Dan Wilson

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep them selves moving in the right direction, how they feed

their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Dan Wilson, a Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter, musician, producer, and visual artist. He's known as the leader of the band Semisnic, for which he wrote the Grammy nominated Closing Time. Wilson has also released several solo recordings, including the two thousand and fourteen release Love Without Fear. He was also a member of the Minneapolis psychedelic rock band Trip Shakespeare.

Here's the interview. Hi, Dan, welcome to the show. Thank you, Thank you very much. As I was just saying to you a little bit before we got started. I'm very excited to have you on. I have been a fan of your music since I was probably eighteen years old. And there is just something about your voice when you're singing that every time I hear it, it just immediately makes me feel better. So, um, that's a great thing, and so thank you for that. That's fantastic. I really

appreciate hearing that. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of Two Wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and

he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, Grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you how that parable applies to you in your life and in the work

that you do. Uh wow, well, I think um. The first thing that strikes me about the parable is that the grandfather doesn't commit to like a permanent victory of one wolf or the other, and the way he talks about it, it's like that both wolves are always available for for the feeding. And I kind of like that about the parable. My my, you know, I definitely have a similar philosophy, although I guess wolves haven't entered into it.

But I I feel like whenever I have pictured something happen happening in the future, so often that thing has actually happened or something really close to that thing. Yeah, I've been very lucky in my choice of things to picture, I guess, because it seems really very consistent that whatever we put our energy or our imagination into eventually becomes reality.

So I guess that's that's how I see the wolf parable, is that it's it's the idea of which wolf winning is almost like which wolf becomes which wolf gets to turn into you know, it gets to be real. Which wolf gets to be uh turned into reality? Right? One of the I like that and you talk about sort of you're thinking about what the wolf that wins is the one that gets your thoughts and um, your attention. And one of the things I like about your your

a visual artist as well as a musician. And and you've also started doing something on Vine's six second Songwriting Lessons And one of the things that I've picked up from some of those and also from some of the pictures that you've drawn, UM, is this idea of just showing up and doing the work towards the things that you care about consistently. And I think that that plays

into that theme. Also. Yes, one one thing that needs to be nurtured and fed is is whatever your gift is, whatever is the thing that you want to share with the world, and whatever is the the gift that you want to give to the world, you actually have to feed that. You have actually have to nurture it and feed it. You can't. It doesn't giving it, Giving it doesn't make it go away. And it's it's ignoring it is what makes it go away. Giving it makes it

stronger and more powerful. Hoarding it and saving it and not doing something with it makes it wither. There was something I saw of yours very recently, and I'm not going to get it right because I don't I don't have it right in front of me. But you talked about having a um, a good plan in doing something is better than waiting on a great plan. Yeah. Well, I've always been, you know, in songwriting, I always feel

like it's hard to tell. I mean, maybe some people are really geniuses at this, but it's hard for me to tell which idea is, you know, amazing, and which one is really really good. I can tell when they're bad,

but even even then, I maybe I can't tell. But but but I a lot of a lot of times I think I have started out a song with what seemed to be a pretty good idea, and then somewhere along the line, at some point, something happened, some little turning point or some additional some other idea kind of sprang out, and then the what seemed to be pretty good actually is incredible and great and a gift, you know.

And so I'm really I'm not a believer in assessing earlier whether an idea is, you know, of high enough quality to continue. I kind of feel like, if I'm going to do some songwriting right now, then I'm just going to try to figure out what's my favorite idea right now that I actually have and work on that, or have a new idea and work on that. But but I'm I guess I just don't. I don't think I think you can wait for a good pitch to excess. I think you can. I think sometimes you gotta swing

out a few pretty good outside the strike zone pitches. Yeah, that's a good analogy, and I think that applies really to anything in life. There's it's so easy for, you know, certainly for times for me in life, to think that certain conditions need to line up in order for me to do this thing that I want to do or that thing versus just doing something always seems to lead to obviously better results and and things tend to emerge, as at least for me, things tend to emerge as

