Q&A: Tender and Brutal, Danny Dwyer Talks Music Videos, Collaboration and New Single “Mortal Kombat”
DANNY DWYER HAS RELEASED — yet another music capsule of heartbreak.
The new single, “Mortal Kombat,” is full of rock-out moments and piercing lyrics that pull on heartstrings. Dwyer pulls a surprise trick, opening the track with a slow build of guitar and synth that eventually explode into a colossal punk rock affair in the chorus. In truth, a heartbreak feels jarringly similar to a losing battle, and Dwyer happens to know exactly what to do to capture that sense of despair. “Mortal Kombat” has the raw and melancholic lyrics that are signature to his songwriting, but somehow the romantic rock twist makes this single the tenderest of them all.
Part of a bigger story arc, the music video for the track features a gloomy seaside British town, a deliberate detour of scenery as Dwyer’s few prior music videos highlight sun-drenched scenes from Los Angeles. There’s an unnamed beauty in the bizarre images featured in this visual collaboration between the artist and his bedroom project. Something about the eerily quiet scenery contrasting the aggressive use of red and blue adds yet another layer of hopeless romantic to the story, making “Mortal Kombat” tender and brutal all at once.
Dwyer has been quietly (or perhaps not so quietly, just strategically) releasing ballads and fun jams alike all year long. Prior to “Mortal Kombat,” there were the lullaby love songs such as “Losers” and experimental hyperpop outbursts such as “Summertime.” A project has been quietly brewing as LUNA set up an interview with the creative mind behind it all.
Read below to hear more from Dwyer on “Mortal Kombat,” his musical journey that took him halfway across the country, and the process of translating it all into a signature sound that resonates with many.
LUNA: How are you doing? How's life? Maybe just tell me a little bit more about the single that's coming out soon?
DWYER: Yeah, definitely. I think I'm doing good, life is good. It's a little bit hectic — I've been back in LA for a week and before that I was in New York for a few weeks. Since February I've been bouncing around a lot like back and forth from New York and LA and did a Europe thing. But, yeah, good and hectic, excited to be busy, and working on all the good things. I'm super excited for “Mortal Kombat.” I'm really excited for the video and the song, and they play into each other and are such a big part of the story. It's been a long time coming with this one, definitely — I think we wrote it in 2019 or 2020. [Since] then, it's just been the process of getting it right, getting it to the point where I feel like it's gotten the attention it deserves, so it's exciting for me, this moment.
LUNA: Is the plan to release tracks one by one until the whole project is basically out?
DWYER: So, we have a double EP coming. It's going to be revolving a lot around “Mortal Kombat,” “Asthma,” and “Losers” — the three of them are singles for the double EP and then some of [the songs] are loose things that I just wanted to share, like ideas I've been playing with. So “Mortal Kombat” is the last single before the focus track of this project, which ties into and wraps up a lot of those themes that I've been working on the past few years.
LUNA: I did notice that there is an obvious theme going on. What about the storytelling? Can you tell us about the parts that have been out to the public?
DWYER: The project is about the time of, I would say, the last 10 years. I've been working on this project since 2019. We started writing the first songs and I took the shift from wanting to do more songwriting to being like, “I need to do the artists thing,” and this is something I've always needed to do. A lot of this project is reflecting on my time growing up in Missouri and ending up in a very different place [with] moving to LA and my whole family's still in Missouri — no one's really left North St. Louis for generations. So it's sort of dealing with that feeling of always knowing I've had this thing in me, the need to make this project and share this music. But it also deals with the consequences and the sacrifices that are involved in that no one has ever done that in my family, and now I'm working on music for a living and no one can understand that. It's also a lot of reflecting about that time, those relationships and those sacrifices, because I think that's something I'm coming to terms with. There are a lot of sacrifices involved in dedicating my life to this, and this project wrestles with that a lot. I want to make a project that pays homage to the hometown, but it ends at this place of really moving on and wrapping up, leaving us in a place for what's next.
LUNA: How did the decision of moving to LA and picking up music come about? Since you mentioned coming from Missouri and a family that didn't really do music.
DWYER: I moved to Denver for two years and then moved to LA afterwards; I visited LA for the first time when I was 17 or 18. It was actually the day I graduated high school. We did our graduation and the next morning me and my best friend flew to LA to visit our friend who went to UCLA and spent a week there. I really fell in love with it and with stuff I would laugh at now… But going to Fairfax and the Odd Future store, I got off the bus and Tyler, The Creator was just there — yeah, he was always around in those days. For the 17-year-old me, [the fact that] this was just here and this is accessible is crazy. In terms of how I ended up getting [into] music, me and my brother were the first in our family to go to college and I was a trumpet player my whole life. That was the big thing, like doing lessons and practicing — that was how I was going to get into college. It was always from this perspective of “That's how I’m gonna afford college and get out, go be able to do more,” which is what I did. And I went to school with a trumpet scholarship in Denver for two years, finished my degree, then transferred to LA for a year and a half and graduated early. But yeah, that was always gonna happen. After that, I've always been writing songs; it was sort of a relief to put down the trumpet. In the end, it started going really well pretty quickly so I was able to shift my focus to that. Since then, I've really been focused on writing the best songs in the world, and I'm really a nerd for that.
LUNA: What's your community like in LA? Because it’s so easy to get lost in that city and usually people just end up huddling with their own friends, do you have any longtime collaborators? What's your circle like?
DWYER: I've probably been here for six years or so. I like meeting people and I like doing sessions a lot. Sometimes I would get into a period of planning to do a session every day and meeting new people that way. I think I've had good luck with finding people early on, where a lot of us were new and trying to figure this out. A lot of us have found a lot of success and are still good friends. Now it's a good friend group of very creative people. I'm really lucky to have the great group I do right now. I'm pretty grateful for that.
