interview with Dane terry
When I was in high school, around age eleven or twelve, I came across a podcast called Welcome to Nightvale. This podcast was radio transmissions from another world, a more dangerous and fantastical world. I quickly fell in love with it, especially the homoerotic elements sewn into the background. However, even at a young age I wished for something a little more explicit, a little more adult. It wasn’t until recently that I found what I was looking for. Almost a decade later, when I decided to listen to Welcome to Nightvale again from the start, I heard them make mention of a “gay noir fantasia” called Dreamboy. It intrigued me so I downloaded a few episodes and went off to work, ready to play it in the background. It quickly became clear that work would be in the background and the podcast would become my main focus. I fell in love with the storytelling, the backing soundtrack, the sound design, everything about it was just perfect. I think the story speaks for itself so I won’t spoil it, but I will say when I finished it I was stunned. The amount of life, especially queer life, that was captured in the story was mind boggling. I knew as soon as I heard it I had to have more, so I went and found the instagram of the main voice actor, who just so happened to be one of the co-creators of the podcast. I found his Bandcamp page which contained several phenomenal albums as well two more story-esque pieces and a live performance. Each and every one of these projects warmed my heart. Truly, I was touched by so many of the songs. What struck me the most is how Dane Terry can make mountains out of molehills. The tiniest moments contain the most magic and Dane freezes time, and captures those moments and shares it through his songs, his stories, and his paintings. He is one of the most talented artists I’ve ever come across and it was truly an honor to interview him. Please check his work out, and enjoy the interview, he has some real insightful things to say.
J.S.-Hey! Just real quick as a prelude, would you like to introduce yourself?
D.T.-My name is Dane Terry, which we know. My pronouns are he/him most of the time, although I do not mind they or they/she. Even just a regular old she, I don’t care. I heard someone recently say that they felt uncomfortable dictating how other people talked about them when they weren’t there, since that was the primary function of pronouns. Its like, I don’t know I’m not there, I’m not gonna tell you how to talk about me when I’m not there. That was interesting to me. All that to say, mostly he/him. Whats your name?
J.S.-My name is Julia Scott, she/her. Trans artist, interviewer, etc.
D.T.-Ah okay Julia, there was a slash in your instagram bio so I wasn’t sure which one you preferred.
J.S.-Yeah you know, I like to leave it up to people, if they know me as one name that’s alright. If they know me as another that’s okay too. To start us off I want to do an easy one: how long have you been playing piano for?
D.T.-Gosh. I started in earnest when I was eleven. Yeah eleven or twelve, so almost thirty years. Yeah, cause I just turned forty so I’m gonna say thirty-nine years.
J.S.-I’ve always had an up and down relationship with music that was unaccompanied by a vocalist. Or at least I thought I did, what I really had a problem with was background music. Music that is there to just fill a void and does nothing with its musicality. One of my favorite parts of going through your catalog was the stories you were able to tell. I felt like I was experiencing a whole narrative when I listened to songs like Something For the Ladies or Last Call at Hotel Man. How long have you been so skilled at creating these narratives in your compositions?
D.T.-Well, I’m gonna argue that you brought all that narrative. That’s the nice thing about art, I didn’t have to do any of that. I think I know what you’re asking though. Stravinsky, who is my dude as far as classical music goes, you know like the really square classical composers, he has a famous quote. He was totally an asshole by the way, such an asshole. Somebody asked him something and he said, “Music itself is powerless to express anything at all.” He was basically like fuck you music doesn’t express emotions. I’m actually kind of a firm believer in that, that music doesn’t express anything. Its entirely through juxtaposition that it is given things like emotion and narrative. Also, the cultural context in which music exists does a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to the narrative you experience through the piece. The title for one gives you something, and then from there your brain does a lot of the hard work. But that's the annoying answer. To answer to your question though, I intentionally left a lot of doors for you to go through. That actually came from, ironically enough, playing background music for a living for fifteen years. That’s what I did. And the thing is, when you’re playing background music it has to be beautiful and absolutely unremarkable. If they are paying attention to you, you aren’t doing your job right. They need to be in a good mood but not know why. The music has to seem like its doing something, but really not be doing anything. That is a skill I perfected, cause you know I had to play for basically four hours straight. With Something For the Ladies, that whole record basically, I asked, “What if I did it, but I played just for me?” So I would play background music, but I didn’t have to reel it in, in terms of harmony. At gigs, like when I was playing somebody’s wedding, I couldn’t go off and play weird harmonies, a waltz couldn’t turn into something dreamlike without the crowd noticing that the music just got weird. I would have to bring it back into something I call “Wallpaper Jazz.” Anyway, Something For the Ladies is just me asking, “What if background music went somewhere? What if I let it go anywhere it wanted?” But its still at its heart, or at least it still comes from the world of background music.
J.S.-Where were you doing gigs at?
D.T.-In Columbus, Ohio, where I’m from and where I lived for many years before I moved to New York, I started off playing for art openings, because my dad is a painter. His gallery heard me and hired me when I was just seventeen to play for one of their openings, and things just went on from there. I did gallery openings, people would see me and invite me to their gallery, from there I got wedding gigs, then cocktail hours at hotels, and so on. It was enough so that I never had to look for work, it got me through my college years. I wasn’t trying to make a career out of it, in fact I loathed it and really resented playing background music because I thought of myself as a “Serious Composer.” I thought it was beneath me, but after so long of doing it, it altered my playing style so deeply that it was me. It had become me. Its kinda funny the way that works.
J.S.-You mentioned your dad was a painter, is he where you started getting your love of painting from?
D.T.-Yeah, I grew up with it so it was always around me. I didn’t really start doing it till the last year and a half when I started doing it in earnest. I would do it in little fits and spurts but never anything major until all of the sudden it just started making sense to me and I began to crank them out.
J.S.-Many of your paintings are number one, incredibly graphic, but more importantly incredibly moving. I feel intimacy, and those quiet moments of love and sex that can’t be spoken in words. Have your paintings always carried these themes or is this a new thing?
D.T.-In terms of my paintings, that is definitely new. My dad is a landscape artist. Oh and I just want to say landscapes are much more human than people give them credit for. I was just doing landscapes until the last year and a half when I started doing nudes of people. That tenderness and humanity in sexuality and the moments of intimacy and love has always been a part of my other work. The presence or absence of it and the dynamics of how it comes and goes has always been a part of my storytelling and songs. It was only natural for it to start to come into my painting.
J.S.-When going through your discography, I was happy to hear the original versions of Sugar Neighbors and One More Name in Nightlife, as they were some of my favorites from the Dreamboy soundtrack. Did you always plan to use them in some bigger project later on or did they just fit perfectly?
