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No one's ever accused Dan Vidmar of moving too fast.
In the five years since first making Portland swoon with a handful of home-recorded R&B slow jams, the Shy Girls singer-producer has taken his sweet, sultry time getting more material out into the world. He put out a six-song EP at the end of 2013, then a mixtape over a year later. Only now is he getting around to releasing Shy Girls' proper full-length debut. Dropping earlier this month, Salt finds Vidmar moving away from the featherweight funk that helped him win WW's Best New Band poll four years ago and toward a darker, moodier and more digitized sound.
With Shy Girls making what's become an increasingly rare hometown appearance, we spoke to Vidmar about relocating to L.A., his frustrations with the industry, why he prefers working alone, and the obvious question: What the hell took so long?
Willamette Week: You moved to L.A. about a year ago. What spurred the move?
Dan Vidmar: I've been down in L.A. off and on, for a month here and a month there, for probably two years. As much as I love Portland, and I still consider Portland my home in a lot of ways, there's just so much opportunity down in Los Angeles. And as I get older, there's more I want to be doing than just touring and doing all that stuff. Los Angeles has opportunities for producing for other people or producing for film and TV or writing songs for other people that Portland unfortunately doesn't have. And I was down there so often it made sense to move my lease down there. I come back to Portland about once a month at this point, so I have my foot in both places.
Have you any crazy industry experiences yet being in L.A.?
Once you're in L.A., in the music scene down there, it happens all the time. Literally, last night, I was at a concert standing next to Thundercat, just randomly. Stuff like that just happens all the time because it's Los Angeles. But in terms of working and stuff, I've been in some sessions for bigger artists in which I had to sign an NDA, so I'm not allowed to talk about it. I've also been in sessions for artists in studios where there were big rappers next door listening to beats. There's a lot of crazy circumstantial stuff that comes up when you're in that environment.
You're finally putting out your debut album. What took so long?
I put out a little demo EP a way long time ago, Sex and the City, and I thought I was going to put out an album after that. It turned into an EP [Timeshare] because I felt like there were six really strong songs, and I didn't want to put out a weak album. I wanted to put out a strong EP. So I paired it down to the six strongest. After that, I was talking to a bunch of labels and there was all this bullshit going on in terms of trying to figure out if I was going to sign to a certain major label or something like that, and that took up a year of my life basically. During that year, I made that mixtape [4WZ], which was intended to be something that wouldn't have to get released on a label and I could just do with my friends. So that came out, and I spent the last year finishing the album, and here we are, a year and six months later, and it's finally out.
So is it fair to say the delay was a mixture of career bullshit and you being a perfectionist?
The truth is I am a little bit of a perfectionist, and I don't like to put out singles, which is a thing you have to do now. That's how the industry work. It's the only viable model it seems, but I don't like to do that. I like to have a full, complete project or release done before I start putting singles out, and that can take a long time—to figure out what a full project you want to listen to front to back sounds like, instead of collecting singles along the way and just plopping them on an album. There was some industry bullshit, too, but for the most part, I was just taking my time. There was also a good six months there where I took a break and was in Portland, just enjoying my time with my friends, backpacking and doing that stuff.
Were you being pressured by your label and the other people around you to put out something to capitalize on the early buzz Shy Girls was getting?
People were pushing me for sure, for good reason. There's a shelf life on these things, in a lot of circumstances. Obviously, I don't think I listened to them, because I've really taken my time. But there's always pressure to put things out, which is why the whole model of putting out singles and throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks is kind of disgusting to me. You feel the pressure to do that sort of thing, and for me, there's very little integrity in that.
How are you able to circumvent that pressure, then, as someone pretty new to the music industry? Have you found it easy for your to preserve your creative autonomy?
I knew nothing about music industry at all when I started. I was ready to go to medical school, I was doing music as a hobby, and then got thrusted into this world and had to learn everything all at once. I feel like I've done a pretty good job of keeping my team small and trustworthy, and everybody that's part of the team. Whether it's the band or management or whoever, they're all on the same page as me and they trust my decisionmaking and I trust theirs. So I don't feel like it ever got to the point where I couldn't say, "No, this is what I want to do."
When Shy Girls won Best New Band in 2013, the sound of the project reflected an unabashed love easy listening and soft jazz, and I feel like those elements have faded a bit over the years. What led to that?
I think it's just a natural evolution. I'm never able to do the same thing for more than six months. I have to just constantly move. And like anyone else, your tastes change over the course of time. To make the same type of music for years would be really boring to me. Some people might listen to Salt and see how it sounds similar to the EP, but I think there's some radically different undertones to it, and themes. And musically, it's quite different from [Timeshare], and it's because I can't really stay in one place.
Are the songs reflective of a particular time period in your life?
Most of the album is about me approaching 30, and getting older, and the decay of my youth—things starting to change and go away, and people moving and getting married, and all those little things that start to happen when you get older that weren't apart of the songwriting picture for me when I was 24. I think the themes are a lot more existential and less about love and partying and stuff.
The artwork, which is basically a big, melting block of ice, seems to play into that theme of slow decay.
The artwork was extremely deliberate. There were weeks that went into the making of the artwork. My creative director and I had to learn to freeze clear ice and not make it foggy and hazy. It's 100 percent shot on film. It would be easy to do it in Photoshop, but I wanted it to look super real.
How does the title play into these themes?
The themes again had to do with decay and all that, and…you throw salt on ice to watch it eat away. You throw salt on your wounds, which is also part of the lyrical content of the record. But also, finding the salt in life was another part of it. The song "Why I Love" was a lot about coming to terms with the absurdity of loving someone else and being OK with that. It was, like, throwing salt on things you know are tasteless. There are several angles to it.
There was a point where Shy Girls really seemed like a band, but then it retracted back down to being mostly just you again. Did it take you a while to realize you prefer working alone?
From the very beginning, it started out as a 100 percent solo thing. The first EP I put out was literally just me on headphones in my apartment here in Portland. To pull it off live, I started bringing in the band, and it became a whole live thing, with sax involved and all that. When I started going to L.A. more, there was all things people I could work with, producers and mixers and engineers and collaborators, rappers and singers and whatever. I started to work with those people a lot, because it was new and exciting. Ironically, when I moved to L.A., I found I just wanted to work alone on this particular album and have it be a very unified voice and vision and not collaborate a whole lot. Having worked with a lot of people now in L.A. and even in Portland, there's something really great about collaborating with other people. There's something really interesting that happens when two ideas come together, and that's really great. At the same time, a lot of times, you can dilute both people's ideas in a collaborative setting. So for me, I thought it was important—maybe selfishly—to do this all myself, and see where I can take it by myself, and have it be authentic in that way.
When I first interviewed you, you were working on a really slow laptop in your apartment. How much different is the whole process now?
It's pretty much the same, except my laptop got a lot faster, and I got more plugins. That's kind of it. I kind of like keeping it that way. I'm not opposed to collaboration by any means. The next thing I do could be a split EP. But for this, it's kind of important to me to keep it authentic in that way, because that's how it's been from the beginning—just me and a laptop.
SEE IT: Shy Girls plays Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., with the Last Artful, Dodgr, on Wednesday, Jan. 25. 9 pm. $16. 21+.
