Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips make a very attractive couple. (photo from myspace)

Dean and Britta play tonight at the Black Cat with Keren Ann. Doors open at 8.

That may sound overly precious, but Dean and Britta are pretty precious too. They got together during their days in Luna (one of my all-time favorite bands, btw) and tied the knot while recording of their second album, Back Numbers. Like their debut, L’Aventurra, the disc combines original duets with covers of mostly obscure songs that are hard to imagine in anyone else’s hands.

I came into the interview expecting only to speak with Britta, but got a pleasant surprise as Dean emerged from the hotel gym just in time for me to ask him a couple questions too. The whole thing had the pleasant, familiar vibe of talking to my sister and brother-in-law on a sunday afternoon…if my sister and brother-in-law were rock stars. It also provided me a chance to ask them both the same questions and see if the married couple-mind meld had started in earnest.

It doesn’t appear that they’ve reached the stage of finishing each others questions, but they’re probably close. Come to the Black Cat tonight and feel the love.

The New Gay Zack: Is it hard to lead a normal married life on the road?

Britta Phillips: We don’t tour steadily, we go on a tour for three weeks and then home a for a couple weeks. Dean has an eight year old, we don’t like to go away for more than three weeks.

TNG: I’ll warn you that I have a lot of marriage questions, I never get to talk to married musicians. You got married between your first and second album. Did it change your music at all?

BP: Nah, I don’t think so. We actually got married during the recording of Back Numbers. It just came up and once we said ‘alright, we’re gonna do’ it we had to do it right away. It would’ve just sat in the back of our mind the whole time we made the album, it would’ve been hard to concentrate. We were just gonna go to city hall and go back to the studio, but [producer] Tony Visconti said ‘Just take the day off.”

TNG: Are there other married indie rock couples? Do you hang out with them?

BP: Sometimes we go to John Spencer [of The John Spencer Blues Explosion] and [his wife] Christina Martinez [of Boss Hog’s] place. I’m trying to think of other couples…We run into Thurston and Kim [Sonic Youth’s Moore and Gordon] from time time.

TNG: Do you still do rock star stuff on the road, like drink and pick up groupies together?

BP: We had party on the bus in LA, we were dancing and drinking whiskey. The other guys in our band are younger, they’re 20 and 27, they party more than we do.

TNG: Do you and Dean share equally in the songwriting process?

BP: Dean is into writing more lyrics, but we both generate a lot of music. We don’t really keep tabs but it seems to work out. On “Singer Sing” we did the music together but I wrote most of the lyrics, and on “Words You Used To Say,” he wrote most of lyrics.

TNG: How do you pick which songs you cover?

BP: Dean picks all the covers, but I jumped on “You Turned My Head Around,” I thought it would be fun. Sonic Boom, a friend of ours who played on the record, said you guys should cover that. He also suggested “White Horses,” he remembered it from when he was a kid, it was the theme for a Yugoslavian T show that was big in England.

TNG: : I remember reading a review that said “You Turned My Head Around” was the only time you really let loose on “Back Numbers,” because your other songs are pretty mellow. Are you normally a quiet person?

BP: Kinda, yeah, I’m pretty quiet. All this stuff I’ve been writing, it tends to be quiet and intimate. It was really fun to go from that to something loud and high. I might do more of that in the future.

TNG: Do you see Dean and Britta as a continuation of Luna or as its own project?

BP: Its both, we’re both the same people although its definitely different because [guitarist] Sean Eden’s in the band and its just the two of us making music. Luna definitely had a sound that I wouldn’t have contributed too much too, I wouldn’t have felt as free to hang on and arrange and add keyboards too. Its a different sound, Luna was its own thing. .

TNG: Do you think your audience just comes to see Luna songs or that you have your own fan base?

BP: Bit of both. People always like to see Luna songs and the Galaxie 500 songs, but people are familiar with our stuff as well. It’s a mix.

