows popping up at all kinds of small and medium sized spots. The Flywheel collective and Students for Alternative Music at UMass have both booked really fun shows for us during the past year.

Our drummer Josh Daniel plays in a couple other bands- Editrix, who we recently did a weekend of shows with, and The Leafies You Gave Me, who are planning to release some new recordings next spring and are also playing a fun Halloween show with us in October. Our bassist Josh Owsley plays in another band called Slant of Light who remind me a little of Lungfish (a favorite of mine), and I definitely recommend checking them out.

Landowner’s Escape the Compound is available now on Born Yesterday Records.