In Conversation: Dan Yemin of Paint It Black

As he readies the release of two new records in a two-month span, Dan Yemin gives up control for creation—and finds survival in the process.

Dan Yemin and Paint It Black at the CMJ Jade Tree Showcase. CBGB, New York City. 2004. Photo by Mark Beemer.

I met Dan Yemin in 1992, in front of his parents’ house in New Jersey. I’d just signed up to play guitar with Ressurection for a summer tour across America with Dan’s band, Lifetime, and the ten of us were all called to his driveway one day to build a loft for the rental van. As I mention in our conversation, he struck me as the most “put together” of our lot; he was smart, well-spoken, and truth be told, better at playing guitar than me. But what I didn’t say is that we all kind of looked up to him. Dan was, and continues to be, a nurturer. That he’d eventually become a clinical psychologist—”Dr. Dan,” as we called him—did not surprise me.

The thing about nurturers, though, is that they often put so much energy into taking care of the people and communities they love, that they sometimes develop a blind spot when it comes to their own needs for care. Listening to Paint It Black’s brilliant new record Famine—their first for Revelation—the recurring themes of personal safety and survival led me to believe that the political had become truly personal for Dan in a different way since the last time he sang on a record. It’s a collection of songs that locates his own footing inside of the chaos of the modern world. It touches on his hopes and his needs, and crucially, allows for a little bit of tenderness.

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I feel like we need to start with that first tour we did in 1992. Because when I think about it now, I very much think of it as the first time that I felt like anything I’d done in the hardcore scene was “real.” That was how I internalized the experience. It made me feel like there were possibilities. Was that also your first ever tour?

DAN: Yeah, it was. It was something I had dreamed about. And man, it was a thrill, but it was also one of the most physically uncomfortable experiences ever [laughs]. It might be a cliché to say it was formative, but it was absolutely formative. The idea that we could make that happen, that anything we did mattered outside our little geographical enclave. It was thrilling to play away from home and have people respond, and even just to think that people might have been anticipating our bands rolling through town.

Music is this communal thing, right? It’s like we can connect with people across time and space. But it’s also this really solitary thing. We imagine a lot of it in our heads, we’ve written stories that we tell ourselves about it, and so a lot of it is also imagined. Touring was not that different from what I’d imagined, but just the fact that we could play all over the place and even just figure out logistically how to make that happen… It’s a wonder to me that we even pulled that off.

I think that was also the first time we’d ever met—in your driveway, when we were building the loft. I didn’t know you, but I had these assumptions about you. I thought, this guy is super articulate. He seems really put together. He’s probably a middle-to-upper class guy with well-educated parents. And then there was this feeling of, who hurt you that you wound up in a cargo van full of ten boys this summer? [laughs] Like, this all looks too perfect.

DAN: Well, most of your first impressions were accurate… I mean, you saw where I lived, right? So that was on the table: An upper middle-class suburb, so far from where my parents grew up. My parents are both from the Bronx. By the time I was 14—very different from you—but it was very unusual for a kid from the suburbs to have free rein to go into the city at that age. Like, the Village and the Lower East Side were insane when I was 14. That was the early 1980s. But they were from the Bronx, so Manhattan wasn’t that scary. Or they trusted my judgment, I don’t know.

But what happened to him that he’s here with all of us in this van? The world happened [laughs]. Being a weirdo in a town like that is fucked up. I’m not trying to sell it as a capital-T “trauma,” but I was a lefty living in a WASP-y suburb during the Reagan years and it was fucked up. I didn’t have any of the standard building blocks of male self-esteem. I was loved and supported by my family, but I was the least athletic person ever. So I got fucked with a lot before I knew anything about politics and I got fucked with a lot once I knew about politics. It was lonely and alienating. Finding hardcore punk was like wandering around in a strange land and finally running into someone who speaks the same language as you and can help you with the map. 

Dan with Lifetime. New Brunswick, NJ, 1996. Photo by Tim Owen.

Was that political awakening coming from home? Were your parents involved in those conversations?

