Dr. Dog Embrace the Present Moment

When Dr. Dog announced their final tour back in 2021, they made things clear: The band was not breaking up. But you couldn’t blame fans for speculating. Over their two decades on the road, Dr. Dog had become a reliable institution, consistently offering one of the best live shows in indie rock—with diverse setlists that pulled from every corner of their large catalog, helping them grow a fanbase that was more likely to read Jambase than Pitchfork. If the band was no longer playing live, it seemed, they were effectively calling it quits.

In reality, the band was simply responding to how much life had changed since they’d set out on their first tour during the Toothbrush days. “When we started, home was wherever we were,” guitarist and co-songwriter Scott McMicken said after the announcement. “People’s idea of their home means something so different now than it did 20 years ago.” The decision was also an effort to avoid the uninspired sleepwalking they’d seen in middle-aged bands. “It’s a trope,” bassist and co-songwriter Toby Leaman tells me over the phone. “A band that’s been together for a million years just doing the thing because… what else can they do?”

It didn’t matter that the band was tighter than ever, or that they were still attracting new fans (thanks in part to the unexpected success of “Where’d All The Time Go,” a song from 2010’s Shame, Shame that exploded on TikTok and led to the band’s first Platinum record). They knew it was the right time to explore their lives outside of the band. Eventually, there’d be another record, though no one could say when it would exactly arrive.

Most Popular

That record, a fittingly self-titled album out July 19th, is the band’s best in over a decade. Technically speaking, the band never broke up, but Dr. Dog is very much a reunion album, featuring a rejuvenated band rediscovering their gifts—and one another—far away from the expectations of the larger world. Getting to that place, though, wasn’t easy. “There was just a need to punch through some brick walls,” McMicken says.

Even before the band announced its final tour, McMicken could sense that things were changing. It began with a request from Big Thief, whom McMicken had known since their early days in New York. The band was seeking a low-key environment to round out the sessions for what would become Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, and McMicken’s homey abode in the desert of Tucson, Arizona seemed ideal for the record’s country-tinged tracks. McMicken was operating with a humble set-up—mostly an analog 8-track in his spare bedroom, something he worried would not be suitable for one of the buzziest bands in indie rock.

“At first, I was considering buying all this new gear or borrowing all this gear and then slowly I realized: No, they’re coming here because it’s like this. If they want to go to the nicest studio in the world with the most famous producer ever, that’s on the table,” he says. “That was when I realized what it was I could offer. And my offer was more intangible than technological. We’re gonna hang out, we’re gonna have some fires, we’re gonna eat good.”

McMicken set up eight mics and recorded the band playing live, at one point tracking 13 songs in a single day. It wasn’t the band’s productivity that impressed him, though; more than anything, he was amazed by how they approached recording as an improvisational exercise, one that embraced imperfection and chance. “By viewing the process in that earnest and honest and present way, you essentially X out of so many factors that are so often there when recording,” he says. It was a revelation for McMicken, who’d grown to view recording as an arduous task filled with endless takes and revisions. “In that void where all those factors were is a new kind of intimacy, responsibility, and gutsiness that I think is more important to soulful, honest music,” he concludes.

After Dr. Dog concluded their final tour, Leaman began experiencing his own revelations, thanks to the abundance of time that getting off the road afforded him. “The time in-between always felt like prep time, down time. But then, to just have nothing,” he laughs at himself, remembering the feeling. “‘We have nothing coming up? You sure about that?’” He began working on a solo record, Military Applications, in his own basement studio, tinkering with synths and sounds that might not fit so naturally on a Dr. Dog record—relishing the fact that he controlled every aspect of the recording. He played a number of solo shows with just a guitar and a drum machine, mostly to see if he could pull it off in the first place. But, despite the satisfaction the work gave him, he began feeling burnt out. Total artistic control meant there was always something he could be working on. With his kids in school and his wife at work, the empty house began to gnaw at him.

“It was literally driving me crazy,” Leaman says. “I ended up getting a job just to stay sane.” Rather than working in a studio, he picked up a gig doing stone masonry or, as he puts it, “hammer and chisel and busting rocks.” On the day we spoke, the team had just finished a dry-stacked wall they’d been building for three months. “Massive,” Leaman tells me, beaming. “It rules.” Despite the title change, Leaman still viewed himself, first and foremost, as a musician. “I mean, Scott and I, since we were kids, that’s how we thought of ourselves,” he says. “Whatever is happening now definitely feels like a segue.”

McMicken wasn’t seeking a day job, but he too felt things changing. For Shabang, his first record billed as Scott McMicken and THE EVER-EXPANDING, he wanted to lean into what he’d learned from those Big Thief sessions. So, he assembled a dozen musicians in Nick Kinsey’s Hudson Valley farm studio without much of a plan; they improvised, experimented and chased whims. It was a dream for McMicken, but by the third day he found himself wandering Kinsey’s cowfields, sobbing uncontrollably. “I knew I was having a great time, I knew I wasn’t in a crisis mode,” he says. “Once it all came together for me, emotionally I realized it was because I was being shown so much love and support standing in this room of strangers.”

