I learned about Patrick Dyer Wolf from a friend who attended Wesleyan with him. Turns out Pat sang in a “man choir” with MGMT boys too (more on that below). I love Pat’s music. Check out one of his newest songs, “Submarines”, and the TOTALLY DIY (iMovie edited) video he made for it:

We also LOVE his song about Tsotumu Yamaguchi, the last surviving double atomic bomb survivor who died in early 2010.

Pat comes to NYC this weekend with Avi Vincour whom he met while hosting open mic nights in San Francisco. The two recorded an LP, Coattails.

What follows are some choice quotations lifted from our email conversations, as well as some of my favorite tracks from PDW’s catalogue.

On living in San Francisco (now that he is in North Carolina):

We [Pat and his girlfriend Mary] decided to go to San Francisco together in the fall after college becuase it was a faraway magical city where we had never been, and we had some family and friends already in place. So it was a manifest destiny with partial safety net type adventure. I’m glad we went. I met some great people out there and had some great experiences. I think it both exceeded and fell short of my expectations, both as a place and as a music scene. It’s a much smaller city than New York, which can be nice, but having grown up in suburban new jersey, sometimes I need to take the subway and/or a drunken cab ride on 1st avenue to get my blood going. It’s beautiful, but it’s dirty. There are great views all over the place. It’s part hippie wonderland and yuppie paradise, and part bad trip. And i think I was expecting the music scene to be very early-1960′s-greenwich-village, and it’s not (not that greenwich village itself was probably what I imagine it to have been). There are indie bands everywhere, and I was hoping for a little more crafty sad bastard introspection. So I was simultaneously over- and underwhelmed.

On open mics in San Francisco:

It’s like cold-calling a lot of the time. Open mics can be a total mixed bag, and they have been for me…. The second open mic I went to was on an invitation from a guy we had seen randomly at a spot right near our apartment, the Bazaar Cafe. He had just started hosting a showcase/open mic type thing at the Brainwash Cafe in SOMA, which was a laundromat/cafe/restaurant/art gallery/music venue. Turned out we loved each other’s songs and started playing together – that was Avi Vinocur – and I even ended up hosting that open mic for almost a year when he got too busy.

Hosting an open mic is a whole ‘nother side of it. There’s a weird mix of obligation and politeness surrounding the whole thing, even just as a participant. … I really admire great open mic hosts that have honest but supportive things to say all the time, and keep the energy going. Because things can really drag. One of the best open mics in San Francisco, and I think the country, was the Hotel Utah. 60 or 70 people would go at 7:30 every monday and put their name in a hat for a chance to play one song. It was a scene. An institution. And the host at the time, JJ, was great. Many many regulars, and the crowd was very supportive of everyone, but I never really penetrated the scene.O  The first time I went there, the entire night was dedicated to a regular who had just died very young. People sang his songs, and songs he used to play, and I was in tears half the time. It seems like a small aspiration, but at the time I felt like I could ask for no more, were I to be suddenly taken from this earth. It was like something out of a play, real americana.

On collaboration, or as this nerd put it, “Are you a monotheistic or polytheistic creator?”

I have never been great at musical collaboration. I’m working on it. I know what I want my songs to sound like and I don’t have a lot of experience co-writing. Lately I’ve been playing in a 5-piece country rock band and a violin/flute/guitar/upright bass jazz/folk trio, and I feel like I’m getting some long overdue lessons in cooperation. Life lessons. … It’s like working in an office, except there’s way more emotional and visceral attachment to every decision that is made, at least compared to my office experience. I am definitely a monotheistic creator. I was kind of brought up catholic, maybe that has something to do with it. Not that I’ve gone to mass recently or anything. In a social scenario, learning when to stick to your guns and when to sit back, and how to not let yourself boil over when things aren’t going smoothly is the most important skill ever. Patience is what I’m learning. Patience that inspires patience in others. To be more like a New Testament God, rather than old. No offense to the Torah, good stuff in there.

