Interview with the Vampire

Singer/songwriter Dan Spencer on genre, humor, and how he went about making a truly weird record

Dan Spencer

Two summers ago Dan Spencer was having a bad time. Newly sober and suffocating in the Tennessee humidity, he stayed indoors, became nocturnal and isolated. Often, Spencer says, he doesn’t know what his songs are about until after they’re finished, but he couldn't help but notice a theme: His lyrics were about caves and hating the sun.  “I was like, what is going on here? So I went and bought Dracula.”

With Stoker in the periphery Spencer wrote Return to Your Dark Master, a concept album about a vampire in the throes of an existential crisis.

The record cover is a black and white photo of Spencer in the woods, overlaid with his logo, his name scrawled inside a pentagram. It looks like the xeroxed liner of an obscure black metal cassette. On opener, “Cult Leader,” Spencer affectionately croons the gothic ode at a funeral-march pace, “I’ll be your cult leader and you will be my offering.” That leads into into the blast beat intro of “Fat Vampire,” a country-shaded pop-punk anthem punctuated by black metal shrieks: “In the afterlife you’ll wonder/Is this all it feels like to be dead?”

The record is, I tell Spencer over the phone, very weird.

He chuckles, and agrees.

Spencer, who lives in Cookeville, Tennessee and grew up outside of Nashville, speaks with subtle drawl and sings in a full, versatile baritone that wouldn’t be out of place on the records his dad favored growing up, the work of lustrous Gospel vocal bands like the Cathedrals, the Gaithers, the Statlers. His mom was a fan of John Denver and Dwight Yoakum, and the latter’s Hillbilly Deluxe spent years in heavy rotation in her car. 

His parents were strict about the content of their son’s media consumption, but he was able to sneak in some “cooler” music via the Christian alternative label Tooth & Nail. Spencer listened to some of their heavier artists — metalcore bands like Underoath and As I Lay Dying — but he was hit harder by art-rock/post-hardcore/spoken-word/screamo collective Mewithoutyou, easily one of the strangest, most eclectic acts to ever bear the uneasy moniker of “Christian rock.” To this day Spencer has seen Mewithoutyou more times than almost any other band. “They led me down a lot of crazy paths,” he says.

This summer Spencer and his band toured  Return to Your Dark Master. I saw them at a bar in downtown Manhattan where the crowd was sparse but enthusiastic. Someone in the audience requested an older song — “Beat Your Ass To Death” — and Spencer politely obliged, launching, acapella, into a melody that sounded like an old hymn. 

“So go ahead and read the Bible son/Read about forgiveness son,” Spencer sang as his bandmates, along with the audience, clapped to keep time. “I never cared much about all those parts/I’m gonna beat your ass to death.”

The appeal of “Beat Your Ass To Death,” from Spencer’s 2022 record Bursting with Country Fresh Flavor,  is its id-driven adolescent clarity. Like many music-obsessed kids relegated to all-ages venues, Spencer was into punk and hardcore and at school hung out with, as he puts it,  “guys in This Is Hell merch.” As the music video makes plain, “Beat Your As To Death” is, despite it’s country-Gospel sound, a nod to that part of his musical development.

But on his own he was listening to Joanna Newsom and Neutral Milk Hotel. He’d go to punk shows with his friends, “then Destroyer puts out a new record and I just have to kind of sit with it and be like, ‘Well I love this and no one else [that I know] does,’” he says with a laugh. “And I will never get to talk about this with anyone.” 

Spencer is Dan’s mother’s maiden name: He was in mortuary school and working at a funeral home when he began releasing music in earnest, and adopted the quasi-alias to avoid alarming the Tennessee state funeral board. Perhaps song titles like “I Like To Worship the Devil” would fly at a Greenwich Village mortuary, he says, “but in the rural south, it's pretty much like working at a church.” 

Spencer maintains that any halfway savvy person would know these songs aren’t meant to be taken seriously. As he put it in one interview, “Not even Watain writes songs called ‘I Like to Worship the Devil.’” But not everyone gets it. “My music [was] suddenly entering my friends parents' periphery. It's like, what is this? Who is this guy you’re touring with?”

