features national scene all just one shot samples, so if I play it, it lasts for a certain amount of time, and if I want to hear it more I have to hit it again. So in a sense I was trying to make my fingers and my feet the sequencer. You know? And that was fun. I haven’t done that much of it, but I will do more. It was pretty exciting. 11: I’d also like to talk to you about your most recent project, Dark Sacred Night, which is a collection of Christmas songs you’ve recorded over the last decade or so. Even though it’s a holiday album, it’s not a particularly happy one. Can you speak a little bit about your relationship with Christmas music, and perhaps why you chose to play these songs in particular? DB: Yeah, every year I had to come up with two more Christmas songs, between 2002 and 2011, and so I’d just try to find ones that worked for me. It’s hard. It’s a melancholy record, but that’s largely because that’s the kind of thing my body does the best. I’m not all that bright and shiny... I don’t know. So I just gravitated toward that stuff and found a way to do it. Sometimes in protest. There’s been a lot of weird shit going on since the year 2000, politically, in my opinion. So I was definitely finding ways to comment on that. 11: On that note, one of my favorite parts of the album is your use of layered vocals, particularly on “Silent Night,” where the lines stand in contrast to one another and create this weird tension between the voices. Can you talk a little about your use of that device? DB: I had always wanted to be able to do counterpoint. I’d seen my sister do it in college as a music major, and I was a musician, but I didn’t get to study in that way. I got the opportunity when that song came around, because I thought, "I’d really like to tackle 'Silent Night' at some point." I mean, I love the song, but at the time, I thought, "I can’t really... It’s not that right now. All is not calm." So I didn’t feel like I could, in good conscience, put it out into the world that way. So I added that other set of lyrics and that melody that’s kind of a counter to the song. And it’s not me doing it. Well, it’s the people in the song, who I suppose I’m pointing a finger at. I want it to be silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. I want peace and dignity for every person, and that’s the song I wish I could have sang, but I couldn’t because it didn’t reflect what was happening, this demonic culture that we live in. It’s just disgusting the way that we think of people, and the way that we think of money and foreign lands, and I wanted to write a song that indicated that: in the name of your god, you do these filthy, immoral things. Murderous things. Evil. And sometimes you gotta call out evil instead of celebrate the baby Jesus. I think you really do honor the baby Jesus by calling out evil. That’s just my opinion. 11: I think the baby Jesus would agree. This record is a collection of songs that were recorded over the span of more than a decade. How do you go about putting together a collection like that, something that still feels like a cohesive whole?
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