D.T.-Absolutely not, I did not. When I was making Dreamboy, well it was originally a stage show called Jupiter’s Lifeless Moons, and while I was making that, me and the director of the stage show, and subsequently the podcast as well, Ellie Heyman, we were talking about songs. We decided that since it was a stage show it should have songs and I knew that so I showed her the songs I had written and I think I wrote one new one, but all the other tracks in it were from my last record. A lot of those songs didn’t make it into the podcast and then I was able to write new songs for the podcast because I had the time to do so. I was very clear, if the songs were going to be in the world I wanted to make sure they fit. So the songs that we ended up using for Dreamboy that I had previously written were Sugar Neighbors and One More Name in Nightlife. One More Name in Nightlife was kinda fine because it was just a drag queen song, just a sort of fun weirdo bop, and it was kind of perfect for Diana Greasefire to sing. But, Sugar Neighbors was essential to the characters. The lyrics were vague enough and talk about things that don’t happen in the world but you get away with it cause it’s a pop song and people understand that it’s poetry. Those two were not written for the show though, Sugar Neighbors was actually written after a Grindr hookup. The boy was my neighbor, as it often happens on Grindr, and as he was leaving I was like, “Hey that was fun, and you’re only a couple doors down.” And he says to me, “Yeah we should do it again, we’re neighbors.” And I remark that its like getting a cup of sugar and we both giggle and say that we’re like sugar neighbors. As soon as he left I was like, that’s a great name for a song, so that’s where that originated.
J.S.-When along the lines did the screenplay transition in everyone’s minds to a podcast?
D.T.-Ellie actually was like, well she knew some people from Welcome to Nightvale and she mentioned that they were looking for new shows, because they were starting a network and wanted a slate of shows. She said that they had a huge following and were great people and a podcast would be perfect for my material. I didn’t listen to podcasts so I was skeptical, but she had me listen to Welcome to Nightvale and I thought, “Hey, I would be great at this.” There’s not a lot of people who do it all, I’m an actor, a writer, a composer, and a record producer. So we had meetings and then it was just that easy it just happened. We were good to go with the podcast as soon as the stage show ended.
J.S.-How long did the stage show run for?
D.T.-It ran for about two weeks. It was a part of a theatre festival, the Coil Festival in New York.
J.S.-Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m too familiar with a lot of queer media and art as I am just sort of coming into it myself, but with Dreamboy you captured a lot of the subtle intricacies that I felt when I was presenting myself as a bisexual man with my boyfriend. There was a lot of little things that you were able to capture that made me go “Holy shit, I thought this was just me.” Did you go into this project trying to make a grand queer project or did that just happen because that’s who you are?
D.T.-Well, I think there’s some element of the last one, meaning its very me flavored because it is very me. But, I also tried to have a lot of intentionality in making it sort of my mind and world. And also exactly the thing you just said, I have a hunch that the things we don’t say, like thee weird little things that I experience that we don’t talk about a lot, especially in the realm of sex, are very helpful for people to hear. People are struggling, they want to be close to each other, and they want to have sex with each other, and they want to know how to love each other and be loved, and I think there’s a lot of things people are afraid to talk about. So I wanted to be like, “Let’s talk about little things.” The hookup, well its not really a hookup, but the hookup that Dane and Luke have in the empty house right before they go to the fire in Cora’s house, where Dane gets locked out of his body and stops the hookup, that’s a really common experience, its dissociation. People don’t talk about that. It comes from us not feeling safe in other sexual situations. Queer people deal with it a ton but I think a lot of people deal with that stuff and so I really tried to have moments where it was like, all of the realms of sex, going from “I don’t feel right,” to “Oh my God, I’m so turned on,” and everything in between there was given its time on the stage because it is all important.
J.S.-For me personally, I’m trans, but I didn’t know that until relatively recently. Having sex with my past partners always felt strange, it didn’t feel like it was me. I would think to myself, “What the fuck, why can’t I just be intimate with them?” It felt like something I should be ashamed of. Hearing how Dane and Luke stopped when it happened to them was such a powerful moment for me. I wish I had realized it was that easy
D.T.-Yeah, exactly. The character Dane in the show isn’t me in some regards, but in some ways he is and I wanted him to act a bit like me even though he’s a complete dumbass who doesn’t know what he wants. I would never deal with the hot mess of communication that is Luke, but I also have in the past, so the character of Dane is somewhat a younger version of me. The point being, I still wanted him to model good queer sexual behavior, meaning he respects himself and the other person he’s with out of love, consideration, and kindness, not out of some moral righteousness, but just because we’re two people who don’t want to hurt each other. Cause people generally don’t want to hurt each other. I think we accidentally do it a lot.
J.S.-I remember the song, There Are So Many Colors in the World, Eric Schmalenberger, and listening to that I was reminded heavily of my own experiences with psychedelics, was that based off of real life or just conjecture?
D.T.-Oh man, I’m so glad you didn’t look up the story to that cause God knows its somewhere on the internet, I think, I don’t know if its google-able or not actually. So the story behind that is, I have a friend, a dear friend, named Eric Schmalenberger. This is one of those songs that was not written for the world, but I made a bet I would get it into Dreamboy somehow, and I’m one of these people where if you dare me or bet me I can’t do something I will show you I can. But that song came about during this big gay party that we go to every year in the woods. I walked up to Eric in the dark and my other friends let me know that he was tripping and so I said, “Oh! Is Eric tripping? Well that’s good!” And Eric looked straight at me and was like “I’m very high on acid right now.” So I looked right back and said, “Well Eric, I have a song for you.” So, I got him up and started slow dancing with him and in a very Merry Poppins way I just started singing the song. I didn’t write the whole song on the spot obviously, the chorus I improvised. Everybody cackled and he got a huge acid laugh out of it before I sent him on his way. The next day he let me know that he remembered the song the whole night and I promised him I would make it into a thing in the world, so when I put it in Dreamboy he was very touched and tickled that I did that.
J.S.-I wish I had started listening to Dreamboy while it was coming out. I was already listening to Welcome to Nightvale so I very easily could have, I just never made the time for it. What was the community of people who were there at the start like?
D.T.-It was a lot of Welcome to Nightvale fans, almost exclusively Welcome to Nightvale fans who had made the transition to Dreamboy. The Nightvale people who released it didn’t really advertise it outside of their own feeds, but they had such a big following that that was enough and I got a significant listenership from them. Then slowly, other people started to find it and trickle in from other avenues. I’ve had such limited interactions with the community because its either mitigated by social media, Twitter, the people who comment, or some subreddit or something on Tumblr. Sometimes after shows people would meet me but the people did didn’t always listen to Dreamboy and the ones who did listen didn’t always come to meet me. So, I don’t know exactly what the community was like, but almost all of the talk and chatter was good, it was very positive. And we got fan art immediately.