DAN: Yeah, definitely. They had a very strong sense of what fairness is. Quite frankly, I have an allergy to discussing some of this stuff sometimes because I think, for them, some of that is probably grounded in their religious background. I think their idea of justice came from their experience with progressive twentieth-century Judaism.

When you say you have an “allergy” to discussing that, why do you think that is?

DAN: It’s just that my feelings about religion are complicated. People need what they need to get through the day. Life is full of pain and loss, and if spiritual life is part of how people survive that—and I know it is—I don’t get to say anything about that. My outrage directed at religion has to do with fundamentalism and what I see as this country’s inexorable slide into right-wing theology.

By which, at some point, religion just becomes the mechanism by which power exerts itself.

DAN: Right. It’s just another lever for enabling fascist-like inclinations. Like, in the balance between freedom and safety, we’re going to favor less freedom and more safety—at least for those in power.

I feel like these ideas are connected to that lyric on your new record that talks about the “cult of I”—which I loved.

DAN: Yeah. It’s an opening line. This is not a brilliant observation, but here’s the thing about America—and let’s be clear, I’m talking about the United States, because “America” is two continents running from almost one pole to the other—but America has never reckoned with the tension between individual liberty and collective responsibility. And I think the bias, especially on the right, is that individual liberty trumps collective responsibility. Did I use the word “trumps” by accident or on purpose? I don’t know [laughs]. But what we’re seeing is the idea that “what I need” and “what I want” and “my right to do whatever I want without any restrictions” is more important than what I would do for my community, in terms of safety or really everything.

Even when we were on tour in 1992, I think we operated on this assumption of fairness—or at least the idea of collective responsibility—but we don’t necessarily know that it was applied. Most of the time we just took whatever the promoters gave us, no questions asked. But we always want to believe that we have a sense of responsibility to each other, because without that, then what do we have?

DAN: And guarantee or not, there should be an open conversation about how the business is going to work. There’s money changing hands, so it is business on some level. So whether or not you ask for a guarantee or even quote-unquote “demand” a guarantee is less important to me than an honest conversation about what is happening with the business of the show. On that first tour, I wasn’t a party to most of those conversations at the end of the show. I remember being preoccupied with money in a different way, and here’s a way that our experiences were probably different that I’ve articulated recently: I was the only one in both bands with a credit card. And we rented a cargo van from Budget that was on my card because they needed a card to rent it. So I was stressed, because I didn’t have the money to pay for it if we didn’t have it as a band at the end of the month. I was stressed about money the whole time. But oddly, I was not the one having the conversations at the end of the show about getting paid.

Dan with Kid Dynamite. St. Andrew’s Church. College Park, MD. 1999. Photo by Mark Beemer.

I kind of wanted to ask you about becoming a singer. Because you never struck me as the type of person who wanted to be the center of attention.

DAN: Yeah, I’m not too comfortable with it.

Was it coincidental that you started singing after you had a stroke?

DAN: No. It was not a coincidence that it was post-stroke, but it was also equally very much a reaction to my experience with the dissolution of Lifetime and Kid Dynamite. Honestly, I just thought that if I’m writing all the music, and I’m singing, and I’m writing all the words, then nobody can quit and have the band fall apart. That was one of the premises. It was very much a survival thing.

I hadn’t been doing a band for a little over a year at that point. I was just working, working, working. And then I got out of the hospital [after the stroke] and I was like, “You’re missing something really important. You should be playing music.” In the wake of having an intense mortality experience, it didn’t make sense for me to make music and have someone else do the talking or write the lyrics. It seemed important that I make the music to talk about things that I thought were important, and in a way that made sense to me. But it was definitely a survival thing. Like, this band will end when I’m done with it, not when the singer quits.

There’s an old issue of Anti-Matter where Craig Wedren from Shudder to Think told me how his girlfriend gave him a copy of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, and told him how he was treating her poorly and that he needed to understand himself better. That book touches on a symbiosis between creativity and impending death or the feeling of that. Was that also in play for you?