soon as I get engaged in the process. Yeah, I completely agree, And I just, you know, I think it's it's funny because I don't like to argue with my fellow songwriters about how to do it. So I almost feel like everybody's got there right to pick the pick, you know, pick their times. I have a good friend who is a really, really talented musician, and he is very much of the philosophy that you you wait until everything is very is perfect, and then you strike create

of lee. You know, you wait until the day is right, and you wait until the idea is good enough, and you wait until the mood strikes. And you know, I get that, I understand why that's a good thing for him, But um, I've gotten so many good results from just charging ahead with an idea that seemed, you know, good enough, and then later you find that there was something really really magical in there. Are there any of your songs that you think that might apply to the parable at all? No,

that's an interesting question. The one that I thought of was free life to some degree, because it's about making it, you know, it's about making choices. At least that's what it means to me. The vibe that I get from free Life is that that we are kind of works in progress, that we are always creating ourselves together and individually, and that there's a kind of beautiful, scary, open endedness about every moment in life and about even like identity, who who one is at all? There's a there's an

open endedness in that as well. I feel like that song is almost a reminder of how unformed or how fresh and and formable I guess, how malleable and fresh and and workable our lives can be if we just think of them that way. In the ear, the questtance hang, will we get to do some thing? Who are we gonna end be? And how we gonna fe in the will I get to do? So? The new album is called Love Without Fear, and the title track is called Love Without Fear? And I think I heard you say

that you had written that about a friend. Yeah, can you maybe share more about that? I was probably part way through writing songs for the album, and um, I was I was in the I was in a mode I had got when I when I'm writing a lot of songs, I get into this mode where everything that happens it turns into a song in my mind. And Uh, I had this uncomfortable conversation with a friend of mine

on the phone. Um, I think he and I were planning are We were not exactly planning something, but we were sort of comparing notes about what what we're going to do in the in the coming year, and it got really uncomfortable and really kind of negative, and I

couldn't figure out why. And after we got off the phone, it's almost it went downhill and it got really bad, and I think but at the end of the conversation, I felt like, wow, we we just had almost like a big fight, and I don't exactly know what it's about. And when I thought about it for a little while, I realized that that my friend was worried that I was going to do a series of dumb things that

we're gonna hurt him in specific ways. It took me a minute to figure out what those things were and and you know, and how to convince him that that those things weren't going to happen, that that wasn't part of my plan. But he was definitely afraid that I was going to kind of trample his his agenda in some way. And uh, once I realized that, it was a huge relief I could because for a while I was sort of mad at him for being sort of difficult, or you know, mad at him for being afraid or

sad or whatever it was. And once I realized that I had it within my power to reassure him, it was like it's sort of weight was lifted. And I I would like to say that I called him right away to talk to him about it, but actually I wrote a song first, Well, I'm glad you did. I love the melody on that, thank you. In this life of mine, someone to take my head? What would be side by side in this world of someone to give me time? Loved give me time? I love with that.

So Trip Shakespeare was the at least I wouldn't say it was your first band, but it was the first band that you were probably known for. And I just love that old music. It's just it's amazing. Is there any music from that time, UM, that really sticks with you today that you feel like you're particularly proud of. I mean, it's a great body of work, but I'm kind of curious what stands out for you of the

Trips Shakespeare music. UM. I have been listening to it a bit more lately because John Munson from the band has been spearheading a rerelease project of the albums, and so we've listened to a lot of the songs on the records, and also a lot of B sides and unreleased things, and um, the stuff that really strikes me almost is the stuff is the live bootleg recordings. Um where the band uh jammed and improvised, because I think

that was one of our great superpowers. And uh, that's one of the reason people really loved the live shows. And I think we never did figure out how to get that to happen on on records. A couple of gigs and we're well received, but the tool Master lost his verve. Don't ask me why. For some reason he lost his Yes, sacred that got something to tell me Dan a letter king from the Buckeye Creamery. It's said, it's just we're going to start up all of machine and why why a girl friends like Up in the

Sky and the Kiss the Twin Times. But fine, you were both sure well it change ups scenery, fine tool mastered up Window, cool Master. So when I listened to the records, I sometimes feel like, Okay, these are really good, like, um, you know, sort of rock songwriting songs. And yet I think that the thing that the band did best was often hidden and not not part of the records. So I like listening to the live bootlegs is any of that going to get be part of the rereleases. I

think it is. I think there are going to be some um I mean, I it's interesting because I feel like that. I think maybe it's either going to be that that some live versions are going to make it onto the the rereleases, or or that we're going to just do a separate project entirely um involving live stuff, which either one would be great. It would be great.

