Photo by Ryan Andrew Bruce

Dan Hornsby is a songwriter in the story form to the fullest extent. A published novelist with a musical skill for writing hooks around character sketches in a bedroom-pop frame, the Minneapolis artist’s debut album with his band True Green is a thing of a wordsmith’s earworm delight. My Lost Decade hears Green narrating the tales of his main character throughout the course of “his ten-year debauched fugue” in indulgent pleasures, romantic trysts, and failing upward while encountering a oddballs, dirtbags and townies. He and his supporting cast have a natural knack for making the slacker mundane feel like a well-worn comfort hang with old friends who’ve got nowhere else they need to be.

+rcmndedlisten caught up with Dan Hornby over e-mail where he discussed the differences and similarities between writing a novel and writing a song, drawing inspiration from the community around him, Alex G encounters, and what his pen holds next.

+rl: My Lost Decade is your debut album, but you’re no stranger to the release world. Your novel, Sucker, came out last summer to some pretty solid praise, and it’s a satirical read based on capitalistic Silicon Valley vultures. That’s a stark contrast to the characters we meet throughout this album, such as “Midtown Matt” and waiters with Elvis complexes who are more down and out and washed up in hometown vibes. Have you lived in both of these worlds?

Dan Hornsby: I had to do a lot of research for Sucker. I don’t have any experience in tech. But the novel’s (secretly rich) narrator owns a tiny record label, so I was able to smuggle in some music stuff. I’ve spent more time in the “Midtown Matt” / “Comeback Special” world. I wrote the last one while waiting tables at a brunch spot, one of those bougie diners, in Memphis. The Elvis reincarnation thing was one of those happy accidents of writing. It turns out Elvis’s favorite book was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

+rl: Is your creative process equally divided between spending time on your literary work as well as your music, or do you tend to focus on one of those mindsets at a time? 

DH: The novel projects take years (at least two or three) of steady work. Songwriting is usually faster and more intense, but not always. I think working on the books has given me more patience with the music. It’s made me slow down and bring other people into the process. It’s pretty common for the two to overlap. You think a line is for a song and it winds up in a book, or the other way around.

+rl: You’re joined on this album by a range of collaborators including multi-instrumentalist and bandmate Tailer Ransom, Texas songwriter Megan Storie, Big Clown’s Zach Mitchell, and Midlake’s Jesse Chandler. In the latter cases, considering the literary overlap in your narrative style, did you have specific parts plotted out for each of them similar to casting roles?

DH: That’s a cool way of putting it. I’ve seen a lot of people get trapped in this idea of doing everything on their own — the kind of guy who says “Um, I play everything,” which really just means they have a midi keyboard, a drum machine, and a guitar. That’s lonely. It’s more fun to bring in other people. In Memphis I knew a bunch of amazing musicians (like Tailer Ransom, Zach Mitchell, Jesse Davis, Charlie Davis — no relation,) and I played with some other really talented people (John Goddard, who plays bass on the record, Kristin Henry) years before I moved there. My wife, the writer Alice Bolin, sings on “Polycarp” and “Buzzerbeater”. My high school girlfriend Megan Storie sings on “Midtown Matt”, and her boyfriend Jesse Chandler was generous enough to add some killer flute. The record was a sneaky way of cramming people from across my life into one place.

+rl: The album bio namedrops Silver Jews and Guided By Voices as kindred spirit inspos, which is very telling by your lackadaisical songwriting style, but also the lo-fi bedroom pop of Alex G and Elliott Smith can be heard in its ripple effects as well. Who do you think would make for the most interesting conversation about writing if you were stuck with them in a car during a long drive?

DH: I met Alex G once, when he was opening for Speedy Ortiz. I really liked his album DSU but he was still playing smaller venues then. After the set I went up to him to tell him how much I liked his music. He looked at me like one of us was insane so I walked away.

+rl: Has the pen already started being put to paper for what’s coming next from the imagination of Dan Hornsby?

DH: Tailer and I are sketching out some new songs. I’m working on a new novel project about ecoterrorists at sea.

True Green’s My Lost Decade is available now on Spacecase Records.