DAN: Absolutely. I had been really discouraged about making music at the end of the ‘90s. I was trying really hard to make things work only to have them kind of fall apart. But nothing makes you treasure life and the time you have like—and this sounds dramatic—coming face to face with death at a young age. I still felt very much like a young person. But it was like, what am I doing? I’ve been working 60 hours a week. I know I’m trying to pay off student loans, but there’s also a lot more that I’m missing with this head-first dive into adult responsibility. So, when faced with destruction—your own or the destruction around you—what else can you do but create?

Is that why you have two records coming out within a month of each other?

DAN: Yeah, probably [laughs]. I mean, the timing has to do with a lot of other boring stuff, but yeah, I’d say so.

How would you describe the difference between the way Paint It Black or Open City plays a part in your psyche?

DAN: It’s a really complicated question because it’s hard to separate it from the processes of how things got done and how difficult it is to get things done. It’s hard to separate the feeling about the music and the words. I’m certainly proud of both things. With Paint It Black, I’m obsessed about the lyrics. Even the stuff that isn’t going to matter, like, I’m moving commas around or moving line breaks around, just for me to look at. I’m just really lyrically excited to put that into the world. Maybe this will connect to you as a writer, but I’m really excited about the refinement of those abilities—just expressing myself verbally about matters of survival and human existence.

I’m also grateful for collaboration because even though I write all the parts, without my fellow bandmates, everything would probably just be arranged like it was Start Today [laughs]. Especially after my stroke, but even starting out Kid Dynamite, this impulse to respond to feeling out of control by over-controlling everything is not a healthy impulse, but it’s an impulse I’m familiar with. And so the process of relinquishing control is just as important to me as the composing of thought—or maybe it’s an important part of it. Because I’m not proud of that impulse to control everything. I think it’s grotesque. It’s like a cousin of the fascist impulse that human beings struggle with.

Honestly, hearing you say that, I just think of that as the bedrock of growing up gay. It’s one of the reasons why so many queer people are control freaks, myself included.

DAN: You mean controlling information about who you are as a matter of survival.

Controlling information, controlling your movements, controlling your speech, controlling everything about your appearance and your demeanor—anything that might “give you away.” And then that spreads. Like, I remember even as a child I used to completely rearrange the furniture in my bedroom every other week. It was just to assert some ownership and power, in a life where I felt like I had none.

DAN: It allows you to feel like you’re in control of your environment in some small way, when you’re a child and you don’t have control over anything.

Absolutely. And so that was a very much a minor exertion of control that honestly intoxicated me because it was the only control I had. When you call it the cousin of fascist impulses, I get it, because that power is intoxicating.

DAN: Right. But I’m not trying to throw shade about other people’s experiences with control either because sometimes it can feel like a matter of survival. I’m just trying to come clean about my own unhealthy impulses. I wasn’t going to change history about past bands by having a stranglehold over how things were done or how things sounded. Because that’s the “cult of I,” right? 

So I assume Open City is even more collaborative because that’s not the thing you sing on.

DAN: Yeah. Open City evolved out of struggling to make sense of what was happening creatively up until then. Paint It Black was a band, but Jared [Shavelson] was now living in California and was minimally available because of his session work and being away on tour with various people all the time. So Andy [Nelson] and I were talking, and he said, “We need to do a band where everybody lives in Philadelphia and we practice every week.” He had been doing this thing with Chris Wilson, a punk cover band where they were performing as a different band every so often for charity. The first one they did was a bunch of shows as the Misfits with Ted Leo as Danzig. And so Chris, I think he had a lot that he wanted to express that he didn’t have an opportunity for playing with the Pharmacists. He wanted to do something faster and more aggressive. So we asked him if he wanted to play. We wanted to channel all the stuff we saw in basements in the ‘90s—the bands from San Diego and the Bay Area and the midwest…

So, basically, Jon Hiltz’s house.

