Words by Corban Goble
Photos by Victoria Jacob

Beach Fossils frontman Dustin Payseur is an interesting soul. He’s a published poet and a Dadaist. He’s a musician with his eyes squarely set in long-gone eras, avoiding contemporary influence and shunning modern records, out of principle. He prefers to work independently, and does so tirelessly, fleshing out songs quickly but deeply entrenched in the process. His songs represent gravely-etched thoughts, set to rock ‘n’ roll translation.

Beach Fossils’ music comes in waves of psych-soaked surf rock, hazy, weird cousins of the genre’s‘60s staples. Following a string of successful 7-inches, Beach Fossils will release their debut LP on Captured Tracks in 2010.

So you’ve got a lot coming up.
2009’s been a really fun year. Doing a lot of recording—I spent about eight months on the album, just kind of getting a feel for this specific sound that Beach Fossils has. There’s been a lot of press. There’ve been a lot of shows and it’s been fun. In 2010, the album’s gonna come out. There’s going to be a lot of touring. We’re doing a tour in February with the The Beets and Christmas Island. It’s an East Coast thing. We’re going to go down in March for SXSW, so I’m hoping that it works out. I remember reading some articles before with people being like, ‘Oh, this summer band, this summer fad…’ and this kind of stuff. I’m hoping people realize that it’s not a summer thing.

Do you feel that you’re unfairly grouped in with the whole surf-rock/lo-fi thing going on right now? Is that frustrating?
Absolutely. I definitely have a specific sound that I’m going for when I record but it’s not intentionally lo-fi. It’s the style I’ve been recording in since I was a kid and all the sudden it’s become the popular sound and a lot of people are doing it on purpose. We’ve been lumped into it, but it’s alright. I think recently that The New York Times featured one of our shows and they called us ‘medium-fi’ and I thought that was pretty nice.

I used to think when the record store went away in favor of finding music on the Internet that genre classification would evaporate a little bit. But I think it’s even worse now, in terms of obnoxious micro-labeling. All of these crazy new genres getting invented daily. ‘Chillwave’ perhaps being the main offender.
Everything is so specific and so detailed. But it’s like there’s a string of bands or a vein of bands that are all doing the same sound. I’m definitely not going after anything that I’ve been hearing on any modern records, contemporary records. I really love The Byrds and I really love free jazz, even just visual art in general inspires me, all kinds of art. It’s not like I just put on a record last summer and was like, ‘Oh, I gotta do this!”’

What do you make of the scene in Brooklyn? I understand you’re not originally from New York.
I really do like what’s going on in Brooklyn right now. In a lot of ways, I think it’s similar to what was happening in the East Village in the ‘70s when you had the no-wave bands and the punk bands, a lot of different styles and people were playing saxophones and playing keyboards and just lots of strange song arrangements, etc. There’s definitely a lot of that going on in Brooklyn right now. And that makes me happy. I go out and see a show and it’s not one genre. There’s a lot of different bands playing a lot of different sounds and a lot of people doing original sounds. There’s definitely some people out there who are going on what’s cool and what other people are doing, but there’s definitely a lot of people breaking new ground all the time and it’s fascinating.

So what kind of balance is achieved, do you think? While music is more democratic than ever and good music can be found more easily than any time in history, location still matters.
You can tour in your own city when you live in New York. You can play all the time and there’s always a different crowd coming out to the show. Everybody has different reactions and everyone is writing something different and everyone is receiving it in different ways and it’s nice. In a smaller town, it’s cool because it’s a tight-knit scene, but it ends up being the same thing over and over and there’s not really any room for breathing. There’s definitely a lot more copycat going on in a small town where everyone’s playing the same thing to play it safe rather than experimenting.

Yeah. I feel like living here keeps me motivated and hungry to get better as a writer and a person.
I like that, though. It’s a good challenge. I’ve recorded the first Beach Fossils record and I’m done with that and I did that. There’s this specific sound that happened on that album, but I feel like it would be a mistake to put out the second record and have songs that would fit on the first album. You gotta constantly evolve. Not necessarily with the times and with what’s going on; you look at somebody like Tom Waits who’s just evolving in his head, on what he likes instead of what people are doing.

Why do you do all the physical releases, the 7-inches and all that? Do you like putting stuff out that way? Or are you an ‘albums’ artist?
There’s a charm to doing a 7-inch and doing an EP because it’s something you can just blast out in a very short period of time and you’re very focused on exactly what you want to do and it’s over. But when it comes to an album, you kinda have to tie everything together and you have to make sure, consciously, that there’s variety so it doesn’t get stagnant and it doesn’t become like you put on the album and it sounds like the same song still playing at the end. For an EP, I feel like it’s alright to stick to the same thing or whatever you want. There’s something really nice about doing both. I guess it’s like a cliché pick, but The Beatles’ White Album sounds like a tons of different 7-inches all on one album. It’s just nice to have that variety going on.

So, being in with the Woodsist crew must be pretty cool.
Actually, in the last few weeks I’ve been talking to the labels and it was just going to be Woodsist and Captured Tracks, but now [the album] is just going to be released on Captured Tracks because [Woodsist] has been busy with a lot of other releases and touring. I love both of those labels; I love Woodsist and I love Captured Tracks. I think the bands that are coming out on them are great. Again, the whole thing about variety, there’s a lot of variety going on there. You can see the inspiration from other bands coming out on those records, but you can also see those records inspiring other bands. I feel proud to be a part of that because I think it’s something special that’s going on right now.

