Dan Spencer at Bonnaroo 6/14/2024
On a day off in September, Dan Spencer was taking a stroll, minding his own business. When he rounded a corner, he found his face a little too close for comfort to a flying rope. A couple weeks earlier, Spencer — a Smyrna native and Cookeville resident who’s been making a name for himself with songs that blend country, metal and other influences — had been added as an opener to Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion Tour. When he had his near miss, he was witnessing Malone practicing a new hobby.
“He’s really into learning to lasso right now,” Spencer says of the mega star. “He’s not off in a throne room. He’s hanging out. He has got one of those plastic bulls and the crew guys are playing basketball and he is just kind of over to the side lassoing.”
Before getting called up to join the massive tour for Malone’s new country album F-1 Trillion, Spencer and his band were playing their brand of “vampire country” just about anywhere and everywhere they could across the South and beyond. The band — Zach Ramsey on bass, Spencer and Conner Duty on guitar and Ethan Young on drums — spent the back half of September 2023 playing small club shows Spencer booked himself on the road to New York and back. They got busier and busier as the time grew near to release their second full-length album Return to Your Dark Master. In April, there was the Buzz-B-Q festival in a part of Eastern Kentucky with no cell service; right after the release in late May, Spencer & Co. performed at both CMA Fest and Bonnaroo. As the summer progressed, weekenders and festival dates turned into longer and longer stints on the road, followed by a short run opening for Black Pistol Fire. Several planned dates opening for Amigo the Devil got preempted.
“We were all mentally prepared to be home for a few days at least, and got the call on a Friday morning that the band would be on the F-1 Trillion Tour starting that Sunday night in Salt Lake City,” says Spencer. “It was the kind of thing you couldn’t say no to.”
On Saturday, Oct. 19, F-1 Trillion pulls into Nissan Stadium, where Spencer and band will play to thousands of folks before heading to Texas to close out the tour. After that, they’ll be back home in Cookeville for a more intimate performance at Wherehouse Skateshop on Nov. 1. We caught up with Spencer ahead of his near-hometown stadium gig.
Before getting added to the tour, you were brought in to write while Post Malone worked on F-1 Trillion. Talk about that experience a bit.
I was in three different writing sessions for it. And by the way, to date, none of those songs have been used. The first writing session I did, he was in Nashville writing the same week that I was in Nashville recording my latest album [Return to Your Dark Master]. I think it was 10 at night or later, and we were staying at an Airbnb by the studio, and I got a text that said, “Get in an Uber, come to the bar.” And so we went to a bar downtown and it was, like, HARDY and ERNEST and Peyton Manning was there. It may have been an after-party for the CMAs, and I guess once [Malone] had had enough — and I think one, two in the morning — we all got into the cars and went to his studio and it was over by Belmont.Â
I'm like, “Cool, I'll get to hear some of the stuff they've been working on.” And they pull out an idea that's not done, and people just start throwing out lyrics. And before you know it, you're throwing out lyrics and adding to what everyone in the room's doing, and you say something and everyone looks at you and goes: “That's good. That's it. That's the lyric. That's what we're going to use.” And you go, “Holy shit. I think I'm writing a song with Post Malone.”
I came back the next night and worked on two or three different other ones. He came back to town in December and wrote more, and I came to one of those sessions, got to meet and kind of write with Brad Paisley a little bit. I was just like, “Wow, how do I get into this room?” Maybe I can understand getting invited to the bar, but I'm in the room now and I'm telling Brad Paisley, “You should use this word instead of this word,” and he didn't hit me.
Folks describe your music in a few ways. I’ve heard “goth emo country fusion.” I’ve seen and written “vampire country,” which I like — things like that. Does it really matter to you what it's called? How would you describe it and what do you think its roots are?
By the time we describe this, the next album is going to sound totally different. So it's tough. But I mean, I've heard “Alkaline Trio, but country,” which was not too far off for some of the songs on this record. I was telling someone that Judee Sill is my favorite person that's ever played music, and she called her music “country cult baroque.” And the music I play for the most part, especially this last album, is quite different from Judee Sill’s music, but there's some crossover there. My biggest influences as far as songwriting goes, are, for sure, Judee Sill, and Jason Molina, and the band Destroyer is one of my all-time favorite bands. There's a guy named John Grant, who's for some reason not really big in the United States, but he was a giant influence on me lyrically, and he's kind of an underrated person that doesn't get talked about enough.Â
Dan Spencer at Bonnaroo, 6/14/2024
How much of what you’re doing feels like memoir, and how much of it is more traditional Nashville songwriting? You’ve got songs like “If I Decided to Go” on 2022’s Bursting With Country-Fresh Flavor, in which you’re kind of listing off your possessions and asking if anyone would care about them — in a way that feels at least honest, if not personal.
