ETC.
Riot.
Twelve months on from the release of last record ‘Dark Comedy Performance Piece of My Life’, Dustin Hayes’ Walter Etc. are back. Words: Rob Mair. Photos: Robert Aaron Nuñez, Morgan Stickney.
I
n an ordinary year, ‘There There’ wouldn’t even be a thing. Coming a little over 12 months since the release of ‘Dark Comedy Performance Piece of My Life’, it’s a mighty swift turn around, even for someone as prolific as Walter Etc.’s Dustin Hayes. But 2020 was far from ordinary, and even though it’s been a bust of a year for touring musicians, the silver lining for Dustin is the fact that he hasn’t had to drag his break-up album around the world to re-live the trauma on stage night after night. ‘Dark Comedy…’ culminates in ‘Thanks For Growing Up With Me’, a five-and-a-half-minute rumination on learning to let go and moving forward as he meets up with his ex for the final time. Filled with searingly honest lines like “And I regret that the whole time we never took off our sunglasses/I wish we had/I wanna know what your eyes look like so bad”, it’s no surprise Dustin calls it the “ultra-personal, sappy record.” “I definitely did not wanna play ‘Thanks For Growing Up With Me’ every night on tour,” laughs Dustin, as we chat over Zoom. “I mean, over time, I’ve grown more comfortable with that record, and a lot of people have reached out to me and said they’ve gone through similar break-ups, which has taken the pressure off – if you can call it pressure. I guess it’s no longer my embarrassing personal jam, but a group of people’s embarrassing jam. “But a lot of the songs on ‘Dark
8 Upset
“THE CAT HAD SNUCK IN AND MEOWED, AND I WAS LIKE, ‘WELL, I GUESS THE CAT IS ON THE ALBUM NOW’” DUSTIN HAYES
Comedy Performance Piece…’ were a couple of years old for me by the time we released the record, and I had a backlog of stuff I’d written, so with the pandemic and not being able to tour, it was like ‘OK, what else are we gonna do? Well, let’s just move forward with the next album’. With a flag planted in the ground, it has meant Dustin was able to put this global inertia to good use and move on to ‘There There’, teaming up with collaborators Kris Schobert, Jake Lee and Milk Flud – the same group that performed on 2014’s fan-favourite ‘Well Soon’ (released under the name Walter Mitty And His Makeshift Orchestra). Since then, Dustin has worked with an array of friends and collaborators, first on 2017’s ‘Gloom Cruise’ and then last year’s ‘Dark Comedy Performance Piece…’, with each album influenced by the musicians and producers behind the record. ‘Gloom Cruise’ (helmed by Jeff
Rosenstock and released on Lame-O) remains a peerless pastel-hued pop record, sun-kissed and breezy despite the serious content matter, while ‘Dark Comedy Performance Piece…’, produced in collaboration with Modern Baseball’s Ian Farmer, has a more frantic indie-punk edge. ‘There There’, however, is neither of these, but instead a grown-up folk-punk record, heavily percussive and stripped back to the bare bones – think early Bright Eyes played by Jack Johnson. It’s an album for slow and lazy afternoons, where its gentle vibe and unhurried pace has the space to breathe. It owes much to the cast of characters responsible for it and the heavy collaborative process in which it was forged. On ‘Well Soon’, the quartet decamped for a month to Dustin’s house – at the time he was living in Portland, Oregon – with everyone bringing in their own parts. This time, they retreated to a cabin in Big Bear
