Dustin Kensrue is notorious for being the frontman for Thrice, but his solo work is to be just as appreciated. Over the years, he has created two different spaces for his talent to flourish and they couldn’t be more different.
Kensrue’s goal for his latest album, Desert Dreaming, was to make an album with a varied palate, and he certainly hit the mark with this rich record. Throughout it, that classic Southern country instrumentation teems along with the sounds of the Southwest and those of the early Hollywood country Western hits, but that’s just the beginning. More than just an appreciation of the desert and the Southwest United States, the album is a reminder that it can be easy to be dismissive of what is going on around you, but it’s important to be living in the present.
Fresh off his tour and already thinking about what’s next, Kensrue sat down with mxdwn to discuss his aspirations, the creative processes for his two projects, the musicians he follows and much more!
mxdwn: Hi, my name is Eve Pierpont, and I’m the editor for mxdwn music feature section. I’m here today with Dustin Kensrue. Hi Dustin.
Dustin Kensrue: Hello. Thanks for having me.
mxdwn: What made you choose Americana as the lane for Desert Dreaming? Who are your inspirations?
DK: Well, this is kind of the third record that’s been in the roughly Americana space for me, but this one’s definitely kind of leaning into some of the more country western stuff. There’s been hints of that before, but never quite this much at once. So, as far as the influences on it, there’s a lot of kind of ’50s and ’60s country stuff that I really dig, so that’s a lot of where it’s pulling the inspiration from, like even the way the tones are set up or the songs are structured. There’s a bit more of a kind of classic vibe to it.
mxdwn: Yeah, definitely. That’s kind of my next question. This album definitely leans into Americana more than your previous albums, even though you can definitely hear tinges of it throughout them. How does your work with Thrice and your solo work influence each other, specifically with this recent album because it is more Americana-leaning?
DK: Yeah. I think, I don’t know that they influence each other as much as they’re just very different outlets for a creative kind of space for me. So, I’m constantly kind of coming up with new ideas, just random bits and pieces of songs and melodies. Usually it’s pretty quick to see which one, they kind of self-sort. So, a lot of the Thrice songs, we’ll start with something that’s a bit more instrumental based, here’ll be like a guitar riff or something like that. Whereas the stuff that usually ends up being on the solo stuff is going to be me sitting down, like an acoustic guitar, and playing some chords and singing a melody. There’s some overlap sometimes, certain songs I won’t quite know what to do with them, and I’ll think, you know, they’re going one way, but they can kind of get pushed either way, but usually it’s fairly clear.
mxdwn: Gotcha. Yeah, I was going to ask what are the headspaces like when you’re writing for yourself versus Thrice. Are they similar at all or completely different?
DK: So, once I kind of know where the song’s going, I think the headspace, I try to be really cognizant of what the song is already doing. What I feel like the melody, the feel of the song, is already kind of telling a bit of a story, and so I’m always trying to figure out something that’s going to kind of work with that story, like something else that I’m already thinking about, how is that going to line up with it? Because I don’t want to force it, and I feel like it’s almost as if those two stories are going in harmony, then it makes something more than either could on their own. So what ends up happening with that is when I’m doing the solo stuff, it’s a very different kind of story usually that I’m telling it, and even the way that I’m telling it, the kind of language I’ll use. With Thrice, the stuff can be a bit more, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say poetic, but I guess it’d be easier to say that with the solo stuff, I can use plain language a little more poetically, and so it feels a little more colloquial and that’s tying in with just the way that a lot of Americana songs have been written over time.
mxdwn: Yeah, that makes sense. That’s very interesting. So, how was it to come back to making your solo music after a little bit of a hiatus since your last album, Thoughts That Float on a Different Blood, and then I know there were singles released after that in 2017, but how was it to come back to it?
DK: It’s great. I mean, that was a really fun project, but those were all covers too. I haven’t really even put out a full like record that I wrote since, when was that, 2015? Whenever Carry the Fire came out, so it was almost nine years ago. It’s too long between, and I am realizing that I really need to stay on top of it because I have a strong desire to write these things and get them out to people. I’m already really thinking about the next record and I have a ton of ideas for it already, so I’m going to try to start spacing like Thrice record, solo record, Thrice record, solo record, which I definitely have not been doing. That’s my goal, because I really enjoy doing it. I just got back from the tour, and it was the first time I’ve done the full, like, month-long US tour with the whole band, and it was just a lot of fun. It’s such a different live experience than playing with Thrice. Thrice is a very intense experience, it’s physically, vocally demanding, and it’s really rewarding, but it’s a lot. This is a lot more just like singing some fun songs, and it takes way less out of me and is fun in a very different sense. I want to get out there and do more of that too.
mxdwn: Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, I was going to ask how that tour went because it just ended on the 19th . Also, how is it different than when you perform with Thrice, which you kind of already answered, but if you want to add anything to that.