You guys were so fun to watch live. We had just developed over time, we developed a very intuitive way of relating to each other where we could we really knew where things were going without having to acknowledge it on stage at all. We're just gonna new, oh, we're heading into this weird zone. Then we would really all kind of flock from sound to sound or idea to idea, and it was very if you know, it's funny because it's like I, um, I think Trip Shakespeare was was

just ahead of the jam band idea. You know, the circuit of touring that was designed, you know that got designed around the jam bands all happened just a bit after Trip Shakespeare. So you know, I think a lot of you know, groups that admired us and watched our concerts like fish, you know, just they got started just a little bit later, and they and and a kind of a scene in a way of presenting that music kind of coalesced around them, and we were just a

little bit on the early end. Yeah. The thing I loved about so much of that music was there was that free flowing element to it. And yet the songwriting, at least in my perspective, was so so good in comparison to a lot of what I would consider jam band songwriting. Just so, how did you guys write songs? Because you had um across the different songs, there were three of you that would take lead vocals, right, your brother or John. How did you guys write songs? And

how did you decide who would um, who would sing? What? Was there any sort of process to that? It was kind of uh, well, how did the songs get written? It was mostly Matt who would initiate them. Um. My role in the songwriting was quite often just to finish something like, um, you know, a song would be three quarters done and but it needed a bridge, and so I would write a bridge, or Matt might have a a completed lyric, but he just didn't have a melody for it, and he would give it to me and

I would write a melody for it. You know. For example, there was a song called Spirit that was on the second album, and Spirit was a poem that Matt gave me, and I wrote a piece of music to it, and I sang it for the band, and John said, can I sing that one? And I think that John sort of would like lay lay and wait for a really good song and say, hey, can I sing that one? And so I think he, you know, he he often sang some really good songs partly because he was sort

of patiently waiting for a really good one to come along. Well, I doubt he had to wait too long. You know. It's funny because I feel I do feel like the songwriting kind of the that the pure songwriting side of Trip Shakespeare was was definitely very quirky, but very very

strong in its own way. You walking from the back the bad to the field that evolves at the center, and you wait for the ankle, the hook when the dodge in the bank are finding now and then I'm like I'm being found at the base of the canyon. I'll be hod from the wreck of the log let me let me crave in the worlds to come with

me when I'm racking, cracking, year crack. I think it almost would have been great for the band if we had just if if the rule was that you could do different versions of the same song on different albums, because our versions live of of a particular song would be so wildly different from month to month, and it

almost was like a new work of art. But there was this kind of like pop songwriting um, an unwritten rule that you you know, once you recorded a song on an album, you couldn't put it on another album.

And it strikes me now like thinking back, like woll it would have been kind of it would have been kind of awesome if we could have had a few songs that appeared again and again on records, and you know, if that could have been sort of part of our playbook, it might have been interesting, because our transformations of the songs were really pretty cool. Yeah, I think it's a little bit like like Dylan. You can hear all that stuff got released later as part of that, but you

can hear multiple versions of one song. It's just really interesting to hear them so drastically reinterpreted. Or arranged. Yeah, we had there was a concert around the heat of Trips experience time. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was Elvis Costello in um in Minneapolis at

the Northern Auditorium and he had a horn section. It was him and the attractions and a horn section and and they just they they did horn heavy versions of all of us Costello's songs, and completely different from the album versions of the songs, like so different. A fast song would be slow, and a slow song would be fast, and there's blasting horns on everything, and it was just to me, it was very disorienting but kind of amazing.