J.S.-You went on tour with the Welcome to Nightvale crew right?
D.T.-Yeah, several times actually.
J.S.-What was it it like heading out with them?
D.T.-Oh they’re great, I love them. They’re a bunch of fun as people and they’re so fun to be on the road with. I like the podcast, the crowds were incredible because their fans are so committed and loving and they foster an atmosphere of supporting each others and the opening act so it was really just my dream gig. Not to mention it was some of the biggest houses I had ever played, you know they’re way more famous than I am so I got to play places like the fucking London Palladium. It was great, truly a dream come true.
J.S.-So in your story Night Swim you feature one of your earlier songs, Volton Destroyer of Stars. Did the story inspire the song or did the song inspire the story?
D.T.-They came about at the same time. The song came to me, and then I knew I needed a way to introduce people to the world of the song. Meaning like, I knew what the song wanted to be, this sort of love letter to a space villain that was actually a 12 year old kid, and these two kids were having this little boy romance but the only way they could think about was they were space villains rasseling in slow motion under water at a swimming pool. Its a great image but I had to get people there, I had to get them to the swimming pool and answer questions. Why is it night time? Why is it special? Why is it just kids? Why do these kids feel safe enough to do this? Why is this moment the moment that Volton decides to come out? Why are they completely in fantasy world here? The main character has been having weird sexual awakenings and this person does something to him and all the sudden its just them in a pool and they’re playing a game and they’re like, “I guess we’ll play the space villain game,” but really he just wants to touch him. So yeah, they sorta came at the same time. A lot of my songs are like that, where I have the song I want to sing, but I have to make a little five minute musical for that song to be in before the song has the most impact. Volton Destroyer of Stars by itself doesn’t have near the impact as it does with the story. With the story its transcendent. Thats the epitome of musical theatre and a lot of what I do can be looked at as modular musical theatre. There are songs or musical moments or stories that are underscored with music that are all sort of, little pieces, little vignettes like that.
J.S.-Were you a theatre person in high school or college?
D.T.-Yes, but very on the outskirts. In high school I never did theatre per se, but I was friends with all those people and I was friends with all the kids who wanted to be standup comics. I won best actor even though I was never in a play. I was that kid
J.S.-How did you pull that off?
D.T.-I was constantly doing characters and voices and improv just in my life, that’s just the kind of guy I was. A very funny, very animated person. I hosted the talent show one year as an old woman from the Bronx, dressed in drag, and I think that was pretty memorable and people thought that was funny. It really wasn’t fair that I won best actor. The people who acted in every play hated me, and rightfully so. So yeah, I was always that kind of person. When I started doing music, I wanted to be a rockstar, then people told me I was talking too much to be a rockstar and what I was doing was actually musical theatre and I needed to move to New York.
J.S.-Me and Mickey, 1986 was another really fun one, capturing a lot of innocence of being a kid in various ways, up until the end that is. Were you actually at Disney at the time the Challenger exploded?
D.T.-My stock answer to these kinds of questions is almost always, “My stuff is almost always half-true and half-untrue.” It will surprise you which parts are which. Thats all I will say.
J.S.-One of my favorite things about your work is the incredible sound design that permeates through your stories and music. I always feel fully immersed in whatever is going on. Your last album was November of last year I believe, but I don’t think its too soon to ask if you plan on continuing audio art or has painting taken your full focus?
D.T.-Oh no no no, audio is definitely something I’m continuing. I’ve been in the process of a podcast deal for the last little bit, its just Covid sorta interrupted everything. I had just started to consider another podcast and I had an idea and I was shopping it around and I was starting to think, “Well I have a name in podcasting now that Dreamboy has happened, so maybe I can get a deal.” The Nightvale people had stopped putting out other people’s shows, very quietly they were just like we don’t want to be a network, not in a bad way of course, but I kind of figured that. So I was looking possibly for a bigger deal with a bigger company but then Covid happened and I kind of quit pursuing it. I was unsure I was even going to continue doing art, it was a dark time as you remember. In retrospect, I just needed a break. I had been hustling for years and years and years trying to get some sort of career started and it had and was about to take off when Covid happened. I was really, really depressed so it took me a long time to pick myself back up and get back on the horse but I did it. So there’s a podcast deal for a new podcast that hopefully will happen soonish. Like next year, it’ll hopefully be out next year. I’m also recording a new record with my dad on drums actually.
J.S.-Your dad plays drums?
D.T.-He paints and plays drums, yeah. Like father like son.
J.S.-All you guys sound weirdly talented.
D.T.-Just me and him actually. Literally no one else in my family on either side is artistic. Him and I like it all though.
J.S.-I remember finishing Dreamboy and getting to that little two minute message that there would be no season two. Were there plans for it that were scrapped or was season two never going to happen?
D.T.-Everybody was pushing me towards it, saying we have to do a second season that’s how this works, if people like it you have to do a season two. I didn’t want to do a season two, its a limited series its done. All the story I had wanted to tell with those characters was done. Thats the point, the point is sometimes you just have sex once and there’s magic in that. Apart from it being like, unrequited love between two prehistoric fish that never got to fuck, its also the story of just having a hookup with somebody that just really cute that you really vibe with, and that’s it. Theres something really kind of queer about that kind of love
J.S.-I felt like if it was a straight romance they would’ve ended it asking if the other person wanted to start dating.
D.T.-Yeah exactly they would have walked off together hand in hand and I didn’t want that to happen.
J.S.-Yeah they don’t do that, Dane walks off on his own.
D.T.-And I liked that, that’s what I liked about it. They just had sex and were like, “I like you.” That’s enough. They’ll wee where it goes or doesn’t go. Everyone wanted to see where it would go, but what if it went nowhere? I liked that it ended there with all the ambiguity and I didn’t think there were unanswered questions that were so nagging that they kept you from enjoying the rest of the story. There were things I might have wanted to tie up more, but that’s the way life is, there’s questions, you don’t always get answers. So anyway, I didn’t have plans for a second season but everyone was saying we should do one and I came back and said we can’t afford it. Nightvale’s deal was they would pay for the first season but we would have to fundraise for a second. Its expensive to make a podcast, I didn’t get paid to make Dreamboy, I paid everyone else but me and Ellie didn’t get paid. So that’s why we started the Patreon, but then we all ended up going our own ways and it quickly became apparent that I didn’t want to make a season two, then me and Ellie split up in terms of being collaborators, so I went ahead and pulled the plug and let everyone know. I also ended the Patreon because the people were paying trying to support a season two so it would have been dishonest to keep taking their money. Instead, I started my own Patreon and let people know it was not for Dreamboy but to support my art and of course a lot less people supported it.