DAN: Hiltz’s house. We originally called it Hiltz Basement-Core, or alternately Total Kirsch Worship. Those were the inside joke names for the band before we had a name. So then we were lucky enough to have Rachel join, who is a really accomplished musician in her own right, and even though she’s not playing a stringed instrument in this band, her musical sensibility is all over it, all over everything. She’s certainly a much better guitar player than me. So it’s a little weird playing kind of complicated guitar parts in front of her [laughs]. There’s one song we did together that felt really special, with her and I trading verses or trading lines.

Dan with Paint It Black. First Unitarian Church. Philadelphia, PA. 2005. Photo by Mark Beemer.

One thing I often mention when I’m talking about the difference between hardcore and emo is that, lyrically, there’s often a lot of “you, you, you” in hardcore and “I, I, I” in emo. In hardcore, you could say that calling other people out is almost a genre feature, and that definitely exists in Famine. There is an overarching “You” approach. So I guess my question is, do you feel an impulse to beat your own self up in a song?

DAN: Yeah. My hope is that there’s also a lot of “we”…

There is, but it’s usually a “we” versus “you.”

DAN: Yeah, I think I was trying to soften, but then Trump came into power [laughs]. And I understand that he didn’t make all this shit; he just tapped into and enabled a darkness that’s been a part of the American character all along. But man, there’s a lot more rot underneath than even I realized.

Do I feel the urge to beat myself up? I think I do it, but it’s implicit. The song I wrote for my son on the record definitely references my own myriad of faults that are laid bare in the process of parenting, but I don’t think I frame it as “I.” I don’t use the pronoun. So it’s implicit that my impatience and difficulty with disarray is a thing that I’m constantly struggling with as a parent—and certainly coming up short, often. That song is framed as a devotional rather than fully indulging in beating myself up. I don’t know if it’s more apparent now that I identify it, but that’s one that I labored on intensely and for a year because it had to be really authentic, and naked, in a way.

Is there a lyric that comes to mind that makes you feel particularly out there?

DAN: “An avalanche, and you were the first stone / Stitches neat and tight, but I came unsewn / Home to mother, son, and daughter / is breath returning to the lung after being underwater.” That’s probably as naked as I’ve gotten, aside from, “I’m apparently not too young to die,” because that lacks nuance.

And then there’s a line on the last song of the record: “I watched my father draw…” Oh, I’m gonna get… [pauses, visibly shaken, then continues]. “I watch my father draw his last breath / Mine is a similar affliction.” I feel pretty naked. That was hard to say [pauses again, tearily]. I think with the lyrical “I” that you talk about, I think I’m so afraid of self-indulgence, or things being received as self-indulgent, that I can be really judicious or sparing with it.

It’s interesting because I’ve always had the opposite inclination. Not that I’m inclined towards self-indulgence in a narcissistic way, but more that I think I feel better when I put myself out there than when I don’t. And I know that sometimes putting myself out there makes me vulnerable to criticism or perceptions of me that aren’t real, but it still feels worth it.

DAN: I agree with that. I didn’t know how else to articulate my grief. I ran out of words about my Dad, specifically. 

As someone in your line of work [as a clinical psychologist], I’m sure you have to deal with your fair share of grief among your patients.

DAN: Constantly. I wrapped up five minutes before we met, and literally walked out of that into our conversation.

How do you not take your work home with you in some way? You’re there as an empathic person, among other things, so you’re kind of tasked with taking some of these feelings on.

DAN: Yeah. I do take it home. It’s usually pretty easy for me to transition when I leave here and go back to my family, because the least I can do is be fully present for them. But I think it takes its toll, pivoting between being fully present for people to whom I’m not related to being fully present for my kids and for my partner. Usually, those chickens come home to roost an hour before my alarm goes off, when I’m lying awake worrying about whether I’ve done enough. Why don’t I write about that? I’m going with an implicit question here. Why don’t I write about that? Maybe I will. 

OK, so this is the part I don’t say, but is very much what it’s about now: I’m talking about the American “cult of I,” and I’m talking about right-wing theocracy, and I’m talking about the impossibility of raising children in this world. That’s what I’m talking about. All of it. That’s why there’s so much “You.” I’m like, How do I protect my children and teach them to protect themselves from this monstrousness at the heart of our national character, our political structure, the world on fire that we’re responsible for. How? It seems untenable.

