Dr. Dog finds fate in its new release

By John Benson

The songs of ‘Fate’ speak to the same subject from different angles.

Since the turn of the century, Dr. Dog has been on a unique musical journey, which has taken the indie act from obscure Philadelphia-based rock band to respected national touring group.

While some outfits would revel in their growing success, the improbable leap to stardom has the members of Dr. Dog, well, tripping out. Sounding like something of a hippie, the band’s singer-guitarist Scott “Taxi” McMicken explains the band’s decision to explore its achievements on the conspicuously titled “Fate,” which was released last month.

“It’s kind of a concept album and all of the songs are sort of speaking to the same subject from a few different angles,” said McMicken, calling from the front porch of his Philly home. “It’s an investigation of how much is choice and how much is chance and how much is predetermined and how much is in our personal responsibility. How much relevance is your past toward your present and how much does your ambition for the future weigh beyond your present?

“It was just sort of a chance to take stock of a moment. So fate in regards to your sense of your future is an open-ended question, fate with regards to where you are right now is a very close-ended question. So it’s a duality I feel like we hit on pretty quickly and sort of arbitrarily too.”

To understand how Dr. Dog arrived at “Fate,” you must go back two albums to its self-produced 2005 effort “Easy Beat,” which McMicken said was created in a casual, no-pressure atmosphere. The album’s grass-roots following led to its 2007 release “We All Belong,” the act’s first serious studio project.

“That record enabled us to enhance our chops in the studio,” McMicken said. “It put us in a place where we could make more textual, more energetic recordings just having more tracks and microphones and stuff.”

From that point, the onus was then on the band to up its concert performances, creating more of a layered, energetic and dynamic experience. A solid year of touring allowed the members of Dr. Dog to really find their groove as musicians and players. This led to the recording of “Fate” earlier this year.

“It’s a new sense of musicianship, a new sense of subtlety and nuance in the arrangements and mostly in the performances,” McMicken said. “With ‘Fate,’ I think there was a lot more emphasis on the performances in the studio. It’s not just, ‘There’s your part and get it in there.’ It was like, ‘Here’s your part, just nail it and really feel it.’

“So it’s not just a collage of sounds and layers working together, but more consciously playing together and playing off each other. And that’s the major sort of technical difference of where we are as part of the band in making ‘Fate’ compared to other records. It’s just an increased level of awareness of musicianship.”

So far the act has incorporated six of the new album’s 11 songs into its live show. You can see Dr. Dog in action tonight at Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland. One thing that hasn’t changed for the band since its arrival on the music scene a few years ago is the seemingly incessant classic rock comparisons to the likes of the Beatles, the Band and even the Beach Boys.

While McMicken admits on an aesthetic level he can understand why critics and fans cite the legendary ’60s acts, he views this as a rally cry for Dr. Dog to just do its own thing and not get involved with influences, styles and expectations.

“We kind of have a built-in understanding of what we do, which we formed in an early stage of the band, that whatever we’re doing as commonplace or traditional or as weird as it might get, really it has nothing to do with a larger context outside of our own fantasy world,” McMicken said. “Everything at the end of the day comes back to our own internal system of logic.”

With his idiosyncratic hippie logic, McMicken adds, “So everything always feels like us doing what we want to do. It’s all clicking and working.”