We had an end-of-the-summer chat with the Los Angeles-based artist Dorian Wood. We started with the first song of his first album to the last song of his latest album, and on our journey we touched on many subjects including queer art, elephants, nightmares and racist antique figures. Maybe you haven’t heard of Dorian Wood yet, but you are sure to want to hear his songs and experience the creative process.

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I was reading this interview with you about La Cara Infinita and you mentioned something about dancing to the song, "it's totally alright to dance to the song." I was like "damn right it is alright, I dance to that fucking song."
Totally. I wanted to write a song actually that people could dance to because I love dancing, that is a really wonderful reaction to get out of anybody with your music and I would always play with these other acts in certain shows where their stuff would somehow be more danceable, people would get up and engage in that way and it's like something I was wondering, how can I do that with people? I love performing but how do I get them to dance and I ended up writing La Cara Infinita with that in mind. It actually originally started off as a wedding song for a couple of friends who were getting married and they wanted me to sing a song at their wedding and I started working on it and it was a very slow song but the chord structure is very similar and it was gonna be a duet with Eddika Organista as well. It just somehow did not... The wedding day came around and I got cold feet and I didn't want to do it. It didn't feel well-rounded enough so I just let it gestate for a while. I think something like a year later I ended up repurposing it for the album.

I like how that's the origin of it, though. It can come from anywhere.
Yeah.

I love the fact that it's also a statement. You talk about how it's based on Pasolini's Salo. 
The video, yeah.

But it's an incredibly catchy, lovable song. There's something slightly sinister about making people dance to one of the most harrowing movies ever made. 
Oh, yeah absolutely! That is always an appealing thing to me! You know, in the grand history of music a lot of the songs you end up dancing to, you dance along to the melody and the rhythm but you never dance along to the meaning or if you do you know, you are celebrating it one way or another. I was really interested in telling a specific story that would convey a message that was very close to me which is the importance of feminism and the movement to protect civil rights without being too preachy or heavy handed and I decided to go down on the route of more psychedelic imagery. In the song it's described as this giant face that comes, that is formed in the sky from thousands of naked women who free themselves from a sort of captivity and they form a giant face and bring about the end of the world. That was just an image that popped into my head one day and I was so fascinated by trying to marry that; very much a tale that celebrates freedom with something you can dance along to -- so it's very much a light-hearted song in that respect. It has violent imagery if you understand Spanish but you know in the end, I'm thrilled when people dance along to it and surprisingly enough, like I love dancing along to really long songs, but it's like one of those shortest ones I've ever done. Not that it would ever really get played on mainstream radio. But you know, that is fine.

I'm gonna go to your first album, which is Bolka. You make a declaration. You say, "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dorian Wood!" ("Apple Heart") That's also something I don't really see or hear in pop music. Obviously there's a lot of that hubris, in hip-hop. What is that declaration? Why was that where it was on your first album? What were you declaring exactly?
That song was actually written the day after my ex broke up with me and it was a song that was purged. It was one of the most fluidly composed songs I've ever done. I literally cranked up that song in half hour. Lyrically and melody-wise, it was... It's like when you're having sex and you have a second orgasm that just comes out of nowhere and you're like "God damn it!  I didn't see that coming!" You pat yourself on the back but you're also completely freaked out. It's that blend is what that song is and that statement was coming from where I was just really completely battered... So the song came out and I was just feeling really low and depressed but trying to somehow summon the strength and I couldn't, so I ended up going down the route: “This is how pathetic I am. This is how pathetic I am with my emotions. How freely I laid them out on the table and there's just no hiding how emotionally over-available I am and just pathetic” is really the thing that kept going through my head. "Ladies and gentleman, I give you Dorian Wood--"

In his current state.
"In his sick and sorry ways." I forgot my own lyrics. But anyway. The song is trying to find a villain in this situation but in the end it's just me, the pathetic one who made this choice to be with this person who wasn't going to be by my side and it was almost like "Here I go again, here I go again shooting myself in the foot" and being stupid and being pathetic and that is where that... It's going beyond just these feelings and actually wearing it on my sleeve and putting my name on it and there's no turning back from the self-humiliation.

Let's talk about "O" a little bit. [The video] is almost this perfect content, which is like a perfect combination of music, lyrics and the images. How did that come to be? It's a wonderful statement. It's an absolute statement, in a way.
The statements that are being made in the song is actually almost creating, closing this bridge that was created with that first song Apple Heart, when I made the initial statement.