On “Rub Rabbit Run”, the first song of his I ever heard:

“Run Rabbit Run” came right after i read the Updike book. I actually remember not being crazy about the book, but I think it hit close to home in some ways… It was the summer right after college, and I didn’t know what I was doing and couldn’t find a job, and felt like I was useless and took refuge in reading a bunch of books.

Are there any songs in your catalogue that you would describe as impatient, or that were spawned by impatience in some way?

Impatience: totally. Above all I get impatient with myself for failing to coagulate life into the vague notion of what i think it should be. “Lazybones” is about that. Maybe also impatience bordering on complacency. And giving up, and not knowing what to do. “It seems to go”, which is on my myspace and www.nohorsetown.com, is another one. Frustration, also. And i think when you’re impatient and frustrated with yourself, that translates very easily to a group creative situation, and I’m slowly learning that it’s not you, it’s me, (even if it is you.) That goes for most of life too, probably.

On college:

I think going to college was a great broadening for me, in musical taste and knowledge as well as identity. That might sound a little trite, but it’s true, so there. Especially at a funky school like Wesleyan. My actual music classes helped a lot, even though I sometimes have trouble grabbing on to their concrete results. In college I became a Bob Dylan fan, and played classical guitar and steel drums and the javanese gamelan, and sang in a gospel choir, and sang tenor in an 18th century british mass for a senior project, and sang in two a capella groups… I think I came in having been more of a jock in high school (although I was never really comfortable with that) and joined the crew team at Wesleyan and somewhat reluctantly joined a frat, but into sophomore year I shied away from that stuff and realized I was severely limiting myself and I wanted to have more time to be creative.

I acted in a play that my friend Owen Roberts wrote, which staged several simultaneous scenes at a Waffle House. Very postmodern? I loved it. Mary and Owen and another friend, Laura Goldhamer, and I formed a band called The Control Group, which was Owen’s idea — an ironically indieish band. Hipsterlicious. Owen is now the drummer in the band Boy Crisis and Laura is, I think, the mayor of Denver. My friend Hannah, who basically introduced me to Mary, also introduced me to a senior in one of her classes, Daniela Gesundheit (bless you) who was this great folk-ish songstress who had taken a year off to record her first album on a 4-track. I thought that was the most romantic thing I had ever heard. She was also in San Francisco while I was there for a while, and now she lives in Toronto and has her band, called Snowblink, which was born that year at Wesleyan, when I was in a man-choir backing her up. Also in that man choir were Andrew Van Wyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, who were already campus celebrities with their band The Management, which you now may know as MGMT…. I am forever grateful and enlightened and wistful and nostalgic and blessed for all of the people and things I came across there. It’s totally made my life what it is right now in many tangible and intangible ways.

On the song he’s written most quickly:

“Coattails”…. I was visiting Avi in San Francisco this past February to play some shows and finish our record. We already had the name for the album but we were still working the kinks out. Before Avi left for work one morning he said, kind of as a joke, ‘well, if you could write a song about coattails, that would round it out kind of nicely.’ I had the whole thing in about an hour and a half in the morning after he and his girlfriend left. I had a deadline, I had a goal, and I had very few distractions, which was great and very rare, in my creative experience.

On the song that has taken the longest to complete:

I’ve got some songs that I’ve been picking at for years that maybe will never get finished, but of the ones that are finished — I started writing “Mary When I’m Gone” when I was studying in Bologna in ’05 but couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I picked it up again in Fall ’07 when we moved to San Francisco while I was looking for a job and had a lot of time with my thoughts in an empty apartment. Sometimes I can get sick of an idea and then come back to it after a while and it looks lovely. I have trouble throwing things away. I make a lot of piles.

On looking forward / looking back:

I am always looking back. And forward. Which is important to do. But, and I am saying this now, because I’m in a pretty reflective mood, I think it helps to look at the present a lot more. Looking at the past or the future too much stresses me out, and I never get anything done. Just chew your food. Enjoy it. Take your time. Work on your song. Don’t worry about everything else you’ve been meaning to do. Just write that shit down. You’ll get to it, if you have time.

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We’re looking forward to more from Patrick Dyer Wolf, for sure. Stay updated on his life and work here.