TNG: Do you get annoyed with every article about you mentioning Jem and The Holograms?

BP: Its not annoying at all, its fun. I like it. There was a young kid at the show last night who had me sign his t-shirt twice. He had written Jem on it, and he was much too young to remember Jem anyway.

TNG: Are there more Dean and Britta records your future?

BP: We haven’t started working on more albums yet. Dean’s been writing a book and we’ve been touring quite a bit. We do have some stuff on our home computers and studios. When we have time we’ll figure out what we’ve got. We’ll do something else for sure.

At this point, Britta herself goes down to the gym and Dean picks up the phone. I actually quoted him in my senior yearbook (“He’s a softly spoken tiger in a sea of pussycats,” from “The Rustler,”) so this actually made me nervous.

TNG: Did getting married change your music?

Dean Wareham: The process was different because we were living together. On the first album I wrote some songs and Britta wrote songs, but on this one we wrote songs together.

TNG: Can you still lead a rock and roll l
ifestyle when you’re married?

DW: A little bit. You know you have to be careful with that rock and roll lifestyle. If you’re talking about drugs or whatever, drugs and sex or addiction, some people can handle those things in moderation and other people see it destroying their lives. Its kind of silly, you become a fashion victim in a way, its dangerous. I’m a moderate person. They say everything in moderation, including moderation. If you read my book, its really very mild compared to what Slash from G ‘N Roses did.

TNG: Was it hard to go from writing music to writing a book?

DW: Very hard…It was a year and half of work. Most of the memoirs that come out of politicians and musicians, they haven’t written them because they don’t have time. Certainly those politicians with a book a year, its like, ‘come on, when did you write that?” Everything’s ghost written, though some of the person always slips through. Slash sounds more thoughtful in the pages of his book than I’ve ever heard him be. The Keith Richard’s’ book, my editor says “its surprisingly lucid.” I said he’s not writing it, lucid is not a word you put together with Keith Richards.

TNG: How do you pick what songs you and Britta cover?

DW: We tend to stay away from really famous songs, or things that are perfect. We like to pick something we think we can improve a little bit, you sit down to play it and try to figure out if you can pull it off. There’s one cover we did last year, Bobby Darin’s “Distractions,” it was Bobby from his folk music phase. It was hard for me to slip into that persona, I’m not sure i did it convincingly, thats why we didn’t put it on the album. When you sing it sometimes it just sounds silly. Luna tried to do Led Zeppelin once and it was silly. Paula Abdul I could do, Robert Plant not so much.

TNG: Do you get tired of always being compared to Lou Reed?

SW: We don’t get those anymore. It was annoying for awhile, but now we get Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood,I guess you have to be careful what you do. We had Sterling Morrison from Velvet Underground play on the second Luna album and it got worse from there. They’re a reference point, one of my favorite bands, but I don’t think Luna sounds like them, I don’t think anyone does. Luna was a lot more pop, not so much drone and noise…Anyway, they gotta compare you to someone. Lou was kind enough to give you a blurb for my book.

TNG: Are you two friends?

DW: I don’t see him that often, last time was at The Warhol Museum a few months ago, he had an exhibit of photos and a Q & A. I deejayed after reception, that was last time. Its nice to see him, he’s always been very nice to me.

TNG: How many people do you think show up to see Luna songs vs. an actual Dean and Britta performance?

DW: I don’t know, there’s definitely some people who show up to see Luna, others who show up to see Galaxie 500 and others complain and say ‘I wish they wouldn’t do Luna, they do the Dean and Brtita stuff better.

TNG: How much is Dean and Britta a continuation of Luna and how much is it its own project?

DW: I feel like its continuation. Britta sings a lot now, but thats nice for me, I can take a break. I time it so I can drink beer when she sings. We’re quieter than Luna, but I don’t feel like its that tragically different. I kind of like now that I feel like I can do a quiet, mellow set more than we did with luna. , We don’t always feel like rocking.

TNG