So there was a statement.
There was a statement. The song itself, the song "O" is living with the fear that what happened with "Apple Heart" would happen again.

Interesting. When I was asking the question I had no idea that they were inextricably linked.
They are. I'm with…I've been with this wonderful man for over five years now and I adore him. Things are going supremely well. He's an incredible light in my life and there is the damaged part of me that will, in one way or another, for probably the rest of my life see a good thing as "Oh, this might be something that I can totally fuck up somehow" or that will just somehow just explode in my face and I'll be like "Well, here I go again!" The song "O" is tying-in with the mythology of the album "Rattle Rattle" where it all takes place on the last day of existence. This is a situation where I have an argument with my spouse, he leaves and the argument is never resolved because the end of the world occurs and that's it. There is no resolution. It's left with that. That is like a nightmare scenario for me.

Ultimate lack of closure.
Ultimate lack of closure. Completely, and that is a nightmare scenario in my head. I put it down in the form of a song. The video itself is actually very much related to him as well.

Is he in the video?
No. He would never. He's behind the scenes. He does not want to be a part of it and I think we are all the better for it as a couple. (Laughs). But he's incredibly nurturing of my creativity, incredibly patient human being and also very accepting of who I am and who I've grown into as a person as a consequence of my creativity and with that is a very deep comfort in my sexuality and fantasies that I have. This was very much a fantasy that I wanted to present visually. Sometimes we look in the mirror and we see ourselves as something that we're not, in an apparent sense to the world and we have fantasies and we do it in the bathroom we do it when we are home alone and...

Or just anywhere in your head, driving around, or anywhere.
Anywhere in your head, you crank up the radio in your car and you...

Morph into somebody else.
Morph into somebody else or a hyper-realized version of yourself. And fantasy I think is so crucial in any age and any existence that we have and that was something very personal to me, the thought of not necessarily doing drag but actually being a woman and what in my mind, would be being a woman. I mean there is absolutely no way as a man I would ever know what that is. But I wanted to present a fantasy that I had of being a glamorized woman like Lana Del Rey or like Beyonce. So those were my instructions to the make-up artists and to the cinematographer: I want to create this wonderland, this total fantasy where this subtle romance unfolds and that's very much a product of being with someone who does not see that as me de-masculating myself in any way or being something he can no longer be around. This is my uniform, this is what I wear, facial hair or whatever. But the video is very much a part of who I am as well and not being afraid to show that side and that's a very empowering thing and I'm always inspired by people who are not afraid to show that aspect of themselves. That kind of stimulation and that kind of inspiration carries onto so many people. I've certainly seen it on the internet like when people do the cosplay or you know just show a side of themselves that they've never shown the world, that's a very generous thing I see. It's healthy.

This will be going back to maybe little bit to "La Cra Infinita" but the Huffington Post article, the headline was "I'm Gay! I'm Angry and I Made a Dirty Music Video!" (Dorian rolls his eyes.) What was that with the eyes?
I regret that line. 

Why? And let me actually finish the question so you can talk about it as a whole: Also there was a Facebook thread I believe when "O" came out and it was about the whole label about being a "queer" artist. You said you were "ok" with that. If you could talk about those two things a little bit and how they relate to each other.
I don't mind identifying as a queer artist. People were asking me, "Well, how do you feel just being reduced to queer artist?" and I don't see that as a reduction. It's a way for a publication to further promote and expand the awareness of their material and it's accurate. I think the statement of "I'm gay, I'm angry and I made a music video" was a way of me attempting to do that but I feel that it's just a statement that perhaps pigeonholes me in a way that I'm not comfortable. I can be queer and I can feel however I want to but to be "I'm gay and I'm angry," well, is like I'm gay and I'm angry...

Did you think it was limiting?
Very limiting. But you know, it was also at the same time was a product of how I felt at the time and that's totally fine as well. I wrote that essay, the first one was an essay on Huffington Post for "La Cara Infinita", with feeling anger and feeling gay (Laughs), that was very much that: You know, perhaps an obvious overstatement of what the article stated. If I could turn back time...

What would it say?
A gazillion things... There wouldn't be any title. (Laughs) I don't think it would need it. 

Just "O".
Yeah exactly. With The Huffington Post article for "O", it said something like "Dorian Wood, Queer Artist."

