Corey Dargel
“I’ve always been fascinated by extreme behavior,” says the pale, sardonic art-pop singer/songwriter Corey Dargel early in our interview. He’s not kidding. His latest album, Someone Will Take Care of Me is a pair of song cycles — one, “Thirteen Near-Death Experiences,” about hypochondria, and the other, “Removable Parts,” considering the even darker subject of voluntary amputation. This is tricky stuff, but Dargel’s touch is feather-light, and he dresses it up in arch, delightful pop songs that flit gracefully between indie and chamber pop. The echoes of Stephin Merritt and other art-pop heroes are strong, but Dargel’s quizzical approach is entirely his own. His fluid, deadpan voice is a thing of wonder, and can make even a painfully incisive line like “I’d almost rather be dead than watch my body fall apart” float like a cocktail-party bon mot.
Dargel recently sat down with eMusic’s Jayson Greene to discuss a few of his own songs, and was also gracious enough to submit to a head-spinningly diverse Jukebox Jury that makes stop-offs at Gary Numan, Magnetic Fields, Xiu Xiu and Lotte Lenya.
So first of all, why hypochrondria? What spoke to you about this kind of mind frame?
I started out with the idea of writing a piece about different kinds of delusions, really absurd delusions, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to focus on hypochondria because it is much more relatable to people. I think we’ve all had a taste of hypochondria, so I thought of these songs as being bizarre enough to be intriguing, but still relatable — we can all relate to our bodies falling apart; we can all relate to being paranoid about a symptom we don’t understand. My last piece, “Removable Parts,” which was about voluntary amputation, which is also a part of this album, was much less relatable.
And why voluntary amputation?
Kathleen Supové, the pianist who plays on that piece, and I came up with the concept together. She wanted a piece about amputation, and she gave me a lot of magazine articles about people who had suffered terrible injuries during wartime. I think she has a special interest in amputation because she uses her fingers to play her instrument. But amputation was a little too dark — and I know you’re gonna say voluntary amputation is even darker — but there’s something about it; why would someone want a limb removed? There’s something in that extreme behavior I find a lot more compelling than the more generic theme of amputation.
Voluntary amputees have been compared to transgendered people, in that they feel like there is actually…they have a specific limb they want to have removed, and because that limb is a part of their body, it means that they are not the person they believe that they should be. By removing that limb, they would then become whole.
What unites these souls? Is there a thread running between these stories?
I think there’s a general theme of mind-body disconnection, of feeling like your conception of yourself doesn’t match what your body is. I also think that even with something more common with hypochondria, that my goal with that was to find a way to relate it to more common and everyday feelings of loneliness and anxiety.
Corey Dargel, “Touch Me Where It Counts”
So with that in mind, let’s start by talking about this song.
There are a few love songs on the “Thirteen Near-Death Experiences” where you don’t know if the love song is to a lover or to a doctor, and this is one of those. “Every Time You Undress Me” is another one. This comes first on the album, because I wanted to set up the contentious “The doctor doesn’t believe there is something wrong with me, and so the doctor thinks it’s all in my head” experience, because I’ve had a lot of family members that have had illnesses that are complex enough and not well-enough understood that they have been told it’s been in their head. I wanted to set up a sort of distrust or suspicion of experts, especially with regard to “how I’m feeling,” because you can’t ever really get inside someone else’s head, no matter how much of an expert you are, to determine how they’re feeling. I also had the most fun writing the lyrics to this song, because there’s almost no correct, proper rhyme, but there’s a lot of almost-rhyme.
[Listens to first line: "I was an angry child"] I liked the idea that a baby could be angry, and that there’s a nursery full of angry babies [laughs], so that’s how I started writing this song. I think that in more general terms, this song is about the way that our culture turns everything into banalities, so that we don’t have a sense of what an extreme feeling would be, or what a really monumental experience would be. Everything is like a movie; everything is like a TV show. CNN runs stories about sexual deviants at the bottom of the ticker, and it becomes a banality. So the line in this song where the singer says, “I experience no extremes/ No highs, no lows, not even in my dreams.”
Gary Numan, “Me! I Disconnect From You”
This is a piece of music I was reminded of when I heard “Ritalin” — it’s another song about the horror of numbness. It has a very chilly sound; there’s a sort of interpretive blankness to the perspective in your songs that I was reminded of here. How much of that blankness is intentional?