Is there anything you’re going to remember in particular when someone says ‘2009’?
Purposefully, I was trying to stay detached from a lot of records that were coming out in 2009 because, working on my own album, I didn’t want to start getting inspiration from things that were coming out now, so I was just listening to a lot of Indian classical music and a lot of ‘60s psychedelic music just to make sure that I wouldn’t be on the same line as the trends and they wouldn’t subconsciously inspire me. Honestly, going out to so many shows constantly in 2009. There were so many great shows coming through, and playing a lot of great shows, and just meeting a lot of great people. It’s been a very refreshing year for me.

So what was your favorite show?
The Woodsist/Captured Tracks festival was so awesome. So many of my favorite contemporary bands playing and just individually playing shows with those bands and playing with their friend’s bands. Off the top of my head, it’s hard for me to specifically think of something. There’s a band called Reading Rainbow from Philly, we played a handful of shows with them, those have been really good highlights just because they put on such a good show. It’s nice when you’re playing with a lot of bands and you don’t have to sit through someone’s set just wishing it was over. It’s nice when you book it yourself and get in on that rather than just somebody who doesn’t understand where you’re coming from, just throwing you on a show. CMJ was kinda weird for that reason, just playing with so many bands.

Man, covering CMJ was rough. It was almost like going to class. You were one place in the Lower East Side, and then you’re like, but I really gotta see this band in Brooklyn in 15 minutes!
I was sick all throughout CMJ and I could hardly sing. The whole time I was just ready for it to be over. We’re playing SXSW in March. I’ve never played it, I’ve never even been to Texas before. I’m hoping that’ll be a little different. Maybe because we don’t live there it’ll be a little more exciting.

What’s your resolution for 2010? I mean, besides being successful with the record.
Definitely the record. Going on tour and continuing to do this and working on new material. It’s so nice to be finally done with the album, I can breathe again. I don’t have to focus on that anymore. When I’m starting a project, I can work on so many songs at a time and not really think about it, but after a while when I’m working on an album and I’m almost done with it, the last few songs are the hardest, ‘cause it’s like, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what’s going to fit with these other songs. I’m just happy that I get to start over again with a new album.

I’ve always thought of the finishing of a creative project is the true art of the thing. Because sometimes it’s so impossible. That’s why I like journalism—I like deadlines. Do you have to set one for yourself? I know recording is more flexible these days because you’re not really getting flooded with financing and expectations, necessarily.
It was more of a personal deadline—I need to get this done. I’ve just been spending too much time on it. The first two months I spent on recording it, I recorded the majority of the album probably and then in between I didn’t know what to do. We were just playing a lot of shows and getting a feel as a whole band playing together rather than just me. I’d be working on a little bit of material with them and then I didn’t record anything in between that. It was difficult to get focused on that, and at the very end, I was like, I have to wrap this up. Four or five songs right there at the very end. I did all the work at the beginning and end.

There’s a lot of freedom involved. When it comes to labels like Woodsist and Captured Tracks, the people that run ‘em are musicians themselves and they know exactly what it’s like. They’re not trying to screw you over. They’re sensitive to your needs as an artist and your space for breathing and creating. They haven’t been harsh on the criticism, which I wouldn’t mind if somebody was, but it’s nice that they knew what they were getting into when they told me they wanted to do a record with me. They’ve been pleased with the outcome so that’s a nice feeling.

So how do you work? What’s your creative process like?
I definitely isolate myself and I work best on my own. I enjoy working with other people and making songs with other people, but sometimes I find it really difficult because I have a vision and I just want to get through with that on my own and I can’t have anyone telling me what I want to do and I don’t want to take the time to tell anyone else what to do. I just want to do it. Usually, I sit around with a guitar and I come up with one riff, and by the time I’ve recorded that riff, a scratch take or just something to remember, I’ve already got the whole song playing in my head, so I just hurry up and finish that in one setting. Most of the time, I finish the song in a sitting and before I sat down I had no idea what I was going to do. I try not to think about it too much, because if I don’t evaluate it, I think whatever comes out naturally is going to be the best because if you start thinking about it it’s going to start turning into something else and it’s going to be difficult. That’s when you’re going to trash a song and never want to go back to it again.

Can you trust that process going forward? Do you ever have to force it?
I can still force it out. It’s just that I don’t work very well under pressure. I like to be completely by myself, to be alone for a while, and be able to think on it and meditate on it for a long time before I do any work, sometimes just holding it back for a while and not doing any work lets it flow out better when I do get down to finally doing it rather than pressuring myself on a daily basis to record a song.

I really like that song “Time” that got posted on Pitchfork. That was cool.
The funny thing about that one is that I had finished up the record and Mike Sniper of Captured Tracks told me that they were going to do two 7-inches instead of one and asked if I had any other songs hanging around. And I was like, OK, let me see what I have. I had recorded so many songs for the LP that I didn’t know if I was going to use. So I went back and found the song “Time”, and I didn’t even really like that song. It was just something else I could use to fill up the 7-inch, probably a lot of people won’t really hear it. The next thing I knew it was on Pitchfork and I was like, ‘Oh no!’ It sounds so different from the LP that it might give a weird first impression. But that’s fine with me. Everyone’s had this whole image of happy summertime music or whatever, Beach Fossils, and that song has a little bit of a darker sound to it. So that’s fine. And I do like the track.

Is there anything you’d like to talk about that isn’t usually covered? I’m sure these things get a little too straightforward sometimes. Just go wild, man.
A lot of people don’t ask me about my influences. All the music that I’ve mentioned already in the interview, psychedelic music and Indian classical music, things like that inspire me. Dadaism has a huge inspiration on me, as far as chance goes, just sitting down and letting whatever happens happen. Beat poetry, I love poetry and things like that. I write poetry myself; definitely different than writing lyrics. I published a book of poetry in 2007 and I’ve actually been working on another one for a little while. I’m almost done with that. I could put that out this year too. I don’t know if anyone would read it; but I don’t really care. It’s a thing I do for myself. I guess there’s not much more to say.