J.S.-Are stage shows anything you might want to get back into in the future?
D.T.-Oh sure I love theatre, its just that they cost a lot of money and don’t tend to make money. I’m currently writing in the very beginning stages of writing something that I want to be a theater thing. I love performing in theaters, just me, a piano, and a lighting designer. Those kind of shows I love and will keep doing, I think I have one in November in New York City.
J.S.-What are some of your favorite places you’ve visited while touring?
D.T.-Well, the thing about touring is that you don’t really get to see the places. You see the theatre, but you don’t really experience the actual city at all. But obviously there are some cities that just passing through are absolutely beautiful, its hard not to be affected by them. I got a day off in Paris and Jesus Christ its cliche but its really gorgeous. The crowds are often better in smaller out of the way places. In the States if you go through, you know, Chattanooga, that’s gonna be a really great crowd. My favorite kind of touring is to do very D.I.Y. touring. You don’t make as much money obviously, cause you’re essentially playing in someones living room. I’ve been a part of some of the most exciting shows, where the artists were great, and the crowds were great, in places like Omaha, Nebraska in the basement of a punk house. I’ve done lots of that kind of thing and I really like it and would love to do more of it. But, I’m so old now, I’m not the twenty-two year old kid I was, I can’t just sleep on the ground and drink beer every night. I don’t drink anymore and I don’t want to sleep on the ground but I don’t know if I’d make enough at punk shows to stay in hotels every night. But I would do it if I could, even if I lost money I would do it. I think its very important. The reason I got into theatre is because a weird D.I.Y. theatre troop came through and performed in the living room of a punk house.
J.S.-I had never really been to smaller shows till recently. I matched with a lovely person on, I think it was Bumble, and went to one of their shows in Miami. From there, I fell into this weird eclectic collective of queer artists. Its been a really beautiful thing to see all of them do what they’re so good at. There’s musicians, writers, painters, and everything.
D.T.-Yeah for sure, that’s where its at, these little communities of artists. If you can get involved with these people you can create a little circuit, which is what I did for a few years. This D.I.Y. singer-songwriter queer touring. Once I moved to New York theatre kinda took over. You can’t really leave New York, you gotta just be there cause it is so expensive.
J.S.-I actually recently wrote a short story and one of the characters was partially inspired by Luke’s character, specifically his Instagram account, Trodden Snow. I just wanted to say on the record that was one of the most beautiful parts of the story in my opinion.
D.T.-Thank you! That was actually one of the original pieces of that world. There weren’t that many but that was one of the first ones. I had girl scouts and some instagram twink named Trodden Snow. And prehistoric fish that haunt people’s dreams.
J.S.-On one of the little special episodes you and Ellie were talking and forgive me if this is not exactly right but you were basically saying you vomit out the ideas and she strings them together into a larger story, is that how it always was?
D.T.-Well that’s being a little generous but yeah basically she helped me quite a bit when it came to shaping the plot. The biggest thing I needed was someone to ask me questions and she was very good at that. It was my first sort of bigger story that I had ever assembled and she really taught me the ropes. For the stage show she did a lot, and for the podcast, well some of the work was already done because of the stage show so there was a little less of that process. I think episodes four, five, six, seven, and eight, we would have directors meetings about what needed to happen then I would just go write them. One, two, and three were hard. She was right there for me, which is why we decided to be co-creators. She was very involved in the world.
J.S.-Are you working with anyone on this next one that you mentioned earlier or is it just you?
D.T.-Eventually there will be other people involved, right now its all me. I mean, the company I’m working with has people that give me notes and stuff. So right now, its just me and them. I’m gonna direct this one, but I may need a co-director. Someone to help me get what I want and need especially when I perform my parts. But, I also think I could direct it myself, so we’ll see.
J.S.-So, you plan on acting in this one as well?
D.T.-Yep, but like I said, we’ll see. A big question with this next one is whether or not I can. And part of what they want from me is my storytelling ability, you know that’s the thing I’m selling and that’s what I can do very well and its what I want to do. But its like okay, we have to make sure I can pull this off because the main character is a twelve year old. Which is fine, usually you can just say, “I’m a twelve year old,” and people will buy it, but when its just audio, there’s a lot more ins and outs than you realize. But, I think it’ll work. If not we’ll have to get a twelve year old, or someone with a voice that really sounds like a young boy. I don’t know if you looked up the person who played Luke but Michael Cavadias is fifty-six.
J.S.-Holy shit. Wow, I genuinely thought he was some super young guy.
D.T.-Yeah, he’s about fifteen years older than me I think. And I’m forty. Thats the beauty of his voice, he can do that so well. His voice naturally is very soft and how it is in the show, but not nearly as much as Luke was in the show but we really had him lean into it.
J.S.-You had one of my favorite voice actors, Cecil Baldwin, playing Eli Critch. I really enjoyed his story a lot. Was it intentionally left up to the audience to decide whether he was a bad guy or not?
D.T.-Yeah I was interested in having this bad guy who you realize is just sort of trying to do his job. At the end of the day its kind of idealistic to think that you should save a zebra that killed a kid. He’s just trying to have a fucking zoo though. I don’t like zoos anyway, I’m not a fan of them, but I wanted him to not be a total evil person. He’s just trying to get people to cut him some slack. I wanted it to fall apart a little bit for Jennifer. That sort of right and wrong that she lived by needed to come crashing down. The realization that there is no right choice, and no body wins, and nobody goes away with the love story. Thats why the last song is There’s Only One Kind of Night.
J.S.-It is really easy to draw parallels between real life and art so I just have to ask, was the story at all inspired by Harambe?
D.T.-Not at all, no. It was inspired by a coat.
J.S.-A coat?
D.T.-A coat. Or a sweater actually. A zebra print sweater I found on a fence as someone was giving it away. It was very fuzzy and a little too small for me so I looked really gay in it and I thought, “This is amazing I’m like a gay zebra.” Then I wrote a whole monologue about this gay zebra that was upset that it was in trouble for mauling a kid to death. I never really performed that monologue, except maybe once. But I loved that idea and that character became this sort of modular piece that was around when I was creating the world. Usually when I’m making something there’s random pieces and I sort of let them all congeal together, the more random the better. The name Zoe was the name of an annoying dog on the block of the house I stayed at when I was staying at Emily’s. I hated the dog, but the name was alliterative of a zebra so it just worked.
J.S.-I remember episode three introducing me to one of my favorite characters in the world, Diana Greasefire. I particularly liked the Christmas special rendition of O Come O Come Emmanuel that she performed. That was fuckin genius.
