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Jan 05, 2016 By Laura Studarus Photography by Richmond Lam Issue #55 - November/December 2015 - EL VY

Murray Lightburn is feeling philosophical. The Dears frontman apologies profusely for his conversational rabbit trails, crediting his meandering deep thoughts to the exhaustion of balancing album promotion and daily life as the father of two. But he’s also the first to acknowledge that his mental processes onstage and off mirror each other. It’s something he found himself trying to expand upon with his band’s sixth album, Times Infinity Volume One, and the forthcoming Volume Two (due out in early 2016). Deep thought is inevitable. But it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom.

“When you scratch just far enough beneath the surface of everything that we’ve done, what we tend to do is examine a problem almost to death in search of a way out of the problem,” he notes. “The real difference with this album is that it’s not so focused on problems or anything too negative. I think where it’s coming from, there’s a sense of looking back with a nostalgic sort of feeling.”

Times Infinity‘s lyrics are some of the most straightforward the band has offered up, comforts offered by lovers, family, and friends. Lightburn attributes this warm sentimentality in no small part to his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, having been a part of The Dears for 20 years, and coming up on his 10th wedding anniversary with his wife and Dears keyboardist, Natalia Yanchak.

“These kinds of commitments that you make seem to go on forever. You don’t see a way out or any reason for it to be over. You think about it in the sense of like, this foreverness that comes into your mind. You start thinking about the things that you want in your life forever…. That’s something that I wanted to examine with the blessing of the band, lyrically. That’s what I really wanted to bring forward. This idea of ‘I love you times infinity.’”

Like most of The Dears’ offerings, Times Infinity is a dense listen, the drama of guitars and percussion given a sizable assist by Lightburn’s sonorous bellow. The band admits that their complex musical and world views don’t necessarily fit into the cultural landscape, offering up a verbal eye-roll at the thought they might ever be tempted to conform. Yanchak, who sings on album tracks “You Can’t Get Born Again” and “Onward and Downward,” is pragmatic about The Dears’ place in pop culture.

“There’s no one out there trying to find songwriters,” she says. “We’ll never have a Janis Joplin again. We’ll never have a not visually perfect, asymmetrical celebrity that’s also a super talented artist…. We’re definitely not symmetrical! It’s a superficial business. But all entertainment is.”

For his part, Lightburn is more optimistic. Sure, they didn’t dumb anything down. But perhaps there’s a market, somewhere on the fringes, for their brand of noir pop sensitivity.

“Everybody likes a story,” he muses. “What’s the story about? You can fill in the blanks and put whatever you want in those blanks and apply it to yourself. I think that’s where the refined part comes into record making and songwriting. Taking the time off that we did, wandering the wilderness and coming up with this. We definitely do hope that it stands apart. But not so much that it’s ignored.”

[Note: This article first appeared in Under the Radar’s November/December Issue, which is still on newsstands. This is its debut online.]

www.thedears.org