Art via Evan Solano
Ross Olson is still waiting on that Folk Implosion “natural One” mixed with “Stupid Girl” by Garbage mash-up.
When I reach Dougie Poole on Zoom, he’s sprawled out on his porch, taking in the hillside views from his East Los Angeles residence. A self-described homebody, Poole’s enjoying some downtime before heading east in the coming days for the second leg of a tour that began in early July.
Since 2016, Poole has forged a brand of country music that’s equal parts celestial and plaintive. Early on, he operated as a band of one, playing multiple instruments, mastering production from home, and performing sets alone. Eventually he’d fill out a proper band and recruit collaborators, but that original, singular sense of craft still runs through his music.
Poole’s first blush with recording traces back to Providence, Rhode Island, where he attended Brown University. There, Poole played in the group Cool World and hung around brothers Andy and Edwin White from Tonstartssbandht. These were acts who specialized in noise, channeling it through transmissions of punk, psychedelic rock, and ambient droning. It was the first time Poole saw a DIY approach up close: instruments recorded straight into iMacs, lofi flourishes from tape machines, bedrooms doubling as studios.
This philosophy shaped Poole’s early artistic output. “It never occurred [to me] that you could just start now and just make stuff yourself and those could be powerful and complete and moving works of art on their own,” Poole tells me.
At first, Poole tried his hand at making similar noise-infused experiments. But he gravitated to writing country songs, a genre rooted in straightforward storytelling and extracting deep emotions from the mundane. Growing up in New York City, Poole wasn’t exposed to many traditional country tropes. At home, though, his parents played folk music around the house, and he loved the country-adjacent pop hits he’d hear on the radio. He discovered the Grateful Dead, whose country covers led him to old-timers like Marty Robbins and Merle Haggard. When Poole started writing his own songs, country’s rigid guidelines offered a framework he could follow and subvert.
In 2017, Poole released “Don’t You Think I’m Funny Anymore,” a lamentation on a relationship turned sour. The backdrop of the video is the middle of nowhere, and the continuous panning makes it feel like we’re taking it in from the back of a shoddy tour van. Multiple Dougie Pooles appear, each sporting a burgundy suit and playing an instrument heard on the song. Kaleidoscopic graphics flicker in the background. Over a fluttering synth melody, the track announced Poole’s arrival as a do-it-all cosmic cowboy.
In the years since, Poole has established himself as one of indie rock’s most effortless songwriters. He writes about things that fuel millennial angst: discontent in the internet age, half-hearted dating, and working thankless jobs. “Beth David Cemetery,” from 2023’s The Rainbow Wheel of Death, is named after a grave site in Queens where several of Poole’s relatives are buried. “And if memory serves, there’s no hors d’oeuvres till the services are done,” Poole croons.
Between tour stops this summer, Poole released At Tubby’s, a live record in the tradition of country troubadours performing in cramped, backroad venues. Beyond re-imagining his music, Poole dubbed the recordings from the set through a tape machine back at home. He used modulation and delay to add a studio-grade polish to the performances’ spontaneity. The results are a skeletal haze of warmth and twang. Absent are the synths from his early records and any sort of percussion; songs unfurl through pedal steel and electric guitar streaks. While the studio version of “Claire” swirls with daydreamt psychedelia, on Tubby’s, it’s guttingly sparse, a ballad of longing and emptiness over acoustic arpeggios. Meanwhile, “Los Angeles” follows the outlaw spirit of Waylon Live. Poole’s cool baritone floats across the galloping groove as he weighs uprooting his life with a cross-country move.
I caught up with Dougie to talk about recording At Tubby’s, DIY art, New York versus LA, and studying creative writing in college.
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