D.T.-We just needed a filler episode, cause we needed more time for the next episode so we came up with the idea for a Christmas episode but I was like, “Fuck we haven’t written a Christmas episode.” So we really quickly improvised that and put it together. My friend Dito, who plays Diana, is such an amazing comic performer so we had a lot of fun as she and Dan Roddlestein do songs for the telethon.
J.S.-You know by the end of it I was kind of hoping they got together more than I was for Dane and Luke.
D.T.-You know, I just got a weird assignment. A fan asked if they could pay me to write a song in Dan’s character to Diana for their partner’s birthday. Dan wrote quite a touching love song, but its not gonna get released or anything.
J.S.-Thats incredible. I think that’s all I really had so thank you once again for doing this with me.
D.T.-Yeah of course, thank you for doing this, bye Julia!
J.S.-Bye!!
D.T.-My name is Dane Terry, which we know. My pronouns are he/him most of the time, although I do not mind they or they/she. Even just a regular old she, I don’t care. I heard someone recently say that they felt uncomfortable dictating how other people talked about them when they weren’t there, since that was the primary function of pronouns. Its like, I don’t know I’m not there, I’m not gonna tell you how to talk about me when I’m not there. That was interesting to me. All that to say, mostly he/him. Whats your name?
J.S.-My name is Julia Scott, she/her. Trans artist, interviewer, etc.
D.T.-Ah okay Julia, there was a slash in your instagram bio so I wasn’t sure which one you preferred.
J.S.-Yeah you know, I like to leave it up to people, if they know me as one name that’s alright. If they know me as another that’s okay too. To start us off I want to do an easy one: how long have you been playing piano for?
D.T.-Gosh. I started in earnest when I was eleven. Yeah eleven or twelve, so almost thirty years. Yeah, cause I just turned forty so I’m gonna say thirty-nine years.
J.S.-I’ve always had an up and down relationship with music that was unaccompanied by a vocalist. Or at least I thought I did, what I really had a problem with was background music. Music that is there to just fill a void and does nothing with its musicality. One of my favorite parts of going through your catalog was the stories you were able to tell. I felt like I was experiencing a whole narrative when I listened to songs like Something For the Ladies or Last Call at Hotel Man. How long have you been so skilled at creating these narratives in your compositions?
D.T.-Well, I’m gonna argue that you brought all that narrative. That’s the nice thing about art, I didn’t have to do any of that. I think I know what you’re asking though. Stravinsky, who is my dude as far as classical music goes, you know like the really square classical composers, he has a famous quote. He was totally an asshole by the way, such an asshole. Somebody asked him something and he said, “Music itself is powerless to express anything at all.” He was basically like fuck you music doesn’t express emotions. I’m actually kind of a firm believer in that, that music doesn’t express anything. Its entirely through juxtaposition that it is given things like emotion and narrative. Also, the cultural context in which music exists does a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to the narrative you experience through the piece. The title for one gives you something, and then from there your brain does a lot of the hard work. But that's the annoying answer. To answer to your question though, I intentionally left a lot of doors for you to go through. That actually came from, ironically enough, playing background music for a living for fifteen years. That’s what I did. And the thing is, when you’re playing background music it has to be beautiful and absolutely unremarkable. If they are paying attention to you, you aren’t doing your job right. They need to be in a good mood but not know why. The music has to seem like its doing something, but really not be doing anything. That is a skill I perfected, cause you know I had to play for basically four hours straight. With Something For the Ladies, that whole record basically, I asked, “What if I did it, but I played just for me?” So I would play background music, but I didn’t have to reel it in, in terms of harmony. At gigs, like when I was playing somebody’s wedding, I couldn’t go off and play weird harmonies, a waltz couldn’t turn into something dreamlike without the crowd noticing that the music just got weird. I would have to bring it back into something I call “Wallpaper Jazz.” Anyway, Something For the Ladies is just me asking, “What if background music went somewhere? What if I let it go anywhere it wanted?” But its still at its heart, or at least it still comes from the world of background music.
J.S.-Where were you doing gigs at?
D.T.-In Columbus, Ohio, where I’m from and where I lived for many years before I moved to New York, I started off playing for art openings, because my dad is a painter. His gallery heard me and hired me when I was just seventeen to play for one of their openings, and things just went on from there. I did gallery openings, people would see me and invite me to their gallery, from there I got wedding gigs, then cocktail hours at hotels, and so on. It was enough so that I never had to look for work, it got me through my college years. I wasn’t trying to make a career out of it, in fact I loathed it and really resented playing background music because I thought of myself as a “Serious Composer.” I thought it was beneath me, but after so long of doing it, it altered my playing style so deeply that it was me. It had become me. Its kinda funny the way that works.
J.S.-You mentioned your dad was a painter, is he where you started getting your love of painting from?
D.T.-Yeah, I grew up with it so it was always around me. I didn’t really start doing it till the last year and a half when I started doing it in earnest. I would do it in little fits and spurts but never anything major until all of the sudden it just started making sense to me and I began to crank them out.
J.S.-Many of your paintings are number one, incredibly graphic, but more importantly incredibly moving. I feel intimacy, and those quiet moments of love and sex that can’t be spoken in words. Have your paintings always carried these themes or is this a new thing?
D.T.-In terms of my paintings, that is definitely new. My dad is a landscape artist. Oh and I just want to say landscapes are much more human than people give them credit for. I was just doing landscapes until the last year and a half when I started doing nudes of people. That tenderness and humanity in sexuality and the moments of intimacy and love has always been a part of my other work. The presence or absence of it and the dynamics of how it comes and goes has always been a part of my storytelling and songs. It was only natural for it to start to come into my painting.
J.S.-When going through your discography, I was happy to hear the original versions of Sugar Neighbors and One More Name in Nightlife, as they were some of my favorites from the Dreamboy soundtrack. Did you always plan to use them in some bigger project later on or did they just fit perfectly?
D.T.-Absolutely not, I did not. When I was making Dreamboy, well it was originally a stage show called Jupiter’s Lifeless Moons, and while I was making that, me and the director of the stage show, and subsequently the podcast as well, Ellie Heyman, we were talking about songs. We decided that since it was a stage show it should have songs and I knew that so I showed her the songs I had written and I think I wrote one new one, but all the other tracks in it were from my last record. A lot of those songs didn’t make it into the podcast and then I was able to write new songs for the podcast because I had the time to do so. I was very clear, if the songs were going to be in the world I wanted to make sure they fit. So the songs that we ended up using for Dreamboy that I had previously written were Sugar Neighbors and One More Name in Nightlife. One More Name in Nightlife was kinda fine because it was just a drag queen song, just a sort of fun weirdo bop, and it was kind of perfect for Diana Greasefire to sing. But, Sugar Neighbors was essential to the characters. The lyrics were vague enough and talk about things that don’t happen in the world but you get away with it cause it’s a pop song and people understand that it’s poetry. Those two were not written for the show though, Sugar Neighbors was actually written after a Grindr hookup. The boy was my neighbor, as it often happens on Grindr, and as he was leaving I was like, “Hey that was fun, and you’re only a couple doors down.” And he says to me, “Yeah we should do it again, we’re neighbors.” And I remark that its like getting a cup of sugar and we both giggle and say that we’re like sugar neighbors. As soon as he left I was like, that’s a great name for a song, so that’s where that originated.
