Every Sunday I forced my parents to take the same road, the one that led to Losciale. You won’t find it on the maps, it is one of the many districts of Monopoli, a contrada, a village of four or five houses lost in the countryside. My best childhood friend lived in one of these houses. In the eighties you could travel the road that connects Bari to Monopoli in three quarters of an hour. Car journeys seemed to never end, my father was singing old songs and I spent my time looking out the window.
One of the points of reference to understand exactly where we were and how much was left until I could play football with Tonio was the Agip Motel and the question I asked myself was always this: “Why had they called it Motel and not Hotel like all the hotels in Bari?”
Dane Sybrant of The Debts runs the Butte Motel in Wray, CO. You can see it on some covers of “Montavilla”.
I’m still not sure about the difference between an hotel and a motel so I thought I’d ask Dane a few questions.
Luigi: “What are you doing in Wray, CO?”
Dane: “Hi Luigi. To be honest, I have no idea how I ended up in Wray! It is literally in the middle of nowhere, a tiny village in the sea of the American Great Plains. Somehow, while trying to escape the weirdness of Portland, OR, we stumbled into a job running a small motel here. It was always going to be just a stopping point on our way to Denver, but 8 years later here we are, still making beds and stocking coffee. I do like small town living, the pace, the people, the potential. Since there’s nothing here, you get opportunities to do things that are much rarer in a bigger city, though at a smaller scale. For instance I have been recently working with a group trying to revitalize an open-air natural amphitheater right here in Wray. Like Red Rocks (in Denver) but not as massive. I find that the midwestern boredom also helps with songwriting. In Portland everything was so beautiful that you got distracted. Here you must create beauty.”
Luigi: “What’s the difference between a Motel and an Hotel?”
Dane: “To answer the second question, from what I understand the term motel comes from Motor Hotel. These became very popular in the 1940’s and 1950’s due to car culture. Basically a motel has doors to the rooms that enter from outside as opposed to being inside of a hotel. This way you can drive right up to your door, sit outside with a drink and enjoy the evening without paying extra for a balcony or actually leaving the building. The Butte Motel was built in 1947 and still retains some of the charm of the old days, although a majority of motels have gone out of style in the last 70 years or gotten seedy reputations.I could be making this all up though, I did no research before writing this.”
Luigi: “What kind of landscape can I admire from the rooms of the Butte Motel?”
Dane: “As the name implies, there is a massive butte that towers over the motel. Sometimes when the full moon is just right you can see witches dancing on the top.”
Luigi: “You run a motel and not a hotel but this doesn’t rule out the possibility that you might go crazy one day. In short, you know what happens to Jack Nicholson in The Shining. What’s the strangest thing that happened to you at the Butte Motel?”
Dane: “When I was living in the motel during the first few years there were definitely moments of wanting to swing an axe through doors, but with time (and distance) we’ve gotten less crazy guests. The strangest event was documented on our “Customer Service” album during the song “John.” It was St. Patrick’s day and we got a call at the office about 3 a.m. I went to the guest’s room, and the door opened to a toilet completely broken in half; the bowl was lying to the right against the wall, and the top of the toilet inside the bathtub to the left. Water (and whatever else) all over the floor. The guest was a 6.5 foot tall, 300lb man in overalls named John, completely drunk, who proceeded to tell me how the toilet “bucked him off” while he was using the bathroom. He was very nice, and you can hear the whole interaction on the song, but needless to say, it is still a mystery how such a sturdy object like a toilet could be broken in half and spread across the bathroom by just a drunken Irish dude going #2.”
Luigi: “Montavilla is one of my favorite albums. I could listen to it forever and I think I know the lyrics to many songs by heart. When I listen to “Combine”, I see these huge harvesting machines materialize in front of me. How are the nights in Wray, CO when it’s harvest time?”
Dane: “Thank you! There were many songs on that album floating around for years that finally got their due. It has a special place in my heart, although I haven’t listened to it for a long time. Harvest time is a very busy season here. Most people who live out here farm and so the town goes into single mother mode; all the dads are working from 5 a.m. to midnight, 7 days a week until the crop comes in. My other band’s name “Harvest Hours” is a reference to this. Since I run a motel I’m just usually watching the butte, waiting for the witches.”
Luigi: “On “Customer’s Service” covers I had fun drawing an American football player whose shirt has your surname. Have you ever played football?”
Dane: “If I had been better at it I never would have started writing songs! It was my first love actually, I was convinced I was going to go pro but college football was such a negative experience that I quit and never looked back. I remember sitting in my dorm room thinking, well my plans are ruined, I guess I could give music a try! Eventually, through songwriting, I realized how much sports for me were actually done to make other people happy, and mainly a consequence of my body type. But I can’t say I didn’t love it at the time! There is something I’ve always loved about the symbolism of a skeleton in football pads. Seems poetically accurate to my experience.Thank you for choosing that theme for the album covers!”
Luigi: “”The Millers” is Dane Sybrant’s third album (the first two under the name The Debts) to be released by Almost Halloween Time Records, the fourth if we include “The Desert” cassingle. Why did you choose to use your name for “The Millers?”
Dane: “In part this album is a culmination of a life spent making music. It is a concept album, a song cycle, a nod to old folk stories and albums I loved during the time I lived in Omaha, NE. Since my lyrics always come after the music, I never felt like I could knit together a narrative before. Somehow when this batch of songs came together there was a story as well as a melody. It felt like mine and I was exercising some kind of monkey demon riding my back all these years. Now I’m free, and can step out from under The Debts. Also, aside from one track where my friend Tyler Smith plays drums, I played all the instruments, made all the arrangements, and mixed the album, for better or worse. Jürgen de Blonde mastered it though, which may be why it’s at all listenable!”
Luigi: “What is the “The Millers” about?
Dane: “”The Millers” is about a midwestern couple trying to survive the night. Their relationship is a storm that starts with moths gathering around a porchlight in the muggy thundering evening and proceeds to whip up into a tornado that tries to destroy everything they love, including each other. At the end there is too much violence, addiction, and pain each has suffered to come out unscathed, so they have to decide whether to stay together or not. Not sure if they make it…you tell me.”
Listen to “Caroline” from the upcoming album “The Millers”.
Or listen to “Montavilla” here, “Customer Service” here, “The Desert” here.