Dr. Dog hadn’t broken up, but now that he’d had time away, McMicken realized things hadn’t been perfect. For years, the band was powered by McMicken and Leaman’s distinctions: McMicken was the poppy weirdo, his high voice a mix of Brian Wilson and R. Stevie Moore, while Leaman was the traditionalist, with a voice that was part-crooner and part-preacher, like a Northeastern Levon Helm. Their best records—bombastic, melodic and towering collections that synthesized five decades of American music—spanned the gap between the two. In the last decade, though, there was less harmony. “We’ve sort of been drifting apart in the way we prefer to work,” Leaman explains.

McMicken was interested in every aspect of the recording process, down to the minutiae of mixing, while Leaman wrote for the road, tending toward songs that would play well in front of a crowd. It’s a dynamic that was reflected in the work, with the later records like Abandoned Mansion and Critical Equation often sounding like a band being pulled in two different directions. There weren’t backstage fistfights or onstage meltdowns, no frivolous lawsuits or salacious affairs. This wasn’t the Kinks or Oasis. In the context of rock history, the tension was small; in the context of a friendship, it was enormous. “I felt so far from [Leaman], in terms of understanding what our shared universe is,” McMicken tells me. “There’s a lot of pain in that.”

As with all friendships, history matters. McMicken and Leaman began playing music together in middle school; by college, they’d formed Dr. Dog as a lo-fi outfit steeped in secret handshakes and inside jokes. If making music with someone is an intimate act, then doing it for the majority of your life is like marrying your high school sweetheart. When I ask Leaman how his relationship with McMicken has changed over the years, he has a different analogy: “That’s kind of a big question,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s like, ‘Well, how’s your relationship with your mom changed?’”

McMicken was eager to work on a new Dr. Dog record, but he knew that doing it in the model of Big Thief or Shabang—open, honest and accepting—would necessitate clearing the air. In the past, the two childhood friends addressed problems just enough to get them back on stage. With touring in the rearview, they now had the opportunity to go deeper, sitting in discomfort rather than seeking out quick resolutions—a process McMicken calls “beautiful and challenging.” Leaman never doubted they’d work through their differences. “We’ve been doing it too long,” he says. “We love each other too much. We trust each other too much.”

Sessions for Dr. Dog began at Leaman’s uncle’s cabin in Forksville, a town in Northeastern Pennsylvania with a population of 110. The nearby Worlds End State Park is both the town’s biggest tourist attraction and an indication of just how remote the area feels. It was the first time since the final tour that the band had been in the same place, infusing the sessions with a buzzing excitement, like college friends reuniting for a mountain weekend. McMicken arranged his studio gear through the cabin, opened all the doors and captured the band playing live in the room together. “We weren’t really trying to do anything other than see each other and have a good time with a bunch of songs that we love,” Leaman says.

Following the week in Forksville, the band worked on overdubs and slight alterations at home and in the band’s studio outside of Philadelphia, but it’s those initial sessions at the cabin that define Dr. Dog. McMicken’s insistence on presence and immediacy bring the band back to the sound of their aughts records, especially 2008’s high-water mark Fate. (Fittingly, Kyle Pulley, who worked on that album, is back for Dr. Dog as an engineer, while “Fat Dog,” a setlist staple from that era, finally gets a proper studio treatment.)

Despite its sound, the album isn’t a nostalgic retread of the past. Like a lot of young bands, Dr. Dog’s early years were filled with songs about love; Dr. Dog, though, doesn’t deal with infatuation or heartbreak—it’s about the much more complicated love that arrives later, in adulthood, after life has done its worst. It’s about appreciating the people who are still there and the people who have always been. There are songs about devotion (the bouncy “Can’t Be Wrong,” featuring a Matthew E. White-directed choir), about communion (the redemptive sing-a-long “Lost Ones”) and about the overwhelming power of those things (the stunning “Still Can’t Believe”). “If this ain’t love,” McMicken sings, as a horn section swells behind him, “then love ain’t real.”

Ironically, the record’s most poignant song isn’t sung by McMicken or Leaman. “Tell Your Friends,” the album’s centerpiece, brings drummer Eric Slick out from behind the kit for a quiet ode about emotional honesty. It’s a song that feels timeless and, considering the context of Dr. Dog, rather timely. “All of the things that felt right didn’t happen overnight,” Slick sings. At the start of “Love Struck,” the album’s final track, you can hear McMicken realize what they’re capturing: “We’ve got it!” he says, just off mic, caught up in the moment. “We’ve got it!”

Dr. Dog Embrace the Present Moment

Technically speaking, the indie rock vets never broke up, but that doesn’t stop their new self-titled album from sounding like a joyful reunion.