J.S.-When along the lines did the screenplay transition in everyone’s minds to a podcast?
D.T.-Ellie actually was like, well she knew some people from Welcome to Nightvale and she mentioned that they were looking for new shows, because they were starting a network and wanted a slate of shows. She said that they had a huge following and were great people and a podcast would be perfect for my material. I didn’t listen to podcasts so I was skeptical, but she had me listen to Welcome to Nightvale and I thought, “Hey, I would be great at this.” There’s not a lot of people who do it all, I’m an actor, a writer, a composer, and a record producer. So we had meetings and then it was just that easy it just happened. We were good to go with the podcast as soon as the stage show ended.
J.S.-How long did the stage show run for?
D.T.-It ran for about two weeks. It was a part of a theatre festival, the Coil Festival in New York.
J.S.-Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m too familiar with a lot of queer media and art as I am just sort of coming into it myself, but with Dreamboy you captured a lot of the subtle intricacies that I felt when I was presenting myself as a bisexual man with my boyfriend. There was a lot of little things that you were able to capture that made me go “Holy shit, I thought this was just me.” Did you go into this project trying to make a grand queer project or did that just happen because that’s who you are?
D.T.-Well, I think there’s some element of the last one, meaning its very me flavored because it is very me. But, I also tried to have a lot of intentionality in making it sort of my mind and world. And also exactly the thing you just said, I have a hunch that the things we don’t say, like thee weird little things that I experience that we don’t talk about a lot, especially in the realm of sex, are very helpful for people to hear. People are struggling, they want to be close to each other, and they want to have sex with each other, and they want to know how to love each other and be loved, and I think there’s a lot of things people are afraid to talk about. So I wanted to be like, “Let’s talk about little things.” The hookup, well its not really a hookup, but the hookup that Dane and Luke have in the empty house right before they go to the fire in Cora’s house, where Dane gets locked out of his body and stops the hookup, that’s a really common experience, its dissociation. People don’t talk about that. It comes from us not feeling safe in other sexual situations. Queer people deal with it a ton but I think a lot of people deal with that stuff and so I really tried to have moments where it was like, all of the realms of sex, going from “I don’t feel right,” to “Oh my God, I’m so turned on,” and everything in between there was given its time on the stage because it is all important.
J.S.-For me personally, I’m trans, but I didn’t know that until relatively recently. Having sex with my past partners always felt strange, it didn’t feel like it was me. I would think to myself, “What the fuck, why can’t I just be intimate with them?” It felt like something I should be ashamed of. Hearing how Dane and Luke stopped when it happened to them was such a powerful moment for me. I wish I had realized it was that easy
D.T.-Yeah, exactly. The character Dane in the show isn’t me in some regards, but in some ways he is and I wanted him to act a bit like me even though he’s a complete dumbass who doesn’t know what he wants. I would never deal with the hot mess of communication that is Luke, but I also have in the past, so the character of Dane is somewhat a younger version of me. The point being, I still wanted him to model good queer sexual behavior, meaning he respects himself and the other person he’s with out of love, consideration, and kindness, not out of some moral righteousness, but just because we’re two people who don’t want to hurt each other. Cause people generally don’t want to hurt each other. I think we accidentally do it a lot.
J.S.-I remember the song, There Are So Many Colors in the World, Eric Schmalenberger, and listening to that I was reminded heavily of my own experiences with psychedelics, was that based off of real life or just conjecture?
D.T.-Oh man, I’m so glad you didn’t look up the story to that cause God knows its somewhere on the internet, I think, I don’t know if its google-able or not actually. So the story behind that is, I have a friend, a dear friend, named Eric Schmalenberger. This is one of those songs that was not written for the world, but I made a bet I would get it into Dreamboy somehow, and I’m one of these people where if you dare me or bet me I can’t do something I will show you I can. But that song came about during this big gay party that we go to every year in the woods. I walked up to Eric in the dark and my other friends let me know that he was tripping and so I said, “Oh! Is Eric tripping? Well that’s good!” And Eric looked straight at me and was like “I’m very high on acid right now.” So I looked right back and said, “Well Eric, I have a song for you.” So, I got him up and started slow dancing with him and in a very Merry Poppins way I just started singing the song. I didn’t write the whole song on the spot obviously, the chorus I improvised. Everybody cackled and he got a huge acid laugh out of it before I sent him on his way. The next day he let me know that he remembered the song the whole night and I promised him I would make it into a thing in the world, so when I put it in Dreamboy he was very touched and tickled that I did that.
J.S.-I wish I had started listening to Dreamboy while it was coming out. I was already listening to Welcome to Nightvale so I very easily could have, I just never made the time for it. What was the community of people who were there at the start like?
D.T.-It was a lot of Welcome to Nightvale fans, almost exclusively Welcome to Nightvale fans who had made the transition to Dreamboy. The Nightvale people who released it didn’t really advertise it outside of their own feeds, but they had such a big following that that was enough and I got a significant listenership from them. Then slowly, other people started to find it and trickle in from other avenues. I’ve had such limited interactions with the community because its either mitigated by social media, Twitter, the people who comment, or some subreddit or something on Tumblr. Sometimes after shows people would meet me but the people did didn’t always listen to Dreamboy and the ones who did listen didn’t always come to meet me. So, I don’t know exactly what the community was like, but almost all of the talk and chatter was good, it was very positive. And we got fan art immediately.
J.S.-You went on tour with the Welcome to Nightvale crew right?
D.T.-Yeah, several times actually.
J.S.-What was it it like heading out with them?
D.T.-Oh they’re great, I love them. They’re a bunch of fun as people and they’re so fun to be on the road with. I like the podcast, the crowds were incredible because their fans are so committed and loving and they foster an atmosphere of supporting each others and the opening act so it was really just my dream gig. Not to mention it was some of the biggest houses I had ever played, you know they’re way more famous than I am so I got to play places like the fucking London Palladium. It was great, truly a dream come true.
J.S.-So in your story Night Swim you feature one of your earlier songs, Volton Destroyer of Stars. Did the story inspire the song or did the song inspire the story?