DK: Yeah, it was a great tour. It was super just chill in a lot of ways. There were only 10 people in the whole touring party, so it was three people playing Brother Bird, they’re great, then The Brevet was playing before me and then also backing with me when I played. Yeah, it was very smooth, great people and a lot of fun.
mxdwn: Awesome. Good. So, Desert Dreaming has an appreciation for like the Southwest and Western parts of the United States and kind of that desert scenery. What made you appreciate those parts so much?
DK: So, I’ve grown up in Southern California, so those are generally the places that I’ve ventured out to the most, you know, grew up going out to the desert that’s close to here, out in kind of Palm Desert, Indio Valley. I also grew up going up to the high desert in parts of Oregon with some family living up there, and then my wife has family out in Utah, so we’ve been going out there a lot over the past 20 years. I think there’s something really uniquely beautiful about the desert and the Southwest specifically. And for me, it was something that I think I lost sight of for a bit, especially when I lived up in Seattle for a little bit, and I was like, man, it’s so green and beautiful here. I kind of just felt like, man, I just came from somewhere that was just brown, and it took coming back to really gain this new appreciation for the beauty of the desert and the Southwest in general. Yeah, so I kind of used that as a layered motif on the record where I’m talking about the actual desert, but also using that as a metaphor for, I think, the way that it’s easy to not be present in the rest of our lives as well, and as a reminder to kind of wake up to that moment of nowness and what’s actually happening in front of you.
mxdwn: Yeah, I get what you mean. I went to school in Boulder, Colorado, and so I would drive to like New Mexico and Arizona and like, even through Nevada and yeah, there is just something about the desert and just that whole, I don’t know, like mystical element almost, but also like not. It definitely has a great draw to it, so I know what you mean. Some songs on this album are more country than others, especially in the instrumental aspects like in “The Heart of Sedona,” “Sage & Lilac” and “Leaving Tonight for Santa Fe.” How do you decide when to incorporate that and when not to?
DK: Yeah, I tried to really have a varied influence in the places I was pulling from to build out the instrumentation for each song. So, there are songs that are a bit more, I mean, it’s hard to summarize in a certain sense because there’s so many different influences that end up creating what is country western music, and a lot of that gets kind of smooshed into one thing, but historically coming from a lot of different places, so there’s Western sounds that I’m kind of pulling from for certain songs, maybe like “Lift Your Eyes,” you’re seeing some of the border music coming in. There’s songs where you’re getting, kind of, some of the Western early Hollywood stuff where there were singing cowboys, things like that. And then there’s some of the songs you’re mentioning, I think pulling a bit more from some of the classic kind of country coming out of the South. For me it was a little bit more of trying to have a varied palate. There’s things I like about all of those, those different sounds. I think it’s easy to, you know, sit down with an acoustic guitar and feel like, okay, well I just build on top of this, like everything might just end up feeling kind of the same, which is not necessarily bad. I feel like my first record is a very simple approach, kind of bulky where it’s just acoustic guitar or bass and drums most of the time. I wanted this to be a bit more lush and built out, so I kind of just followed again, like trying to follow where I feel like the song wants to go and then pushing it that way a little more.
mxdwn: Yeah, totally. It is very lush. That’s a great way to describe it honestly. So, I feel like there’s been a rise in popularity as of late for what I call kind of smooshed into one thing like Americana/alt folk, but also like Appalachian and Oklahoma kind of country music vibe going on. With all the veterans and rising stars, who are some that you would love to collaborate with?
