Dehd’s Long, Strange Trip to an Album Overflowing With Life

B ands already spend an inordinate amount of time touring, so when I ask the Chicago indie-rock trio Dehd why they decided to turn the writing sessions for their new album into a road trip, guitarist-singer Jason Balla admits, “It’s a bit masochistic.” 

Nights spent shivering under piles of blankets in the dead-of-winter desert cold in Taos, New Mexico; an avalanche blocking the roads on the way to Bainbridge, Washington; a 15-seat Chevy Express traversing the mountains of Montana in a blizzard, Buck Meek’s “Candle” blasting on repeat, making it out the other side to clear skies only to hit a deer and wind up stranded for in a small town called Forsyth for five days. Then, a quick tour of Ireland and the U.K., before returning to Chicago and the practice space in the hideous Frank Lloyd Wright warehouse (“The bathroom is like a portal to hell,” bassist-singer Emily Kempf says), where Dehd finished doing what they’d been doing all along — writing some of their best songs yet, 14 of which comprise their new album, Poetry, out May 10 via Fat Possum. 

Sitting now in the comparative calm of New York City’s Bryant Park on a cool spring day, a few hours before Dehd play a free show at Rockefeller Center for Record Store Day, Kempf and Balla note that, ridiculous as their road trip was at times, it was free of the rigorous, repetitive travel and scheduling demands of touring. 

“It was romantic and poetic,” Kempf says, “before we knew we were going to name the album Poetry.” 

Dehd has always dabbled in the romantic and the poetic. Musically, they navigate a sweet spot between garage rock, indie pop, girl groups, and post-punk, evoking wall-of-sound merchants from Phil Spector to My Bloody Valentine in the process. Kempf’s and Balla’s lyrics approach matters of the heart and soul with an unvarnished sincerity that’s sweet, silly, and just serious enough. Simmering throughout it all is a DIY spirit that’s been central to Dehd’s identity since Kempf, Balla, and drummer Eric McGrady (who prefers not to do interviews) formed the band after meeting at a house show in Chicago in 2015. But over the past nine years, as their audience has grown and praise has poured in, there’s been a push-and-pull between retaining control and learning to relinquish some of it.

Poetry, which follows 2022’s Blue Skies (their first for Fat Possum), is even more an exercise in trying to let go (at least as much as possible). For the first time, Dehd recorded with an outside producer — their friend Ziyad Asrar, who plays guitar in Chicago indie favorites Whitney — and Kempf, who usually directs the band’s music videos, handed control over to the filmmaker and performer Glamhag, who helmed the glittering, goofy visual for the excellent, bubble-gum-sticky single “Mood Ring.”

All of this was ultimately in service of recapturing something essential about the earliest days of Dehd — “the freshness and joy of making music,” as Balla says. “We were making [Poetry], and it felt like the first year we got in the room, where it was just the ecstasy of making shit … But also with the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of all this time as a band.” 

That said, well, old habits and all that. Balla cops to recently wrestling back control over the band’s merch from the company that usually handles it, leaving his house full of cardboard boxes. 

“Shit got really psycho,” he jokes. “Emily stayed at my house and I was gone for two hours, and when I came back, she’d organized every box because my shit was so crazy.”

“I was like, ‘He’s gonna be so mad,’” Kempf says. “I made a couch out of the boxes.”

“I don’t have any furniture in my house,” Balla says, “so I was sitting on the boxes for a while.” 

“Our van has a bench we can take out, and it was his living room couch. We are lifers in a sick, sad way.” 

THE GREAT DEHD road trip of 2023 was partly necessitated by Kempf’s move to Taos in 2021, after she bought an off-the-grid, ecofriendly home called an Earthship. The band agreed to split writing sessions between Chicago and New Mexico, and then a friend came through with an offer to use his family’s house on Bainbridge Island, just outside of Seattle. The two locales fit Dehd’s criteria — beautiful, interesting, and free — and, as Balla puts it, “I think we all needed some shake-ups anyway. It’s easier to look at your life and reflect on it when you’re removed from your normal surroundings.”

Balla and McGrady decamped for Taos in January, and the band spent 10 days there. Kempf describes her Earthship as a “Hobbit-Star Wars bunker” — white rounded adobe walls, red brick floor, tchotchkes and plants everywhere, and huge greenhouse windows that look out at miles of blue sky, desert, and mountains. She first learned about Earthships in her twenties after watching a documentary, then rediscovered them during a bout of pandemic-era boredom. Her decision to move to Taos was fueled by some prepper tendencies, she admits with a laugh: “Weird shit’s about to happen. None of us are gonna survive the apocalypse, but I just want to feel better about it.” 

But living so far off the grid was appealing for other reasons, too. “I love being outside, I love doing chores, and I grew up riding horses. Now I’m literally a cowgirl in cow country,” she says. Kempf now has a couple of horses, chickens, dogs, and a new baby highland bull calf. Right before she left on this most recent tour, one of her horses got lice: “I’m Googling ‘what to do when bugs all over horse,’” she laughs. “And it’s like, shave their body, lice shampoo, sanitize the whole barn. I had to hire a groundskeeper because I can’t do all this shit when I’m gone.”