People have asked me over the years if I’ve ever thought about having kids, and yes, there was a period where I thought it was something I could do somewhere in the future. But at this point, I just can’t even imagine it.

DAN: I know. All of our crust punk friends are like, “How could you bring kids into this world?”—not so much like they were coming at us with that question, but more in terms of how they answered the question for themselves. And my question is more like, how could you not? Who’s going to be around to fight them when we’re gone?

There’s a lot of stuff on the new [Paint It Black] record that seems to return to safety and survival, at least thematically, so what you’re saying makes sense. I hear that in what you wrote. There’s one line, in particular, where you talk about closing your eyes as a means of survival, and I really felt that. Because there is a point where sometimes I feel like the only way I can get through the day, is to stop thinking. Like even this past weekend, hearing about that show in Minneapolis that got shot up… 

DAN: I haven’t heard about it yet.

It was a basement show, with predominantly queer and trans punk kids. And apparently someone unrelated to the show saw what it was and came in and started shooting people. At least one person died, several injured. So when I hear this kind of stuff… I always think about safety as a queer person and it’s exhausting. And sometimes I just want to close my eyes. Shut my laptop. I don’t want fucking MSNBC on. And maybe I don’t even want to listen to the Paint It Black record [laughs].

DAN: Right. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Before I had kids—not to reduce it all to that again, but it’s central to who I am and what my life is organized around—but before I had kids, I had been working for myself for a long time. I made my own schedule, and I would get up in the morning and read the fucking newspaper while drinking coffee for over an hour every day. I really have to titrate it now. There’s only so much I can let in because of that thing you’re experiencing. But how do you close the book on that one, Norm? That hits home, doesn’t it? I mean, they all hit home, but that’s gotta feel especially personal.

Absolutely. It hits a lot of key components of who I am. Like, I remember when the Pulse shooting happened, I was probably catatonic for an entire day—just sitting there, processing it almost as if I were there. But especially now as I’m older and I’ve experienced so much already, there’s this feeling that I just have to protect myself. At some point, taking everything on can be masochistic or soul-destroying.

DAN: If I let myself feel it like I did when I was eighteen, I’d drown. That’s how I ended up here [in hardcore], because I felt it so intensely—even stuff that was not happening to me personally at all. I felt it all so intensely and personally. But I also like to think we have more in common than just outrage.

This seems like a good time to ask this question, and this will be the final note, but I really wanted to see if my interpretation of this has any merit at all. There is a lyric in “The Uncomfortable Silence” that makes me feel like you’re talking about the hardcore scene. That lyric was: “I see the armor, see the shield / and I felt the anger, what it concealed / Dig deeper, I dare you to risk / Underneath the anger, what might we miss?” Do you feel like you missed something?

DAN: You asked about beating myself up, and that line is a “we” that is definitely an “I.” And what I missed is grief, fear, vulnerability. I’ve said this a few times in the last few years—I don’t know how publicly—but I’m not interested in the limitation of this kind of music as simply just a performance of male anger. For myself or for anybody. It’s extremely limited. It’s just a fragment of our range of experience. And I’m only really interested in strength as part of the experience of vulnerability. Just like I’m not interested in courage without fear. I feel like I’m working to be in that balance. And the irony of it is that I’m very comfortable expressing anger with a microphone in my hand, but I really struggle to express anger one-on-one to the people I love. It’s something I’ve been working on for decades.

How much of that do you think goes back to that first impression I had of you? Like, you didn’t seem like “the angry person.” Is that just something you don’t want to be a part of your perceived make-up?

DAN: In person, I’m much more about love. Not that those things are incompatible. Like, I don’t think you can have intimacy without conflict and without anger. And I’ve certainly been guilty of being conflict-avoidant, because it’s really uncomfortable. But it’s still definitely a work-in-progress for me—as a musician, as a partner, as a friend, as a parent. Right now, I think I’m doing OK.

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