It made me realize that the song itself is like a a free floating idea that doesn't necessarily, ah I have to be tied to one interpretation. And that was a really huge learning moment for me. Yeah. So after Trip Shakespeare, you went on and formed a band Semi Sonic, that you had a big hit with Closing Time. There was a song on your first record that I'm was

a huge fan of and still am. I was going through a really bad break up at the time and it was brand new Baby, And what is so great about that song is that it is such a such a sad subject, but there is just the joy that comes out of the way it's produced and sung. I just so many times that was such a great song to just make me feel better. Time you need a time on the Man's dream to find a just sad brand Baby makes you. I guess that's I guess that's nice to hear. I like that a lot, you know.

I mean, all of the songs that I write, if they're if they're angry or bitter or sad or troubled, it's because I'm angry or bitter or sad or troubled at the time, you know. So everything I write comes out of some real experience, but it's actually for me kind of come to turn it into something beautiful or something rousing. You know. I think Brand New Babies are really rousing song. And it's kind of it's really fun

to play live. It's got a lot of chords, it's kind of hard to play live, but it's really fun to play live because it's just like it's almost like shaking off your troubles just by being really loud about them, you know, right exactly it is. It's a it's a great one. So after that you've kind of gone on and released a couple of solo records. And the other thing that you've had a lot of success with is you have co written some really big hits for Adele and the Dixie Chicks and and have had a lot

of success in that area. That's been an interesting and kind of unexpected joy for me. I always wanted to co write songs and put them on other people's albums, or at least I I knew that was a thing when I was a kid, and then in the late nineties, I really I really worked to try to make it happen, and I guess it took me like maybe four or five years to figure out how to do it well. It seems like you certainly got the hang of it.

A question that I have for you is, um, one of the ways that My Bad Wolf tends to manifest itself is in is in comparison or and I wonder, is it ever challenging for you that some of the songs you've written UM co written go on to get huge and your own solo work is is comparatively obscure in that How do you Because there's obviously it's great that that's happening for you. Do you ever wrestle with that? Yeah?

I do. I'm it's it's funny. I Uh. There's a joke that a friend of mine told me years ago. A man gets two ties from his mother for his birthday, a red tie and a blue tie. And the next time he sees his mother for lunch, he wears the red tie and they sit down to lunch and she looks down at his tie, and she looks back up at him and says, what's the matter? You didn't like

the other tie? And to me, it's a very like similar thing, like if I write two songs and one of them becomes a hit, I you know, and and an unavoidable little knee jerk reaction that I have is what's wrong? What's wrong with the other song? You? People didn't you didn't like that other song? Everybody? What's wrong with you? I can't help it. I want them all to be sort of equally loved, even though it doesn't in the case of the tie story, like you can't

wear two ties at once. But in my case, like you know, I so if I do uh a solo album and and then write a song that's you know, gets on the radio and someone else is singing it. It's it's both of them are my work. But you know, I kind of want people to like everything that I do, so I want them to hear my my solo records and my co writes and my productions and everything else. Right, I think that's one of those sort of what wolf defeat.

It's easy to twist that into I mean, I know I know people who would certainly look at that and just feel grouchy about it. And the other interpretation about it is it's amazing the things that you're doing and that people are hearing them and to have those opportunities, and it's sort of what perspective do you want to take on it? Yeah, and there's a there's there's kind of a it's hard to explain exactly, but I was talking with a friend about a project that they were

working on that is um charitable. And this charitable project is a very specific thing that's only gonna benefit a few specific people. It's best that it works that way, but my friend it feels a lot of pressure from the world to to have whatever idea that they're working on be scalable. You need to be able to scale it up. You know, what's the matter. You can't help a hundred thousand people with this idea. You're only helping

for people with this idea. You know, you've got to be able to scale it up to a million people or form people or whatever. And and you know, I think artists struggle with that a lot, especially pop pop artists, where scaling your work up to massive numbers is is a you know, it's a longstanding hope that a lot of people have you write a song. It's it's great to have it be very meaningful for a handful of people, but it's also awesome to have it be meaningful to,

