MUSIC
The Dollyrots P H OTO : C O U RT E SY I N D E P E N D E N T MUSIC MEDIA
Hello, Dollyrots!
The Dollyrots’ new rarities album, Down the Rabbit Hole, wasn’t inspired by the pandemic — it was caused by it BY B R I A N BA K E R
W
hen the husband-and-wife duo Luis Cabezas and Kelly Ogden, aka the Punk Rock band The Dollyrots, began working on the follow-up to their 2019 album Daydream Explosion, they came to a rather startling conclusion: They didn’t have anything particularly interesting to say. The Dollyrots’ condition has been fairly common among musicians during the COVID-19 pandemic.
26
CITYBEAT.COM |
Confronted with the same environment and housemates (for Ogden and Cabezas, that includes their 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter) for an extended period of time, the well of inspiration goes slightly dry. “COVID kind of murdered our creativity,” Ogden says from her Florida home studio, where she records her daily radio show for SiriusXM. “We kept our kids home for one full year. We were
MARCH 9, 2022 - MARCH 22, 2022
stuck in our four walls with our two tiny kids and me doing my radio show and just kind of losing our minds. At the end of every night, we’d go, ‘Do you want to write some music?’ and most of the time, the answer was, ‘No.’” Late last year, Ogden and Cabezas realized it was going on three years since they’d released an album and, with little new material in the pipeline, their only acceptable option was to do a deep dive in the Dollyrots’ archive and assemble a rarities collection. That kind of project can often be time-consuming and frustrating, considering the physical act of locating songs and creating a solid album out of relatively disparate material recorded at different times. Cabezas’ logic for the rarities project was that the band has been around for two decades and had more than enough music — especially considering the B-sides from Daydream Explosion, which they released on musician Steven Van Zandt’s Wicked Cool
Records (Ogden’s radio show is also on Van Zandt’s SiriusXM channel, Underground Garage). But the duo was almost immediately confronted with improbabilities stacked on impossibilities. “That was on a Thursday,” Ogden says. “Luis called Wicked Cool Records, and Dennis (Mortensen), who we work with over there, said, ‘Why don’t you put it out with Wicked Cool?’ And Luis was like, ‘Alright, but we really want to have it in time for Christmas. When would we have to turn it in?’ Dennis was like, ‘Let me call you back.’ He called back and said, ‘I’ll need it Tuesday.’” With just days to meet a seemingly unattainable deadline, Ogden and Cabezas hit the ground running. “Fortunately, we have an awesome team that we work with,” Ogden says. “Luis dug through the hard drives very quickly, we picked the songs, he remixed a couple of things that were in