I guess I don't know other people's processes very well, and I don't talk to a lot of other people that write songs in that way, or in a “Nashville songwriter” way. Most of my relationships with other musicians or people in bands are kind of friendships, too, so it just kind of depends on how you’re doing it.Â
But something like “If I Decided to Go,” it’s a kind of song that gets written on a very small feeling. And I think that's what I've tried to be good at, is taking a really fleeting or small or very temporary feeling and putting a whole song to it. I'm not suicidal, and I'm maybe not particularly depressed. I'm not a risk, but if you can feel like that one time for a few minutes, it's worth writing a song about, and that's what I try to do.
What’s the reception been like from Post Malone's crowd?Â
He’s got a full country band — pedal steel, fiddle — and they're doing a lot of country versions of your “Congratulations” and “Circles” and “Rockstar” and all that. It’s really cool to watch, but it's a “big white cowboy boot girl” crowd for sure, which is fine. That's what we're used to in Nashville — maybe not at our shows — but we're used to seeing it. It's kind of funny seeing them in Syracuse, New York, sort of like, “Wow, you guys are everywhere,” but totally a CMA Fest crowd. He’s got a huge, dedicated fan base that we definitely learned a lot about. But I think there's definitely some new people that kind of got more into [Post Malone] on this album that are coming out for sure for country music. They’ve been really good. They've been really receptive to us.Â
You’re from Smyrna and you’ve lived in Cookeville a while now. Tell me about playing music inside and outside Nashville.
I was always going to shows as a kid in Nashville — Rocketown, or long-gone places like Little Hamilton or the first Drkmttr or The Owl Farm, just going to all ages shows here and there and seeing hardcore bands. But I was totally shy and didn't make friends at all. I just never made friends that whole time in the hardcore scene. I had friends I went to high school with who would come to stuff, but I would never go into shows and make friends. It always felt like this big, impenetrable thing — like, the music scene, and everything that came with it. It was always traveling to the big city, which back in the day took 20 minutes from Smyrna to Nashville, and it was always dipping in and out of it.
I mean, at least a handful of the songs on Bursting were kind of direct hits at Nashville, and what it's become, and who's there doing stuff and why I think they ought to kick rocks. I was just never, even in [my earlier days of playing music], I was never looked at or accepted by the people who were making music. I didn't move out of Nashville because I was mad at Nashville, but I definitely claim Cookeville over Nashville because no one gave a shit from there anyway.Â
One of the more well-known things about you is that you were in mortuary school. Is there anything from that experience that you’ve taken with you into music?
On the funeral director side, outside of the embalming and all that stuff, it's essentially a party planner. You have to organize food, flowers, police [escorts], grave liners, the monument company. It’s a lot of organizing with other businesses how we're going to make this all work, and work Saturday at 10 a.m. If you've tour-managed yourself, there's a lot of crossover skills you can take over into planning a funeral.
It probably influenced songwriting the most in that I was hearing a lot of old people talk a lot, and the crazy idioms or just things you've never heard, especially working in Cookeville. It’s a little more of a country crowd, and so you're just hearing kind of phrases, like real country stuff, where you’re wondering if you’ve ever heard anyone describe something this way.
That's my big advice to anyone writing songs, is just to hang out with old people. You're going to hear something described in the way you've never heard it. Hang out at Hardee’s. You’ll hear the coolest song names you’d never come up with on your own.
What are your plans for when this tour is over?
I have been booking myself shows for several years and I still — even though obviously things are insane right now, and I just played Fenway Park and we're going to play Nissan — we know already we’re going to be in Whitesburg again, and Charleston, West Virginia … Eastern Kentucky and all of those places. I love it in those places, since I was kind of burned, so to speak, by Nashville and its scene. And I found amazing scenes of great people doing super cool things in really small towns. As long as I am able to, I will, and I wouldn't enjoy myself if I wasn't able to play in places like Whitesburg, or Murray, Kentucky, or wherever folks have welcomed me. I have the most fun doing that and made some of the best friends ever doing that.