DK: Hmm, that’s a good question. I think for someone that’s rising, I really love her voice, Bella White. It’s really great. There’s a band called The Deslondes from New Orleans that I absolutely love. I think they’re doing really great work. Who else? I’m terrible at thinking of on the fly. Oh, Dean Johnson is great, out of the Pacific Northwest. He has an album that came out not too long ago called Nothing For Me, Please. I really dig that one. There’s a guy I just discovered on this tour named Mike Frazier, and he used to be out of Virginia, now he is also in the Pacific Northwest. There’s just some people out there that are really talented and it always blows my mind that they’re not more well known, which always mystifies me, just the way that certain people can slip through the cracks and be so talented. But yeah, that Mike Frazier, he put out like a ’70s psych-rock record which is not so much my thing, even though it’s really good, but he put out a record called, Another Night, Another Sunrise in 2023 that’s amazing. It sounds kind of like Neil Young. That’s great.
mxdwn: Alright. Nice. I’m definitely going to have to check that out. So, kind of like you were saying, “Lift Your Eyes” has that deeper country western feel, like it could be in a country western movie, you know what I mean?
DK: Mm-Hmm.
mxdwn: How was it to write and record that song and what were the influences behind it?
DK: Yeah, so I think a good touchstone for at least my introduction to a lot of that kind of sound is a, there’s a band called Calexico that I’ve been listening to since I was, I don’t know, probably like 16. They’re always kind of playing with some of those sounds along the border and stuff that was coming from other places in the States and it very much has that instant feeling of like, oh, this is the desert happening. Which is a lot of fun. Yeah, there’s some of those, the rhythms that are there. I really like, there’s a lot of baritone guitar on the record, and that one I think features that well where there’s just kind of this big ringing out of notes that have tremolo on them. It’s definitely a fun thing to do and I think in different ways, on different songs on the record, but especially that one where you’re trying to capture a space with sound, which is, you know, it’s a weird thing and it’s also, I thought about it as I was recording it, there’s some sort of feedback loop that happens because you have a space and someone’s inspired by it and they write something to kind of reflect that space. But then you hear that along with that space and now that influences the way that you actually experience that space. And then you write something so it kind of bounces back and forth to where there are sounds now that we associate with certain, you know, landscapes or things like that. I don’t think you could ever get to just . . . on the first, like if someone had no context for any of that, I don’t think they’d come to it and write that one thing. But you have this shared space where everyone is being influenced by each other and you kind of build a language around the way that you represent the space with sound.
mxdwn: Yeah, that’s so true. That’s a really good way of putting it. How was it working with Cat Clyde on “Death Valley Honeymoon?”
DK: It was great. Cat’s awesome. I found her music because I was searching for someone to sing that song with me, and I wanted to find someone’s voice that I really liked, but also that I felt like had a spirit about them that could do my grandmother justice since it was like kind of singing her parts in that song. And I felt like she had some of that spunk and just vitality that my grandma definitely did. I was really glad that she was able to do it and she was able to come out and do the video with me, which was a lot of fun. Just a lovely human and very talented.
mxdwn: Yeah, definitely. That’s awesome. That video definitely looked fun. It’s really cool. I like it a lot. So, the song “Desert Dreaming” is the last song on the album. Did you write it to be the last song for this album and where did it come from?
DK: So, that song is kind of the only like directly autobiographical song. It’s just kind of a day that my wife and I had on Joshua Tree, so trying to capture the feeling of being able to get away, not only with the person that you love, but in a place that’s gorgeous and not demanding anything of you. That easy kind of laid back engagement with the world. I don’t think that I wrote it to be originally the last song, but once it was finished it very much began to feel like that was the way to close that. That was the way I was closing the shows as well.
mxdwn: Oh, yeah. That’s beautiful. Will there be any other songs released as kind of sequels to the album at all?
DK: I don’t know. There’s some songs that I was obviously developing, because there’s always a million different stages of development, there’s some that I thought might end up on it, but in the end they didn’t feel like they went with the overall vibe of the record. Like the record, it’s not all happy, but it does have a mood to it and the songs were a bit darker. I didn’t want it to feel . . . I don’t know that all the records would ever be like this, but I wanted this record to have a feeling that you could just sit down and it would continue to put you in a similar place the whole time. There’s a chance I’ll release these separately before I do something else. I’m just not quite sure what the next full length will look like. Either there’s some kind of waiting to see if I want to develop those and bring them onto that or do them as something on their own.
mxdwn: Gotcha. Okay. Awesome. Well that’s all the questions I have, but it’s honestly been such a pleasure talking to you. I’m in love with this album and yeah, I definitely cannot wait until whatever the next thing you come out with is. But thank you so much for your time.
DK: Awesome. Thank you for having me.
Photo Credit: Stephen Hoffmeister
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