I do find it interesting that you find the [first] one limiting but you are ok with the "queer artist."
The "queer artist" I'm totally fine with, and the reason is that there's still a lot of awareness that needs to be placed on the queer community that goes beyond lesbian and gay. The term "queer" I think encompasses a lot more and is infinitely more acknowledging of a person's individuality rather than sexuality. Huffington Post did actually ask me, would I be comfortable with that term and I'm like, yes I would. I honestly wasn't expecting it to be that prominently featured in the title of the article but if it means that a search result for "queer" would bring people to that article, I'm fine with that. Labels are labels and people will always have a label, people will always be like "You remind me of this person and that person", that's fine. 

It's probably one of the reasons why we're sitting here right now. 
Exactly. How can I ever see this as a negative? I mean, you can't argue with results. You connect with people. I really enjoyed connecting with you that first time. 

It was great.
It was a wonderful, wonderful thing. I'm always very grateful when anything, anything that pulls you out of your fucking house and gets you out on the street interacting with people in person: That is nothing but a good thing. If it means something like that, as trivial as a label in an article in a sea of articles in this world that really in the end mean very little than human interaction, that is only a positive thing.

Going back to the whole thing you just said about individuality vs. sexuality: If you could elaborate on that a little bit... I thought that was a really eloquent way of putting that. I'm not a part of the queer community but the way you put that--
Oh, well you're missing out! (Laughs) I can't talk to you, then. Fuck! (Laughs)

I've been listening to a lot of John Grant lately and the song Glacier [the video of] which is about the history of gay rights. I put that song on and I didn't even realize it was about that until I saw the video with the archival footage. I thought it was incredibly strong, an immensely relatable song whether you are queer or not and then there's that song called GMF, which is the "greatest motherfucker"...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

...which is fucking hilarious.
It is. I really like what he's communicating. I like John Grant. I honestly don't know how he identifies, like if he identifies as queer or not. For many and certainly for myself the term gay does fall under queer but I think also there's a specific tone that can be applied to "queer" as like me going beyond just being gay and like actually being queer is that, it's more liberating to leave what gender you have sex with in the bedroom but still retain the identity that comes along with that: An identity that has been forged from many, many years of oppression. I feel that queer culture is a response to that. In my experience, when I come across artists who identify as queer there's something very new and fresh and stimulating to what they are presenting that is not present in what can be considered by many to be a gay mainstream culture or a lesbian mainstream culture, even trans. Queer I think still gives you the freedom to fuck whoever you want and be happy with that freedom and own up to that freedom. I have queer friends who sleep with their own gender or who sleep with the opposite gender and are not content with being bi. My friend Margaret Cho identifies as queer.

But she's married to a man?
She's married to a man but I believe that they have an open relationship… But she very much identifies as queer and we talked about this recently and I can definitely see it in her creativity and the way she expresses her views. There's a regard for aspects within what is deemed as gay culture that people who identify as gay many times wouldn't narrow in on their...  It's hard to explain because it's not a very specific thing but it does give you a lot of freedom. To identify as a queer artist I feel is very liberating: Constant source of expanding the possibilities of expression and where you want your views to go to. I think as human beings we are constantly evolving and changing and you know and very, very few of us are the same person we were in our childhood or our adolescence or even in our early 20's. We're constantly changing, who knows, our sexual orientations might change as rapidly as our tastes in music and film. To say like "I'm gay now but I'm straight tomorrow and I'm bi the next day", some people are just content with being queer. It is really just the empowerment of rejoicing in freedom.

Dorian posts these wonderful drawings and paintings with the caption "nite" every night before he goes to bed and I'm a big fan of them. He’s recently done an "art purge" with a "come up with your own price" exhibit, which I bought some of. One of those paintings or drawings is actually on the cover of Rattle, Rattle. Am I right? Was that you?
Yes. On the vinyl.

The artwork is literally on the album. How do you think it's figuratively on the album? How do you think your art informs the music? Or music informs the art? Vice versa. Because I do think they're very compatible. It's dark, but it's humorous and there's something about it, I suppose for lack of a better word, humane, despite the surrealism of it. The drawings that I gravitated [towards]... Tedi that I got: "Nobody loves you Tedi!" I love Tedi!
You got that one!