I enjoy mixing hints of autobiography with pure fiction, but in a way I feel like my own life experience is not interesting enough to make a song cycle out of. The parts of my life I feel are interesting enough, I will put some autobiographical content in, but with other songs, I create a character and then really try to empathize with this character. By the time I finished both of these cycles, I was surprised and a little bit alarmed at how close I felt to the people I was writing about.
I’m interested in creating vulnerability, both in performance and on record. In order to do that you have to create some sort of question as to whether or not these songs are true, or personal. I like keeping that question up in the air. I don’t want to turn things so vulnerable that people are turned off, but it’s something that appeals to me artistically. I don’t know the Gary Numan song well enough to talk about it, but it sounds like with that song, and with that album cover, that he’s drawing a line, saying, “I am going to be alienated,” and I don’t wanna do that. I definitely want to connect with listeners, but I don’t want that connection to be about me all the time.
If you felt like you had to point to a particularly autobiographical song on either of these cycles, which one would you would point to?
I would point to “What Will It Be For Me?” which is a song about speculating about one’s own demise based on one’s family’s medical history. The medical history that I’m talking about in that song is actually my family’s medical history, and I remember the first time we read through that song in rehearsal, as soon as the run-through was over, I said, “Oh my god, this song is way too cheesy. I can’t deal with this song; it’s too pretty.” I think what I was really saying was “It’s too personal, I can’t put it out there.” Thankfully, ICE [International Contemporary Ensemble, the group that plays on "Thirteen Near Death Experiences," along with drummer David T. Little] told me, “No, it’s great, it’s beautiful, we love it.” Then when we were mixing it, I added all sorts of processing, to still, I think, try to obfuscate the personal quality of the song. When I played the mix, they reacted negatively. They said, “You’re making it sound too distant and too New Age-y; it’s supposed to sound fragile and sparse because it’s a fragile song.”
Corey Dargel, “Why Not Take All”
I was really drawn to this song for a lot reasons: The lyrics, certainly the line “This cavity in my chest that once was my heart,” kills me. But I also wanted to talk about your decision to add all these layers of distortion and noise to what is otherwise a simple piano ballad.
This is a song where the singer is saying “I’m not pathetic,” so I thought the music should sound pathetic in some way. For me, that translated into broken, out-of-tune records and scratches and really distorted, confused-sounding samples in the background. Also, it’s a Sinatra number in a way, where I’m smoking a cigarette, singing this song; the lights are dim, I have a glass of whiskey. And I’m destroying my body with whiskey and cigarettes and saying, “I’m not pathetic, this is who I want to be.” So that’s the mood behind this song.
Magnetic Fields, “I Don’t Believe In The Sun”
This is off of Magnetic Fields ‘69 Love Songs, which is kind of this triple-backflip, stick-the-landing exercise in writing every kind of pop song imaginable. I can hear a lot of his style in your songs — what are some of the things you connect to?
Yeah, I know this song. I definitely connect to his playing with language, I guess this post-modern mindset that language doesn’t always mean what we mean it to mean. And that especially with music, you can change the meaning of language pretty easily, depending on what you do with it. I think Stephin Merritt is really good at just playing games that get us to think about language. He’s unusual in that way in that he’s really thinking about the language as he writes. He’s sort of the epitome, in my opinion, of that sense of lyrical craft. And yet he still manages to turn out music that is incredibly moving and even sentimental. That’s something I strive to do as well.
Lotte Lenya, “Oh Show Us the Way”
This is from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahoganny. The tone — jaunty, yet sardonic; informed by popular and art song in equal measure — reminded me of you.
I love this. The idea that if you can’t find a whiskey, you’re going to die, or that you’re going to choose to! The lyrics almost work against the music itself; the music is so jaunty, but the lyrics are about saying goodbye, about being an alcoholic — it’s pretty dismal. But she’s enjoying the pleasures of life. She’s not looking to reason for the answers.
Xiu Xiu are really an inspiration to me, especially Fabulous Muscles. It seems to me they’re so meticulous about what sound comes next, what sound happens when. Everything seems so well put together and well thought-out, and every time I listen I hear some new subtlety that I missed. Xiu Xiu is also artful about not pointing out its artfulness, but they make exceptions: “Niece’s Pieces,” the song before this one, is just a sickly, asphyxiated trombone thing. Like, if you are listening to this in a club, what do you do with it? In a way, I aspire to that kind of mixture: songs that you can dance to, and then songs that you have to listen to really and you can’t really do anything else.
