Dave Hause at Hernando's Hide-A-Way - Memphis, TN

DAVE HAUSE’S SONGS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ROOTED IN TANGIBLE REALITY—OFEMOTION, OF ENVIRONMENT, OF CIRCUMSTANCE.

Since releasing his debut album, Resolutions, in 2011, thePhiladelphia-born songwriter has poured his whole heart, soul and life into hismusic. That’s no different on Drive It Like It’s Stolen, his sixthfull-length. Its 10 songs overflow with Hause’s trademark urgency and passion,shimmering with a truth that reflects the harsh realities of life in this dayand age, as well the intermittent jolts of joy that punctuate it. After all,his songs have always detailed his own personal traumas and triumphs within thesetting of an unforgiving capitalist backdrop, tethering those personalexperiences to ineluctable external forces. 2013’s second album, Devour,for example, was a response to his divorce from his first wife, while 2019’s Kicksaw him tackle hope, depression, global warming and a crumbling Americandemocracy with the news that he was to become a father. Most recently, on2021’s Blood Harmony, Hause wrote and sang about the positive impact ofhaving twins, and of the joy and excitement of being able to be at home withthem for the first couple of years of the pandemic.

Drive It Like It’s Stolen is just as earnest and heartfelt, rawand real as anything he’s ever written before. Yet there’s also a subtle yetsignificant difference—here he’s delving into a more fictional type ofstorytelling to create what he terms "post-apocalyptic Americana.” That’sclear from the title of this album’s haunting and ominous opening song, “CheapSeats (New Year’s Day, NYC, 2042)”. Set two decades in the future, it’sobviously not about anything that’s actually happened, but is still very muchinspired by life. At the start of 2022, Hause was in a good place. He’d changedhis diet and had maintained a strenuous workout regimen resulting in improvedphysical and mental health. Feeling great, he’d decided to go off Lexapro andleft to go out on the Blood Harmony band touring.

“I was feeling great,” he recalls. “I came back to work, didn’thave my meds. But then I’m on tour, I’m not working out, I’m not eating thatway anymore. And I’m really faced with the American city, the Americanexperiment post-pandemic. We’re going places and being like, ‘Oh, my God, thisis what Portland and San Francisco and Los Angeles look like.’ And itlooked terrifying. Whenever I went anywhere, I felt like I was watching theprequel to 12 Monkeys, except I was also living it and just wonderingwhat the fuck was going on. The tour was doing well, but it just felt like mymental health was falling down stairs. A few months later, when we werefinishing the tour, we heard stories that people were siphoning gas out of tourbuses. So, a lot of the record was kind of born of and trying to wrestle withthat.”

To that extent, the future dystopia of “Cheap Seats” is very real—avivid depiction of a society on the verge of collapse based on Hause’sexperience as a touring musician and then filtered through his imagination. If“Cheap Seats” sets the tone with its dream of escape from a ravaged New YorkCity, then song “Pedal Down” starts that road trip. It’s a gloomy, glowering,dark early morning ride through desolate, post-apocalyptic streets, whoseatmosphere really places you inside that car. A moody and monochrome song fullof portent and hope in equal measure, it’s both a literal journey—captured bythe album’s striking cover, which replicates the view of one of his twins inthe back seat as the family drives away—and a metaphorical exploration ofHause’s fears and anxiety of being a parent in modern day America. ‘But welead our lambs to slaughter,” he sings. ‘It’s profit, boot straps, andguns/Every god needs a sacrifice/Honey, what have we done?’ On one levelit’s a simple question directed at his wife about having kids. On another, it’stackling the whole American system.

“Having children sounds like a great idea,” he explains, “and then you realizethat they’re grist for the mill. They’re grist to be sold to, they’re to beexploited, and they’re potentially fodder for our passion for guns. If your godin America is the gun, the idea that we must have these guns, then gods needsacrifices and our children are those sacrifices. And you wonder, ‘Did we bringchildren in this world to sacrifice them to the various American gods?’ That’sanother thing we’re kind of grieving. We’re all complicit in this, and we’reall potentially going to have to pay.”

The disturbing, apocalyptic quasi-reality of the album’s lyrics is matched andamplified by the music. Written by Hause with his younger brother Tim, DriveIt Like It’s Stolen—just like the three that preceded it, as well as Tim’s2022 debut full-length—is the distinct next phase of their creativepartnership. The third release on the brothers’ own Blood Harmony record label,it shakes up expectations while at the same time building off the sound andreputation Hause has established for himself over the past decade or so. “DamnPersonal”, for example, is a boisterous blue collar anthem about lost friendsthat’s charged with electric emotion, while the uplifting, Petty-esque “HazardLights” ruminates on Hause’s sobriety and the temptation that exists when he’saround friends who still imbibe. Yet though there’s a specificity to thoselyrics, they’re easily applicable to other situations, too.

“That feeling of having the hazard lights on,” says Hause, “it’s justuncertainty. I’m kind of just pulled over here—I don’t know where I’m going, Iknow where I’ve been, the hazard lights are blinking, so please don’t hit mebecause I’ve got to figure out what to do next.”

Elsewhere, there’s “chainsaweyes” and “lashingout”, two veryhalves of the same whole that once again merge personal anxieties withuniversal horrors. Both ask important questions about identity and parenthoodand responsibility and the difficulties of raising children in America. Theformer is backed by dramatic strings that emphasize the importance of thesubject matter, while the latter begins as a beautifully poignant acoustic tunebefore descending into a marvelously unexpected piano breakdown that wouldn’tbe out of place in a saloon sometime in the 1800s. Don’t be deceived by whatHause calls the “sugar” of that part, though—there’s still an important messageunderpinning it.

“Both those songs are trying to assess that angry, always devouring, youthful,testosterone-fueled American boy thing,” explains Hause. “Raising boys inAmerica, you don’t want to fall on the wrong side of history with that. In“lashingout”, that person who sings ‘I want to be God for a day’ at theend could be a school shooter. That wish could be something that would promptsomeone to do something terrible. Why would you want that power? You couldreally hurt people. But here’s the thing—we all feel like lashing out like thatat points. But what is it that’s prompting this feeling that you want to changeeverything, and do you have it right? Are you righteous in that anger ofwanting to lash out?”

Drive It Like It’s Stolen was engineered and mixed byDavid Axelrod, and—like Blood Harmony—produced by Will Hoge and recordedat Santi Sound in Nashville, though with a different set of musicians than thatalbum’s all-star cast. Yet that’s not to the record’s detriment at all. Onpenultimate song “Tarnish”, a song about both a life lived and one still beinglived—past and present coalescing in a beautiful mesh of wistfulself-reflection, Hause sings ‘I never got a golden record/I guess themelodies were wrong.’ The performance and production of not just that song,but this whole record, proves that sentiment entirely wrong. It’s followed by“The Vulture”, a song that harks back to the defiance that dominated Kickbut which is recast with his children in mind. It feels, too, like thecementing of the thematic shift he’s making on this record. These songs maystill be for Hause, but they’re increasingly less about him.
“My life is getting increasingly less interesting,” he smiles. “And that’s bydesign. You want to be steady, you want to be at a baseball practice or takingyour kids to gymnastics or whatever it is. You don’t want to necessarily bestaring into the abyss all the time and trying to determine your existentialweight. I don’t want my life to become fodder for songs—I want my creativity tobe the fodder for songs.”

With this particular car ride, then, Hause is en route to awhole new world. Whether real or imagined or a combination of both, it’s timeto buckle up for the ride.