Austin’s interview with up-and-coming musician Trashdog.
How long have you been writing/creating music?
I’ve been writing/recording my own stuff probably since 2003? Probably earlier than that even. Initially everything I did I put out under my own name until the formation of DGHD in 2013 when I started recording under Sawa Meron. I think it was 2017 though when I formally started going as Trashdog.
Where did the name Trashdog originate from?
One night I had a dream where I was on tour with one of my other bands, Leche. It was morning and I had just gotten out of the shower and was looking at a neatly stacked pile of t-shirts trying to decide which one I should wear for the show that night.
The first shirt had a picture of an extremely fucked up rat on it that said “We Love Our Second Venue” – obviously I couldn’t wear that one because in the dream we were on our third night of tour and “it wouldn’t make any sense”.
The next shirt was an extremely weird perspective drawing of a first-person view of being in a movie theater audience, with some tense yet illegible dream-speak on the screen. That shirt was “too boring.” The next shirt had a picture of Jerry Seinfeld holding an AK-47.
Underneath the image was the text TRASHDOG. I woke up almost immediately laughing and realized I had to create that image, which then became the artwork for my first album.
Besides music what do you do for a living?
Graphic/motion design. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, I’m not really into being an ad-man in the classic sense, but sometimes the work can be satisfying. Lately though I’ve really had the urge to work with my hands, I think at some point I’d like to be a pepper farmer…
Who/what are your major influences?
Musically, my influences are all over the place, I don’t really have one genre I favor over everything. The first albums I owned were Weird Al records, and then I rode the classic 2000s Mainstream Teenager wave probably until I could drive and started listening to 91.7, a college station in Houston, which I think really helped me expand my musical palette.
Lately, I’ve been diving deep into Robert Fripp’s early solo stuff, like Exposure, and some of his other work with Brian Eno. Other new notable bands (to me) are Bogshed, and Stump. Also really been enjoying Macula Dog. Though right now I am listening to one of my favorite jams – the Secret of Mana OST.
Music aside, most of the songs I write are just about life in general and anything can be an influence really, people/places/objects/creatures, it just depends on how I feel in the moment and what things stay with me.
Wasp in My Garage is a classic example, I lived for several years in a house that had wasps that were so aggressive toward me they would try to sting the peephole of my door if I looked out of it. Then I have a song like Lost My Skunk, that’s essentially about feeling like I’d lost my “essence” quarantined in 2020, and for such a simple song it still holds a lot of meaning for me. So it just depends on the day really, though I will say that Weezer will have some of the most introspective songs I’ve written in a while.
When can we expect more material?
My next album, Weezer’s Blue Album, will be out hopefully by spring of next year. I definitely did not intend to put as much effort and thought into it as I wound up doing but I’ve been working on it for almost 2 years at this point so it’d feel cheap to rush the process at this point.
Sorry to make everyone wait, but I think it’ll be worth it when it comes. Once that’s out though the floodgates will reopen because I’ve definitely been working on other material outside of that as well.
In which way are you involved with the “Digital Hotdogs” label
I initially created Digital Hotdogs as a place where I could sell my freelance design services (you may find some crossover vids there hidden in the recesses of the DGHD youtube channel), though around that time I had also decided that I wanted to break my musical projects into different bands and DGHD seemed like a good enough kind of umbrella brand for all of my creative endeavours to live under.
A lot of the early catalog is just me experimenting under different pseudonyms, though once I started to record my friend’s bands and post those albums too the catalog really started to take off. Nowadays DGHD to me is a sort of library rather than a full-on Music Label, where I really function as a curator more than anything else.
Will we ever see a Trashdog tour?
Of course, maybe sometime in ’23? It’s admittedly a little daunting to hit the road by myself, and that plus the fact that the pre-pandemic DIY circuit I used to run has been thoroughly crushed by capitalism / bands dissolving over the past few years means that I’ve gotta pretty much start over in some ways reforging connects in other states. I would love to get back on the road at some point though for sure.
ADHD seems to be a theme in your songwriting, how has ADHD affected you creatively and what made you want to write songs about it?
I think for me one of the Just Brain Things™ that I struggle with is not being able to shut my brain off sometimes, and ADHDemon is definitely the song where I kinda talk about that the most. It can be frustrating at times when you really want to create something, or just have a moment in peace, but your brain is essentially kind of fidgety and can’t sit still.
The kind of information-rich society we’re living in with the internet only makes it harder too, because there is just this absolute wealth of knowledge and media right there at your fingertips, so it’s really easy for me to get wrapped up in watching intermediate woodworking videos for 4 hours when all I really had set out to do was like access a google doc with lyrics in it.
I pour a lot of my frustrations out into my music, so it’s only natural to write a song about how I want to write a song but can’t, and looking back I think I’ve actually done that many times.
Where did audio sample from “Jelly the donut” originate from?
There was a time in my life when I was young where I was glued to a tape recorder and had one around with me constantly, recording a variety of room tones / burps / psychotic monologues, my sister often assisting with “”skits”” while we hid in the back room at my mom’s work.
The sample from Jelly comes from “Alien Album” which was recorded in 2000, as do all the samples from Sittin On My Head. The album itself is kind of themed in a way of looking back at a simpler time in my life and I sprinkled in a lot of samples from that cassette (and even a full song John Henry), but something about the unabashed absurdity of the Jelly sample in particular really stuck with me, and eventually a song spun out in my mind about how “Jelly the Donut” was saved by and consequently fell in love with Superman.
What are your goals as a performer?
In my live performances, I really try to do everything I can to have a unique show every time. I’ll play songs at different speeds, or backwards, or in different keys, improvise new songs, pretty much anything/everything I can do to let the audience know what they’re getting is totally unique to that night.
As an artist as a whole though I’m not really sure I have an outright goal, other than to just keep creating as much art as possible ’til I kick the bucket. That’s about all ya can do to stay sane in this wacky world.