That type of stuff. How do you think they inform each other?
I don't really know. To me it's like milk and cheese. They come from the same cow but once is cheese and the other is milk and sometimes you'll have them both together and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. To me it's kind of like that. CD for example has a photograph by this artist called Sarah Sitkin and I very much loved her work and I wanted to work visually within her aesthetic. Then sometimes I have this very clear idea that I feel that I can create on my own. So it's just trying to always find ways of purging...

Define purging.
Just...

For you.
For me purging is not climbing up to a clock tower and shooting people. It's the way that I deal with my own issues. Not that I would ever want to do that for the camera but I feel that it's an outlet that when music doesn't, can't communicate what I need to get out of my system, then visually it happens that way and it's strange: Rarely do they both coincide. Sometimes I make milk and other times I make cheese. 

How long does it take you? Do you just start drawing? Have an immediate image of what you want to draw? Or is it mostly improvised?
It's... I'll tell you in the context that it happens. I can't tell you how it happens. Every night before I go to bed… And this is easier when my partner is out of town. When my partner is in town and we're both sleeping in the same bed, which is nine out of ten times... He'll be reading a book and I will be on my side of the bed, doing my version of reading a book or writing a journal entry. I will literally do the illustration right before I go to sleep: I'm already in bed, I literally do it, I photograph it with my phone, I post it on Facebook and I turn out the lights and then go to sleep. It happens exactly like that every night. 

I think that's so cool. The consistency of it, the ritual of it. I find that really cool.
Thank you. Like I said, the entire clock tower thing, it's... I don't go to therapy or anything like that. I'm sure I would greatly benefit from going, but there are thoughts in that, that I have and that people have in general and they come out of people in specific ways and to me this is really a necessity thing, it's really a necessary thing that I need to do to find peace in everyday life. Music doesn't come as fluidly as that, as the individual aspect of it does.

It doesn't put a lot of distance between itself and the observer. If you get it, you get it immediately. If you relate to it, you relate to it immediately. It's not alienating despite what some may think of the content. If that makes sense...
Well, thank you. I never really even... Unlike with music, there's no certain consideration for what the emotional reception would be to that, that I take into account when I'm composing music. With anything visual, that is something completely different and like I said it's all coming from the same cow but it's rarely if ever done with... It's a much, much, much darker thing. To me humor can easily find a home in a darker way of seeing things and it could be as a consequence of that but it's usually... (Said) way too much already but the drawings are from a really, really, really, really, really, really dark place… Which is funny though because some of them, I look back on them and I'm like, some of them are cuddly and cartoonish...

Maybe those are the ones I gravitated towards but in general I do see a pattern and that's the pattern I'm talking about.
Which is interesting because you would think that stuff like that would be more personal and it was for a long time. The visual aspect of what I do is very recent. It's only been like a few years old. It was something that I kept to myself, I'm going to keep this to myself. It always started coming out and I started putting it on Facebook and then the idea of having that "art purge" where I gave everything up at a price that people deemed fit for their own budgets or tastes or whatever. At first I questioned myself, why am I just essentially giving this aspect of my life away and then I'm like, well, if it really were that precious I wouldn't share it with anyone at all and I had been doing it on Facebook for a while. I think a lot of it is also relying on the fact that it's, sorry to come up with all of these analogies but it's, you take a shit and you wipe your ass you hold on to the toilet paper. (All laugh.) If some psycho, present company excluded, wants to come out and buy it from you then your first thought is like: Really? But then you feel like, "this is something that means this to this person.” Based on all this shitty toilet paper I've been putting on Facebook, people seem to be very receptive to it so I'm like, I need money and I can get rid of this stuff, so it's a win-win. It's kind of like that.

What's with you and elephants?
Elephants came from a dream that I had years ago. In the dream, I was in my old apartment in Glassell Park and looked out the window and the sky was filled with these gigantic elephants, larger than our real-life elephants and they were slowly moving and slowly descending. It was the most marvelous and horrifying thing I had ever seen. It was an overcast day in the dream and these elephants were... When I woke up, I immediately thought what if something like that happened? How would society cope with that absurd visual? Would they be intimidated? Would they be afraid? Would they throw all rationale out the window and fucking kill each other? That was my theory, that's what would happen. People would fucking kill each other. Just completely give themselves to debauchery and fornication and murder and just everything that society tells you is a big no-no. All of a sudden, "You know what, fuck it, there are elephants coming down from the sky, FUCK IT!"

