When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: The Blue Note
Tickets: $20
Before the band’s Blue Note show this week with the Shiny Toy Guns, lead singer Jared Watson (Dirty J) took some time to talk to MOVE. After hearing about touring, the creative process and more, we stand by the opinion we’ve always had: The Dirty Heads are cool as hell.
**[MOVE]:** Have you guys worked with the Shiny Toy Guns a lot, other than this tour?
**[Jared Watson]:** No. This is the first time we’ve met them, first time we’ve ever worked with them, but, you know, we’re fans of their music. They always have a bunch of songs with like snowboard videos and skate videos. And we kinda get played on the same radio stations and things like that.
**[M]:** The tour just started, so obviously that’s on the agenda for the foreseeable future, but do you guys have any plans after the Tour Odyssey?
**[J]:** We’re doing a small tour in Brazil for about two, three weeks, and then we come back and actually finish up this tour.
**[M]:** How else are you promoting your new album _Cabin By the Sea_?
**[J]:** We have a new video coming out. We’ll be doing a bunch of radio shows. We’ll be doing a bunch of acoustic things. We have a new acoustic album coming out actually, probably closer to summertime.
**[M]:** What’s the new video?
**[J]:** The new video is for “Cabin By the Sea,” the actual title track of the album.
**[M]:** I have to ask about one of the album’s songs, “Smoke Rings.” Did you guys write that together?
**[J]:** We take breaks and just do all this crazy stuff to get inspiration, or we get bored on certain songs. So we’ll just mess around, and Mario (Caldato, Jr., who worked with the Beastie Boys) and Dave (bassist David Floral) came up with this. And it was super grimy and rad, and super fun, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got an idea for this,’ and I wrote my verse, the very first verse, in like ten minutes or something like that.
It just came, and once we had that first, I laid it down and Duddy (Bushnell) wrote his verse in like an hour, and that song was done. We had been watching movies the night before. We were smoking and watching all these weird movies that Mario had brought, and we remembered that there was that funny part about long hair and all this stuff and hippies. And we were like, “Oh my God, we should put that at the top of the song.” So it all came about in pretty much one day.
**[M]:** Obviously a lot of your songs reference smoking things other than tobacco. Do you catch any heat for that?
**[J]:** No, we haven’t yet. I feel like our music and message and what we’re all about is almost kind of like a lifestyle. And we don’t push anything on anybody. We’re not pushing, we’re not being malicious about it, and we’re not being political about it. So you know, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen and you don’t have to partake and come to the shows or whatever … We’re not 100 percent about smoking weed. We do believe that it should be legal. We do have a stance on it, but we don’t push that on anybody. We’re just talking about our lives or what we like or what we’re passionate about, and that comes through in music, but we’re not weed Nazis.
**[M]:** Do you get tired of singing the same songs over and over?
**[J]:** I’m so stoked to be where we are and to be doing what we’re doing, playing the music that we made for our fans. I don’t think we ever get sick of it cause it’s just a fucking awesome job.