Interview with Dante Shivers

Dante Shivers’ “Changes,” a song about wondering whether you’ll ever live the life you imagine was eventually finished while he was actually doing it. That gives the song a very personal weight. I also like how his songwriting seems to move between alternative rock, blues, folk and more stripped-down moments depending on what the story needs. For me, “Changes” feels like a song about looking back at who you were while finally becoming the person you hoped to be.

Interview with Dante Shivers

“Changes” was written across two cities and then remained untouched for almost fifteen years. What was it about the song that made you want to return to it after such a long period?

I don't think I ever consciously decided to abandon it. It was just one of those songs that followed me around without ever feeling finished. I had written most of it in London and New York, but something about it never quite felt ready.

When I came back to it almost fifteen years later, I realized that maybe the song hadn't been waiting for another verse or a better arrangement. Maybe it had been waiting for me to understand it.

I had spent those years living through many of the things I was wondering about when I originally wrote it. Suddenly the song didn't feel like an old unfinished piece anymore. It felt strangely current.

The song began with a very intimate moment involving a ballerina, a late-night conversation and the image of ballet shoes hanging by the window. How did those details shape the emotional world of the song?

That night really established the emotional vocabulary of the song.

We had spent hours talking about traveling, dreams, life, and whether either of us would ever have the courage to leave what was familiar and actually pursue the lives we imagined for ourselves.

Later, she was sleeping beside me and I was awake looking through the window at the moon, with her ballet shoes nearby. It was incredibly quiet. There was something beautiful but uncertain about the whole scene.

Those little physical details became inseparable from the larger questions we had been talking about. Even the line “Watch the clock grow old” was partly influenced by Big Ben and the imagery of London. Time was everywhere in the song before I completely realized I was writing about it.

When you first wrote “Changes,” you were wondering whether you would ever pursue the life you imagined for yourself. How different was it to finish the song while actually living that journey?

That was probably the strangest part.

When I originally wrote it, I was imagining a hypothetical future. Fifteen years later, I was traveling through Asia, living outside the United States and actively trying to rediscover what I wanted my life to be.

Then I found myself in Thailand finishing this song written by a younger version of me who was terrified he might never have the courage to do exactly what I was doing.

There's something almost absurdly full-circle about that.

The song hadn't changed nearly as much as I had.

Did returning to an older piece of songwriting feel like reconnecting with a younger version of yourself, and did that change the way you approached the recording?

Absolutely. And I felt strangely protective of him.

I didn't want to rewrite the song simply because I'm technically a different songwriter now. It would have been very easy to make the lyrics more sophisticated or change things I might phrase differently today, but then I would have erased the person who actually wrote it.

So the recording became less about correcting my younger self and more about collaborating with him.

There are two versions of me on that record separated by almost fifteen years, and I wanted both of them to remain audible.

The title “Changes” feels particularly significant given how much your own life changed between writing and recording the song. Did its meaning evolve for you over those fifteen years?

Completely.

When I was younger, change felt like something waiting in the future. It was exciting, frightening and abstract.

Now I understand it as something constant. People disappear from your life. Relationships end. Places stop feeling like home. Dreams evolve. You become versions of yourself you never anticipated.

So “Watch the clock grow old, but don't lose your rock 'n' roll” means much more to me now.

The “rock 'n' roll” isn't really music. It's that essential thing inside you that remains yours while everything else changes.

I think I understood that intellectually when I wrote it. Now I've lived it.

You completed the recording in Thailand while travelling to rediscover yourself. How did being so far from the places where the song was originally written affect the final version?

It gave the song perspective.

London and New York were almost ghosts by that point. I wasn't trying to recreate those places. I was remembering them from thousands of miles away and through fifteen years of distance.

I think that naturally made the recording more reflective.

And there was something wonderfully appropriate about finishing it in Thailand. A song born from a conversation about whether I would ever go out and experience the world was finally being completed while I was doing exactly that.

I couldn't have planned that if I'd tried.

Your music moves between alternative rock, blues, folk and cinematic arrangements depending on what the song demands. What determines the sonic language you choose for a particular story?

The song decides.

I don't sit down and think, I'm going to write an alternative rock song today. Usually I have an emotion, a lyric, a melody or even just an image, and I follow it.

I think arrangement is another form of storytelling. If something feels fragile, putting a wall of guitars behind it just because that's supposedly “my sound” could destroy what made it interesting. Another song might need exactly that wall of sound.

Genre is useful for describing music after it's made. I don't find it particularly useful while I'm making it.

How do you balance the deeply personal nature of your songwriting with your desire to leave enough emotional space for listeners to find their own experiences in it?

That's incredibly important to me.

I know what my songs mean to me, but I don't believe that gives me ownership over what they mean to somebody else.

I tend to write through imagery rather than explaining everything literally. That gives the listener somewhere to enter the song with their own memories.

If someone tells me one of my songs means something completely different to them than what I originally intended, I don't correct them. I actually think that's one of the most beautiful things that can happen to a song.

Once I've released it, part of it belongs to whoever needs it.

Looking back at the songs that eventually became American Nightmare, do you hear a common thread connecting such different musical styles and periods of your life?

Yes, but I don't think the common thread is musical.

It's me.

American Nightmare contains songs written across very different periods of my life, and they don't all sound alike. Some are delicate, some are angry, some are cinematic, some are strange, and some are much simpler.

For a long time I might have seen that as inconsistency. Now I think that's the point.

The record is almost a collection of different versions of the same person trying to understand love, fear, loss, identity and what it means to keep going.

The continuity is emotional rather than stylistic.

Love, loss, identity, regret, change and resilience recur throughout your work. Which of those themes feels most important to you at this particular point in your life?

Identity.

Not identity in the sense of putting a label on myself, but figuring out what remains when you remove all the things you've used to define yourself.

I've spent a lot of time recently traveling, being alone, meeting people who know nothing about my history and waking up in places where almost nothing is familiar.

There's something liberating about that. You begin discovering which pieces of yourself were circumstance and which ones are actually you.

I think that's probably why Changes resurfaced when it did.

As both songwriter and producer, how do you know when a song needs a larger cinematic arrangement and when its emotional impact is stronger when stripped back?

Usually when I notice the production instead of the song, I've gone too far.

I love big arrangements. Strings, guitars, percussion, strange textures, enormous builds. I can happily disappear down that rabbit hole forever.

But every element has to earn its place.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is leave somebody alone with a voice and an instrument. Other times the emotion genuinely feels enormous and the arrangement needs to become enormous with it.

I'm not interested in minimalism or complexity for their own sake. I'm looking for the arrangement that feels like the emotion.

Having finally completed “Changes” after fifteen years, has the experience changed the way you think about unfinished songs, old ideas and the possibility of returning to them later in life?

Definitely.

I used to think an unfinished song represented some kind of failure. Like I hadn't figured it out.

Changes taught me that sometimes “not yet” is a perfectly legitimate creative decision, even when you don't realize you're making it.

We have this instinct to finish everything while we're still inside the moment that created it. But sometimes distance is exactly what the work needs.

There are songs I've carried with me for years that I look at differently now because I'm different.

So I'm much less inclined to throw an old idea away simply because I couldn't finish it at the time.

Some songs might just need you to catch up with them.

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(•)> That's all, Folks! Check out Dant Shivers on the Pigeon Opinion Playlist