The Earthsip is solar powered, so when Dehd was there, they’d play and write songs until the panels needed to recharge. Being made of dirt — and tires filed with dirt — the solid walls absorbed sound like a well-baffled studio space, making for cozy acoustics that encouraged songs like “Alien” and “Dist B,” which feel at once intimate and otherworldly. Kempf’s great talent as a singer is the delightful, surprising malleability of her voice, but here she found herself singing more softly, like she does when writing songs alone. 

Dehd’s songwriting process has always involved a lot of collaborative jamming, and this time, too, they allowed themselves for the first time to drift away from their usual instruments. “Alien” came out of Balla on bass and McGrady on acoustic guitar; “Magician” was Balla on drums and McGrady on bass. “There was a freshness,” Balla says. “And maybe that’s why it felt similar to when we were in a band for the first time, where it was new and we were discovering our voices in relationship with each other.”

After the desert, they headed to the wet, green, mossy Pacific Northwest. They set up in a cabin above a garage, where they could look out at the shifting tides of the Puget Sound and the seals that would hop onto the dock. “We were like teenagers in our parents house,” Kempf says, adding later that she and McGrady would retire each night to rooms down the hall from each other where the two of them would get on the phones and giggle with long-distance crushes. 

Here, they wrote songs like “Necklace” and “Mood Ring.” Balla brought the waves into the lyrics on the latter — “Pull the ocean out to sea, pull your lips now close to me” — while “Mood Ring” still carries the hand claps they captured on the original demo, echoing around the high ceilings of the room above the garage. “There’s some things that just had the fingerprints of the space where we wrote the song,” he says. “It was this beautiful thing where you get the spontaneity of how it feels when we write songs.” 

Dehd ended their odyssey where all odysseys must end: home, Chicago, and the ugly Frank Lloyd Wright warehouse that’s been their practice space since the beginning. They brought with them the live energy from their just-completed tour of the U.K. and Ireland and matched it with the city’s — “there’s stuff happening, there’s life happening,” Balla says. 

“We were back where we grew up, thrived, all the DIY houses, the DIY tours, all of our friends,” says Kempf. “And those are the bangers.” They wrote songs like “Shake,” “Don’t Look Down,” and the exhilarating opener “Dog Days,” with its grab-your-friends-and-scream chorus, “Everyone I know is breaking hearts tonight/Everyone I know is bleeding, but I know we’ll be all right/Everyone I know is breaking hearts tonight/Everyone I know is a broken heart.” 

Every day before they started writing, Balla would play a clip of Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski’s poem, “The Laughing Heart.” “It was like we were about to play the big game, and we had our little prayer circle with Tom Waits,” Kempf recalls.

The YouTube algorithm had gifted Balla the clip, one of those serendipitous moments when the right piece of art finds the right person at the right time. He was going through a breakup, his life was changing, and he was trying to put himself “into the mix rather than circle the wagons and be a recluse or the wounded little puppy.” 

The spirit of the poem — “Take action in your life, know your life, experience the spectrum of pain and joy and everything in between,” Balla puts it — captured everything Dehd had been trying to infuse Poetry with. It ends with the lines:

your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

And then Waits says, with craggy awe, “That’s a beauty, yeah.” 

DEHD SPENT 14 days making Poetry. About three-quarters of the way through, most of the recording was done, the 13-song track list seemed settled, and Balla and Arsar were deep in the production phase — long days in the studio that descended into a cabin-fever kookiness with drum-based Peaky Blinders bits and an imaginary gremlin helper. Balla was crashing with McGrady and remembers coming home one night, exhausted and disoriented, to find the drummer enjoying a beer in the backyard with his roommate. McGrady called over, “Hey Jason … maybe we should … Should we record ‘So Good?’”

“I was like, ‘You’re asking me this now!’” Balla remembers.

Dehd didn’t intend to record “So Good” — a crush song that glows in the dark of despair and uncertainty — but McGrady hadn’t been able to get it out of his head. An auspicious sign. As a drummer, McGrady has always done a lot with a little, using just a floor tom, snare, drum machine, and tambourine. His approach to life is similar, speaking only when he “feels strongly about something,” Balla says, which makes him Dehd’s perfect tie-breaker and gut-checker. 

“Which is some fucking wise-ass Yoda shit,” Kempf says. “How many people are like that?”

The trust Dehd have cultivated over their nine years together runs so deep, and speaking with Balla and Kempf, it’s a reminder how crucial something so extra-musical is to the creative process. Dehd are the sum of its three parts, and those parts all have the freedom to roam — “run wild with our skills,” as Balla puts it. Poetry feeds off that, but it’s also the result of a collective effort to give the band, as an entity, that same kind of space. 

“It’s a rare thing,” Kempf says. “It’s rare to be in a true-love partnership forever, or to have a best friend, or to have a band that works for a long time — not rare in the sense that it never happens, but it’s a rare treasure that should be noticed and fostered for as long as it shall exist. It’s crazy that we’ve been a band for this long and it just sort of feels like it’s been happening, and we’re like, “Well, still here, all right!”