Taking Chances

Dustin Payseur is back home in New York after a European tour; no shows or recording for a little while at least, but he's keeping himself busy. An impressively prolific writer, he talks like a guy who's got no interest in slowing down. “I've gotta have a lot of things going on to keep my sanity!” he laughs. “I go out a lot when I'm home; a lot of the time it's not my choice, I'm not like, after a tour, 'Oh I can't wait to get back to New York and see a bunch of shows!' That actually sounds horrible. But so many of my friends are in really good bands that tour all the time, so I find myself going out a lot.”

He's also got plenty of projects of his own on the go, most of which, he says, might not appeal to your average Beach Fossils fan: “I think the majority of my fans would hate the other stuff that I do, but that's totally fine. If people liked the music that I was making only at one certain time then that's cool, that's what I was making and what I was challenging myself to do. I have a lot of stuff in the works that I'm excited about, and I'd like people to not be like, 'Oh here's the guy from Beach Fossils making, like, aggressive music', but, 'Here's a guy who's a musician experimenting with other styles'.”

This interest in experimentation won't come as a surprise to anyone who's had more than a cursory listen to Beach Fossils' latest record, Clash The Truth, which was much less dreamy than the band's earlier efforts, disillusionment and anger constantly rippling under the surface. Payseur says this sound is less of a departure than people might think. “I'm always listening to music that's more aggressive. I really love hardcore punk music, and I was even listening to that during earlier Beach Fossils stuff; I just wasn't letting it come through as much because I was recording some stuff like that kind of on the side.”

It's really more like returning to his roots. “I can work on stuff like that much easier than Beach Fossils; it definitely comes more naturally to me but I like the challenge of trying to work stuff into pop songs. That's the fun of Beach Fossils; I just want to see if I can.”

Despite the cohesion of the end product, while writing Clash The Truth, Payseur experimented heavily and wrote without limiting himself to particular sounds.

“I made a playlist of like seventy-five songs; I had enough material for a few more albums. There was a lot of different stuff on there. I wanted to release it as a double LP that was separated by sounds, but looking back I'm glad I didn't do that.”

Writing primarily alone enables Payseur's open approach, for which he's thankful. “I kind of like having the freedom to do everything myself. Right now [my bandmates] are spread all over the country and the only times we really see each other is when we go on tour.”

Despite living in different states, Payseur says this band is the closest knit of all Beach Fossils incarnations. “When we're all in town we definitely hang out every day – we get on really well. It's funny, with my old line-up we'd go on tour and then we wouldn't talk, whereas in this band we'll go on tour and the next day one of them will call me and be like, 'Do you wanna hang out?'”

When it comes to actually playing live, Payseur says seeing these songs translated from what previously only existed in his head is “one of the best feelings. If you've been working on a song and you can get it together and play it with a whole band, it's incredibly different. I hadn't even heard the songs on Clash The Truth live until I'd already recorded the whole album. I didn't even have a whole band yet when we recorded the album – just me and the drummer. So I got a new band together right after that and you're in the practicing stage after that so finally seeing everything live feels really great.

It's not just the preforming that makes Payseur excited about touring; he also loves challenging audiences with the choice of supports. “If I'm on tour I just wanna watch good bands. There are times when one of the best bands on tour is this crazy loud band and I'll be out in the crowd like, 'This band is awesome', and then I'll look on Twitter and people are like, 'This band opening for Beach Fossils sucks!' and I'm like, 'You don't get it'.”