LUNA: I guess on that topic, I do want to ask, when it comes to visual direction and all the photos that go along with your songs, in terms of workflow, execution, and creativity between a team, how does that come about? I see that Paris [Mumpower] is being credited for creative direction for a lot of these. What is your input, and do you personally have any experience in terms of visual art? Because it’s just way too extensive and I wouldn't believe you if you say no.
DWYER: Yeah, working very closely with Paris is really cool. Also, [with her] as my girlfriend, we have a really good dynamic, and it's cool we're able to work together like that. For the “Mortal Kombat” video, we worked with bedroom projects, which was really cool. We went out to London for that, but for the other videos Paris and I do work pretty closely. And it's cool to be at a point where [working] doesn't have to be separate. Sometimes when people are in relationships, it's nice to not work together, blah, blah, blah, but I don't think we were ever that intentional about working together. We started dating and it just sort of happened very naturally, I think. As far as my personal experience, I'm very much a fan of visual and creative individuals and it’s always something I've been interested in and has been tied very closely in with the music. A lot of the songs I make are very closely tied to images when I create them, which is something I just noticed, so it's always been important to me. It's been cool because Paris is super generous. It's like [she would say], “I want you to do this video,” and it's really nice because she's such a professional in those things, so I'm able to take the reins and give my opinions when I want to. But then on the other side, for the other ideas I want to pursue, she's super generous about it. So it's cool to work in both ways where we can lean on each other.
LUNA: You mentioned you have friends at UCLA and I noticed so many spots that I used to go to when I was in college — were any of the recent photoshoots done in Westwood by any chance?
DWYER: The ones with the houses in the back? I think that one is the one where I'm wearing the shorts. That was by the Larchmont area. One day I was with Paris and we were just driving around. She had never seen those houses — I think that's like where the mayor lives. So she was like, “Oh my god, we have to do this shoot.” Yeah, that was Larchmont, so not too far.
LUNA: How do you location scout? Because there's also Lands End in SF for the “Asthma” cover.
DWYER: I think so. Yeah, it's like a feathers or it's, like, kind of. Yeah. Okay. That I did do — I was because me and Erica [Devin Snyder] had been wanting to do something for a while. We were just talking the day before [looking for] where would be cool, and I really just started Googling and I saw that and then I just had this idea of some weird human sacrifice, or something, like this would be cool to just get a crazy outfit that you wouldn't expect, something glam vibes. It’s different with [other things like] the “Mortal Kombat” video, they [bedroom project] had found this desolate beach town in the south of the UK or something, don't quote me on that. We drove three hours to the beach and it's this nuclear power plant town so no one lives there. And the whole time there we were like, “What does anyone who lives here do?” There were just these small villages of houses and fish and chips spots that had two people in there? Why is this not a vacation spot? But yeah, I just find unexpected, random things that people don't see every day.
LUNA: How did you find the other locations in LA, like the carwash? I know you also mentioned that one French place in Echo Park. It’s just so specific.
DWYER: Was Taix a French restaurant? Yeah, it kind of became a joke because we always go there. It's just [random] — there's a place in Silverlake where you can get a table for 15 with no reservation and the food is decent. It's like, very mid. You can get a whole banquet room to yourself, just very bizarre and random. So it became like a joke; we always loved going there. They were gonna tear it down or something so we were talking about shooting there. The carwash was Paris, I believe, I think she had driven by it. And really random locations have just worked out really well — I have to share more later. I have this dirt bike, which is my main transportation — I don't really have a car here, I just ride that around. And sometimes I like to either take calls on there [with] the headset or go ride around for a long time to talk to people. We go out to the mountains a lot, which is how we found some locations. In another life, I will just be a location scout and ride this dirt bike around all day.
LUNA: So much of this project is about yourself, maybe even a little bit reminiscent of a past life before LA, but so far all the visuals have been very California-focused. How did that decision come about?
DWYER: I think it's from being out here and wanting to tell it from the current perspective. A lot of it is written as memories and less so as if it was written from a 17-year-old me. We've been talking about going to Missouri as well — I think it would be cool to go touch on some of that and do a trip there.
LUNA: Your sound has always been very consistent from the very beginning, but it's certainly what's in at the moment, at least for the LA indie rock scene. Did you as a musician ever see that coming, and has your attitude changed over the years towards music?
DWYER: Yeah, that's funny. It's been pretty effortless making this project, And it's been kind of funny watching everyone catch up, in a sense. I'm making the music that I wanted to make when I was 10 years old. That's a big part of it — when I feel like I don't know what to do, I like to look back at that, like, “Well, where did this inspiration come from? Where did you realize you needed to make this? Where did you realize this is what you're supposed to do?” The more I revisit there, the more I feel like I can really get inspired to find that direction. So with this, it was a cool process. When we started making the record in 2019/2020 — everyone was just starting to come around and catch up, which is funny. It's cool to now be in a place where we've been able to take our time with this record and really tell the story we want to tell. It feels like it's a fitting time for it and the world is very much ready for it. It feels good.
LUNA: Are you happy with where you're at as an artist at the moment? Have you ever thought of an end goal for yourself?
DWYER: Yeah, definitely. I think I want to make the greatest album of all time. I want to write some really impactful music for other people and for other artists. Right now, I'm very excited and optimistic about this project being able to tell that story. I'm also really excited for the next steps. Those ideas are really coming together and I'm starting to sort through all that. Overall, I think things feel really good. I'm really excited to be sharing this stuff. That's been a long time in the works, and I'm just really excited for what's next.
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