you know, millions of people. The thing is like for me, like if I think about who, who whom I am envious of in the world of music, It's really funny. It's a strange thing because I'm not very envious. Usually, I'm actually pretty much on my own path and I kind of understand that i have a weird and quirky, kind of unique path in music, and I'm very lucky,

you know, no one else gets to be me. But if I'm ever envious, the strange pattern is that I'm envious of people musicians or creators of music for their success only if I despise their music. I'm never envious

of someone who's music I love and who is successful. Yep, there's a I read a I read a study recently or some research about that that that seems to be exactly because I've been really interested in when does because it's we all compare ourselves to others, right, It's just part of what happens, and it would be nice if it didn't happen, but it does. And but there seemed to be cases where that comparison is kind of benign or even can be motivating. Um, and then there's other

cases where it's it's not so much. And it's really interesting that the research seems to say that when if you compare yourself to somebody who you um a you like or be you see like you could become what they're being or then you two, it tends to be

pretty benign. But if you compare yourself to people who don't seem anything like you, or seem to have gotten some break that you never got or seemed to you know, there's something about their circumstance that makes them able to do it, then that tends to become more of um uh, you know, a maladapted And I just thought that was really interesting. That sort of fits exactly with what you're

saying there. My theory about this whole question of like envy and comparison for myself is that when I contemplate or think about or kind of dream about the successes of people that I whose music I love, my my biggest kind of emotion is is gratitude, like I'm so happy that I've gotten the chance to hear their music. And somehow that that kind of neutralizes, you know, what you could imagine would be, um, the possibility of feeling envy.

And so that's that's why, strangely, my my only little twinges of envy here and there are like I sometimes envy people who who I think are you know, creating mediocre music and are very successful, Like why I don't even want that life. I don't. I don't even want to be like that at all. But I think, I I it's almost like I I envy them in the way that a person might envy someone who wins the lottery by chance, you know, and so you know, but but it's you know, one I think one of my

lucky breaks in life. Is that that's a very small kind of component of my psyche. And you know, years ago I had this really interesting experience. I went to a question and answer by Frank Stella, who's a painter from New York that I admire a lot, and uh, he gave a talk and then afterwards we were allowed to ask questions, and I I said to him, um, and I was. I said to him, you know, I go to the museums and I look at the paintings,

and there's so many bad paintings. Is so much bad work, and it's you know, up on the walls of the museum, and it's getting rewarded and it's succeeding. And yet I dan know that it's bad. You know what, what do you think about that? Mr? Stella? And he said, UM, worrying about bad art succeeding is not your job. It's of no concern. Your job is to find the art that inspires you and that fires your imagination, and your job is to is to study that art and figure

out how they did it. Forget about the bad stuff. Your job is to look for great stuff that you love. And I was so struck by that. It seemed it was very simple, like, oh, oh, I get to just ignore the things that I don't think are good and and just pay super close attention to the things that I think are great. And that's really that that helped me so much over the years. That one bit of

advice has been super helpful for me. Yeah, it's really about putting the focus on sort of the process and the internal piece and and that internally versus the external reward of it. Or it's like this, Um, you can feed that part of you that wants to be mad at the success of mediocrity, and then you will become

a bitter, sad person. Or you can cultivate a habit of loving great work and feeling grateful for it and being excited about it and sharing it with your friends and and thinking, I want to do something that's great, and then that's the part of you that will grow and that that becomes your character over time. And I really feel like Frank Stella was at the right place at the right time in my life to say that thing that was so helpful. That's great. Well, I think

that brings us to a pretty good point. To wrap up, Dan, thanks so much for being on the show. I really enjoyed talking with you, and it's uh, like I said, your music has meant so much to me, so speaking of appreciating great art, thank you, cool Man. Yeah, thanks for having this conversation with me. I hope that what I said makes sense. I think it was great. All right, Take care, cool Man, Bye bye. You can learn more about Dan Wilson add this podcast at one you feed dot net slash Wilson