D.T.-They came about at the same time. The song came to me, and then I knew I needed a way to introduce people to the world of the song. Meaning like, I knew what the song wanted to be, this sort of love letter to a space villain that was actually a 12 year old kid, and these two kids were having this little boy romance but the only way they could think about was they were space villains rasseling in slow motion under water at a swimming pool. Its a great image but I had to get people there, I had to get them to the swimming pool and answer questions. Why is it night time? Why is it special? Why is it just kids? Why do these kids feel safe enough to do this? Why is this moment the moment that Volton decides to come out? Why are they completely in fantasy world here? The main character has been having weird sexual awakenings and this person does something to him and all the sudden its just them in a pool and they’re playing a game and they’re like, “I guess we’ll play the space villain game,” but really he just wants to touch him. So yeah, they sorta came at the same time. A lot of my songs are like that, where I have the song I want to sing, but I have to make a little five minute musical for that song to be in before the song has the most impact. Volton Destroyer of Stars by itself doesn’t have near the impact as it does with the story. With the story its transcendent. Thats the epitome of musical theatre and a lot of what I do can be looked at as modular musical theatre. There are songs or musical moments or stories that are underscored with music that are all sort of, little pieces, little vignettes like that.
J.S.-Were you a theatre person in high school or college?
D.T.-Yes, but very on the outskirts. In high school I never did theatre per se, but I was friends with all those people and I was friends with all the kids who wanted to be standup comics. I won best actor even though I was never in a play. I was that kid
J.S.-How did you pull that off?
D.T.-I was constantly doing characters and voices and improv just in my life, that’s just the kind of guy I was. A very funny, very animated person. I hosted the talent show one year as an old woman from the Bronx, dressed in drag, and I think that was pretty memorable and people thought that was funny. It really wasn’t fair that I won best actor. The people who acted in every play hated me, and rightfully so. So yeah, I was always that kind of person. When I started doing music, I wanted to be a rockstar, then people told me I was talking too much to be a rockstar and what I was doing was actually musical theatre and I needed to move to New York.
J.S.-Me and Mickey, 1986 was another really fun one, capturing a lot of innocence of being a kid in various ways, up until the end that is. Were you actually at Disney at the time the Challenger exploded?
D.T.-My stock answer to these kinds of questions is almost always, “My stuff is almost always half-true and half-untrue.” It will surprise you which parts are which. Thats all I will say.
J.S.-One of my favorite things about your work is the incredible sound design that permeates through your stories and music. I always feel fully immersed in whatever is going on. Your last album was November of last year I believe, but I don’t think its too soon to ask if you plan on continuing audio art or has painting taken your full focus?
D.T.-Oh no no no, audio is definitely something I’m continuing. I’ve been in the process of a podcast deal for the last little bit, its just Covid sorta interrupted everything. I had just started to consider another podcast and I had an idea and I was shopping it around and I was starting to think, “Well I have a name in podcasting now that Dreamboy has happened, so maybe I can get a deal.” The Nightvale people had stopped putting out other people’s shows, very quietly they were just like we don’t want to be a network, not in a bad way of course, but I kind of figured that. So I was looking possibly for a bigger deal with a bigger company but then Covid happened and I kind of quit pursuing it. I was unsure I was even going to continue doing art, it was a dark time as you remember. In retrospect, I just needed a break. I had been hustling for years and years and years trying to get some sort of career started and it had and was about to take off when Covid happened. I was really, really depressed so it took me a long time to pick myself back up and get back on the horse but I did it. So there’s a podcast deal for a new podcast that hopefully will happen soonish. Like next year, it’ll hopefully be out next year. I’m also recording a new record with my dad on drums actually.
J.S.-Your dad plays drums?
D.T.-He paints and plays drums, yeah. Like father like son.
J.S.-All you guys sound weirdly talented.
D.T.-Just me and him actually. Literally no one else in my family on either side is artistic. Him and I like it all though.
J.S.-I remember finishing Dreamboy and getting to that little two minute message that there would be no season two. Were there plans for it that were scrapped or was season two never going to happen?
D.T.-Everybody was pushing me towards it, saying we have to do a second season that’s how this works, if people like it you have to do a season two. I didn’t want to do a season two, its a limited series its done. All the story I had wanted to tell with those characters was done. Thats the point, the point is sometimes you just have sex once and there’s magic in that. Apart from it being like, unrequited love between two prehistoric fish that never got to fuck, its also the story of just having a hookup with somebody that just really cute that you really vibe with, and that’s it. Theres something really kind of queer about that kind of love
J.S.-I felt like if it was a straight romance they would’ve ended it asking if the other person wanted to start dating.
D.T.-Yeah exactly they would have walked off together hand in hand and I didn’t want that to happen.
J.S.-Yeah they don’t do that, Dane walks off on his own.
D.T.-And I liked that, that’s what I liked about it. They just had sex and were like, “I like you.” That’s enough. They’ll wee where it goes or doesn’t go. Everyone wanted to see where it would go, but what if it went nowhere? I liked that it ended there with all the ambiguity and I didn’t think there were unanswered questions that were so nagging that they kept you from enjoying the rest of the story. There were things I might have wanted to tie up more, but that’s the way life is, there’s questions, you don’t always get answers. So anyway, I didn’t have plans for a second season but everyone was saying we should do one and I came back and said we can’t afford it. Nightvale’s deal was they would pay for the first season but we would have to fundraise for a second. Its expensive to make a podcast, I didn’t get paid to make Dreamboy, I paid everyone else but me and Ellie didn’t get paid. So that’s why we started the Patreon, but then we all ended up going our own ways and it quickly became apparent that I didn’t want to make a season two, then me and Ellie split up in terms of being collaborators, so I went ahead and pulled the plug and let everyone know. I also ended the Patreon because the people were paying trying to support a season two so it would have been dishonest to keep taking their money. Instead, I started my own Patreon and let people know it was not for Dreamboy but to support my art and of course a lot less people supported it.
J.S.-Are stage shows anything you might want to get back into in the future?
D.T.-Oh sure I love theatre, its just that they cost a lot of money and don’t tend to make money. I’m currently writing in the very beginning stages of writing something that I want to be a theater thing. I love performing in theaters, just me, a piano, and a lighting designer. Those kind of shows I love and will keep doing, I think I have one in November in New York City.
J.S.-What are some of your favorite places you’ve visited while touring?