Yes!
Fucking kill everything that comes in your way. Fuck, then kill. Slowly this idea started developing in my mind that what if these elephants were these benevolent creatures that pose no harm and the irony being that once society is completely extinct by its own hand, the big irony is that as soon as the elephants touch the ground they collapse and then they die. The ecosystem is completely altered and they can no longer sustain life. Everything is dead. So, everything is dead and that's where the elephants come from. That's where the end of the world is, to me. 

That's why there's that reference in "O" about the end of the world.
With "O", yeah. The lyric about the elephants: That's a song that takes place at the end of the world. People wonder how would you cope with that? What is exactly the end of the world and what does the end of the world mean to different types of people? It could mean losing your job, going through a break-up, the loss of a loved one... These could all be very serious "I'm hitting a wall and this is the end for me" type of things. They are not things to ever be taken lightly but it's exploring and finding the unification and people's perceptions of what the absolute end is with them, that, interestingly enough have very little if anything to do with their own mortality. More like the unbearableness of dealing with an incredible grave situation where you feel completely helpless and powerless and all you can think about it, is, well, the end. This is the end. 

I didn't realize it at first in your music but the more I listen to it I was getting all these religious references. Where did those come from and what is your relationship with religion? Do you have an appreciation for it or do you kind of relate to it in a way that a non-religious person walks into St. Peter's Basilica and just appreciates the artwork for what it is? Is it a fascination with the grandiosity of the religious stories in the Bible, or Old Testament?
There's definitely that. But I'm a Christian. 

You are?
I'm a Christian. What's interesting about that is that the pageantry and the lavishness of a place like St. Peter's is separate from what I believe in because to me spirituality and religion are very, very private, individual matters...

Absolutely.
...That are for one's own betterment. I don't feel like it's in any way beneficial to go throwing your weight around in other people's faces telling them that how you feel and what you believe in is the absolutely truth and the absolutely correctness in life.  Christianity and even the way Catholic Church interprets it, to me is a very different thing than what the Catholic Church as an entity is. That said, there's a very fascinating aspect to the aesthetic of religious figures and there's a constant reconciling of that in what I believe in. That is something that constantly pops up in one way or another in my creativity. Very little of it has to do with me, actually, with my sexual orientation. It's far beyond that. I don't know, there's something really interesting and gaudy...

Interesting and what?
Gaudy. About the way the religion is presented. 

Oh yeah.
There’s also at the same time a lot of really beautiful imagery and beautiful tales and examples that are given that are in the Bible that I think are very important to what I believe in and to my own spiritual betterment but the two still remain very separate and yet I am always happy when they come up in a song. So if that answers your question...

That completely answers my question.
Cameraman, Silas Robinson: I kind of want to hear a little bit of the narrative from the first time you saw [one of these figures] when you were antiqueing to now you have a whole collection.
Now I have a collection of them! Basically when my partner and I first got together, he had this passion for antiqueing that I had close to zero interest and I just never thought there could be anything in an antique store that I could possibly find appealing until the day I found a black figurine, black as in a little black child but done in a very racist manner, there's a sea of these racist figurines that are antiques but are still being circulated and sold, now at like antique malls. I just find it really interesting. 

Cameraman, Silas Robinson: Do you have any guess for why? I would like to think I live in a world where I can't just go out and buy racist figurines and in antique store but that's clearly not true. (Laughs) Do you have a sense for why do those still exist? Why are they so ubiquitous? (Laughs)

(Dorian Laughs) 

Silas: Or is that the beauty? (Laughing)
That is the beauty of it. Taste is taste. I'm in no way racist. I've slept with enough black men to know that I'm not (All laugh). In no way am I patting myself on the back for sleeping with black men. (All laugh) Although trust me, I should! (All laugh) 'Cause that is a long line of black men that I've been with. If anything for endurance purposes. Sidetracked just a little bit, though!

Silas: This shelf is a part of your legacy. (Laughing)
This shelf is part of my legacy. (Laughing) This shows me where I've been: No, not at all. I think there's a very tongue and cheek sense of humor to this, this collection that I have of these incredibly racist figures. (All laugh). There's an inappropriateness that I find humorous. I collect them because it's horrifying, I like things that are, you know, so shamelessly...

Sinan: Subvervise?
Subversive. Shamelessly subversive.