Bursting with Country Fresh Flavor is a relatively straight-forward country record, full of wry, agile poetry in the tradition of John Prine and Blaze Foley, two of Spencer’s major songwriting influences. For Return to Your Dark Master, “I was, for sure, pulling a lot from when I was in middle school and early high school, and first spending any sort of actual time on the internet, taking in a big wave of bands entering my sphere,” he says. “It was bits of country but there’s a lot of Alkaline Trio, HIM, ‘Hot Topic goth.’” 

Recorded at what Spencer calls “a very optimistic time for my label,” the experience was relatively lux. “This was the first time I’d gone to a proper studio and lived there for a week and did it that way.” Producer Tate Mercer, an old friend of Spencer and his band, “is really big in the heavier Nashville stuff, alt-rock and pop-punk-ier bands. But he drum techs for Dan + Shay, who are stadium-selling pop-country artists. So he gets that stuff too.”

Because of the oddness of the songs,  “I knew it would have to at least be up to snuff production-wise, for the suits, so to speak,” Spencer adds. But, of course, “the lead single starts with a black metal riff, so how commercial can this possibly be?”

Alex Bienstock, a Brooklyn-based artist, musician, writer and exponent of various obscure philosophies, was also at Spencer’s New York show. He first heard Spencer while back, he says, after Spencer sent him a message asking “if his music was gay,” Bienstock wrote to me via Instagram message. “At the time I said gay a lot but he also may have thought his style back then was more emo than mine.

“I am very post-cringe and don’t really worry about this idea of something being gay compared to, like, cold brutality,” he explained, noting that Spencer “puts himself out there emotionally.”

Emo is, one could argue, an inherently post-cringe genre, rejecting the too-cool posturing of rock ‘n’ roll in favor of potentially embarrassing vulnerability. Spencer’s Spotify bio simply reads “Everybody’s serious but me,” and his pet peeve is, he says, Nashville musicians who claim to worship John Prine but neglect to include humor in their own lyrics.

But, as with any truly funny songwriter, Spencer is, even under the inherently shape-shifting guise of a vampire, quite sincere. Like Dan Bejar of Destroyer — still Spencer’s favorite band — Spencer’s songs are, beneath their byzantine structures and ironic, twisting lyrics, emotionally bare.

His song “Eternal Platitude” is an interesting exploration of that tension: The narrator laments his inability to express his true thoughts and feelings, obscuring them behind jokes. “‘Just kidding’’s my eternal platitude,” Spencer sings, repeating the words “Just kidding” over and over, building into a resounding howl, until it’s unclear which part is the joke.  

Spencer could perhaps be considered a vanguard of post-cringe, an artist unconcerned with a curated personal brand. “Cringe is subjective and people can feel however they want but I think it's liberating to not really care about much in terms of being judged,” Bienstock says. “The term ‘bad ass’ for too long had a form but it's really a content.”

The Return to Your Dark Master tour took the band — including Conner Duty on guitar, Zach Ramsey on bass and Ethan Young on drums — to every kind of venue, from punk bars to festival stages to 200-cap rooms with 50-foot high ceilings where, Spencer says, “five or six people show up, [but they all] bought advanced tickets and are super excited.” Anyone who saw the band could likely tell that they were on to something special.  

After his set, I asked Spencer if I could interview him, before he blew up. “Because I think you’re going to blow up, don’t you?” I asked. He laughed, and shrugged. A few weeks later he and his band were on another tour, opening for Post Malone. 

Post Malone’s most recent release, F-1 Trillion, marks a full-tilt, if not exactly sudden, turn towards pop country. As a younger man, Malone played in hardcore bands and recorded rap tracks in his bedroom. Some have complained that Malone, who first hit it big with his 2015 cloud rap hit “White Iverson,” is cynically leveraging his hip-hop career, abandoning the fans who made him one of the highest-selling artists on earth. But I’d guess that he and his fans — like Spencer, and many other artists who came of age at the dawn of streaming — have a less than dogmatic understanding of genre.

Stadium crowds notwithstanding, Spencer seems committed to staying slightly less than marketable. “I really tried to shut Nashville out,” he says. “It’s partially my own personality, not liking to be in a city, but it feels like it's been useful to not be surrounded by a scene.”

“I try to zone in,” he says, “and do something as true to me as possible.”