D.T.-Well, the thing about touring is that you don’t really get to see the places. You see the theatre, but you don’t really experience the actual city at all. But obviously there are some cities that just passing through are absolutely beautiful, its hard not to be affected by them. I got a day off in Paris and Jesus Christ its cliche but its really gorgeous. The crowds are often better in smaller out of the way places. In the States if you go through, you know, Chattanooga, that’s gonna be a really great crowd. My favorite kind of touring is to do very D.I.Y. touring. You don’t make as much money obviously, cause you’re essentially playing in someones living room. I’ve been a part of some of the most exciting shows, where the artists were great, and the crowds were great, in places like Omaha, Nebraska in the basement of a punk house. I’ve done lots of that kind of thing and I really like it and would love to do more of it. But, I’m so old now, I’m not the twenty-two year old kid I was, I can’t just sleep on the ground and drink beer every night. I don’t drink anymore and I don’t want to sleep on the ground but I don’t know if I’d make enough at punk shows to stay in hotels every night. But I would do it if I could, even if I lost money I would do it. I think its very important. The reason I got into theatre is because a weird D.I.Y. theatre troop came through and performed in the living room of a punk house.
J.S.-I had never really been to smaller shows till recently. I matched with a lovely person on, I think it was Bumble, and went to one of their shows in Miami. From there, I fell into this weird eclectic collective of queer artists. Its been a really beautiful thing to see all of them do what they’re so good at. There’s musicians, writers, painters, and everything.
D.T.-Yeah for sure, that’s where its at, these little communities of artists. If you can get involved with these people you can create a little circuit, which is what I did for a few years. This D.I.Y. singer-songwriter queer touring. Once I moved to New York theatre kinda took over. You can’t really leave New York, you gotta just be there cause it is so expensive.
J.S.-I actually recently wrote a short story and one of the characters was partially inspired by Luke’s character, specifically his Instagram account, Trodden Snow. I just wanted to say on the record that was one of the most beautiful parts of the story in my opinion.
D.T.-Thank you! That was actually one of the original pieces of that world. There weren’t that many but that was one of the first ones. I had girl scouts and some instagram twink named Trodden Snow. And prehistoric fish that haunt people’s dreams.
J.S.-On one of the little special episodes you and Ellie were talking and forgive me if this is not exactly right but you were basically saying you vomit out the ideas and she strings them together into a larger story, is that how it always was?
D.T.-Well that’s being a little generous but yeah basically she helped me quite a bit when it came to shaping the plot. The biggest thing I needed was someone to ask me questions and she was very good at that. It was my first sort of bigger story that I had ever assembled and she really taught me the ropes. For the stage show she did a lot, and for the podcast, well some of the work was already done because of the stage show so there was a little less of that process. I think episodes four, five, six, seven, and eight, we would have directors meetings about what needed to happen then I would just go write them. One, two, and three were hard. She was right there for me, which is why we decided to be co-creators. She was very involved in the world.
J.S.-Are you working with anyone on this next one that you mentioned earlier or is it just you?
D.T.-Eventually there will be other people involved, right now its all me. I mean, the company I’m working with has people that give me notes and stuff. So right now, its just me and them. I’m gonna direct this one, but I may need a co-director. Someone to help me get what I want and need especially when I perform my parts. But, I also think I could direct it myself, so we’ll see.
J.S.-So, you plan on acting in this one as well?
D.T.-Yep, but like I said, we’ll see. A big question with this next one is whether or not I can. And part of what they want from me is my storytelling ability, you know that’s the thing I’m selling and that’s what I can do very well and its what I want to do. But its like okay, we have to make sure I can pull this off because the main character is a twelve year old. Which is fine, usually you can just say, “I’m a twelve year old,” and people will buy it, but when its just audio, there’s a lot more ins and outs than you realize. But, I think it’ll work. If not we’ll have to get a twelve year old, or someone with a voice that really sounds like a young boy. I don’t know if you looked up the person who played Luke but Michael Cavadias is fifty-six.
J.S.-Holy shit. Wow, I genuinely thought he was some super young guy.
D.T.-Yeah, he’s about fifteen years older than me I think. And I’m forty. Thats the beauty of his voice, he can do that so well. His voice naturally is very soft and how it is in the show, but not nearly as much as Luke was in the show but we really had him lean into it.
J.S.-You had one of my favorite voice actors, Cecil Baldwin, playing Eli Critch. I really enjoyed his story a lot. Was it intentionally left up to the audience to decide whether he was a bad guy or not?
D.T.-Yeah I was interested in having this bad guy who you realize is just sort of trying to do his job. At the end of the day its kind of idealistic to think that you should save a zebra that killed a kid. He’s just trying to have a fucking zoo though. I don’t like zoos anyway, I’m not a fan of them, but I wanted him to not be a total evil person. He’s just trying to get people to cut him some slack. I wanted it to fall apart a little bit for Jennifer. That sort of right and wrong that she lived by needed to come crashing down. The realization that there is no right choice, and no body wins, and nobody goes away with the love story. Thats why the last song is There’s Only One Kind of Night.
J.S.-It is really easy to draw parallels between real life and art so I just have to ask, was the story at all inspired by Harambe?
D.T.-Not at all, no. It was inspired by a coat.
J.S.-A coat?
D.T.-A coat. Or a sweater actually. A zebra print sweater I found on a fence as someone was giving it away. It was very fuzzy and a little too small for me so I looked really gay in it and I thought, “This is amazing I’m like a gay zebra.” Then I wrote a whole monologue about this gay zebra that was upset that it was in trouble for mauling a kid to death. I never really performed that monologue, except maybe once. But I loved that idea and that character became this sort of modular piece that was around when I was creating the world. Usually when I’m making something there’s random pieces and I sort of let them all congeal together, the more random the better. The name Zoe was the name of an annoying dog on the block of the house I stayed at when I was staying at Emily’s. I hated the dog, but the name was alliterative of a zebra so it just worked.
J.S.-I remember episode three introducing me to one of my favorite characters in the world, Diana Greasefire. I particularly liked the Christmas special rendition of O Come O Come Emmanuel that she performed. That was fuckin genius.
D.T.-We just needed a filler episode, cause we needed more time for the next episode so we came up with the idea for a Christmas episode but I was like, “Fuck we haven’t written a Christmas episode.” So we really quickly improvised that and put it together. My friend Dito, who plays Diana, is such an amazing comic performer so we had a lot of fun as she and Dan Roddlestein do songs for the telethon.
J.S.-You know by the end of it I was kind of hoping they got together more than I was for Dane and Luke.
D.T.-You know, I just got a weird assignment. A fan asked if they could pay me to write a song in Dan’s character to Diana for their partner’s birthday. Dan wrote quite a touching love song, but its not gonna get released or anything.
J.S.-Thats incredible. I think that’s all I really had so thank you once again for doing this with me.
D.T.-Yeah of course, thank you for doing this, bye Julia!
J.S.-Bye!!