INTERVIEW: Des Rocks talks upcoming album ahead of Worcester, MA stop in April
Staff writer, Cassandra Paiva, chatted with Danny Rocco, aka Des Rocs, a few days after the start of his current tour. They talked about stage presence, live energy, and the upcoming third album.
CP: You just kicked off your tour on Tuesday. What’s new with this one? What can fans expect?
DR: Well, it’s a whole new show. It’s really important to me to change up the entire show every headline tour, and it’s just an intensely emotional and heartfelt rock and roll experience that’s going to be a level of energy that I feel like people have not felt in a really long time.
CP: Where do you get that energy and stage presence from? You seem to never stop moving. Do you do any special training before hitting the road?
DR: No, unfortunately, there’s no good gym machine that simulates me just kind of flailing about on stage for 90 minutes. I wish there really was. But the only way to practice is to just jump into it and start doing it. We had the first headline show last week, like after I do that first show, I legit feel like I was hit by a truck. You wake up the next day, you’re so, so sore. But you’ve got to just do it over and over again. And the energy really just comes from, I think, an enormous sense of enthusiasm and gratitude for being able to do what I do.
CP: You’ve toured with some major artists like Muse, The Rolling Stones, and The Cult. What did you learn from those tours, and did anyone give you any good advice?
DR: I definitely got some good advice. And I learned stuff like how big it can be and how much it can mean to so many people. I played so many shows with a couple hundred kids screaming along the words that mean a lot to them, but when you see it magnified to 25,000 people a night or 80,000 people a night, it just makes you very in awe of the power that an artist can wield.
CP: You just released “The Riders of Red Hook” for UFC and “When the Love is Gone” from the upcoming album within a week of each other. Is there a difference between writing for something and writing for yourself?
DR: Well, I don’t really write for other people or anything. People will reach out and use our music for certain things, but I’ll never really take directive from somebody else in any way. I’m just going to write what I write, and either it’s really good for what they want to use it for or not. I guess I’m pretty neurotic about how the records come out, and there aren’t really any other third parties involved in it.
CP: Speaking of the upcoming album, what was the process of writing and recording this one like compared to the first two?
DR: The first two were quite different. The very first one was really just me sitting alone in a room. The second one was a sonic and kind of a spiritual release. And the third one, which is upcoming, is very different because we recorded it live as a band. We’ve never done that before. So the whole album is a full take of us playing the song. There’s no copy and pasting, there’s not a lot of studio tricks or anything like that; it’s just real because we really wanted to capture the energy of the band live. That’s a hard thing to do today.
CP: What made you make that decision for this time around?
DR: I think to challenge myself creatively and get myself out of my comfort zone. And to also create something that’s a lot more timeless than a lot of modern rock records. A lot of modern rock records are so digital, so in the box, so sterile, and so compressed, and I don’t think they’re going to stand the test of time, sonically. But when you’re actually in a room and playing, you can kind of feel the tension of the people, you can feel the air moving through the microphone, and that just impacts people on a psychological level a lot differently.
CP: You’ve probably written and scrapped so many bits and ideas, if not whole songs, would you ever release a demos or B-sides album? What about a live album?
DR: I have many live albums that I’ve recorded, I’ve never released them though. I kind of banked them, you know? I think it would be really cool to release, like, one live album from every era, one day. And as far as demos and stuff, man, I’d love to release some of that stuff one day. The right time, the right place, and the right song. I have whole entire albums that I’ve scrapped.
CP: Is that because it wasn’t the right feeling at the right time, or things didn’t line up?
DR: Yeah, I think it’s just a lot. Each album I wrote for me is a very different album. And then I take that and sit with it, and then I think, “Ok, which album is the album to release right now?” Like, which one do I want to play live? Which one connects with me emotionally at this moment?
CP: Would you ever go back and revisit some of those ideas and take bits and pieces from those songs that you scrapped?
DR: Definitely. They’re all kind of like still in play. There are things I think about a lot. And I kind of just toy with them, and sometimes I’ll take them out of the closet and mess around with them. And then sometimes I’ll just leave them there for another day, you know? And not use them. But everything is always fair game.
CP: Where do you get your ideas from to write? Is it kind of atmospheric, or is it internal and personal?
DR: It’s both. Like, some of the songs are like straight-up diary entries, and then some of them are really fantastical, fictional tales that are just of fun for me to kind of live in another universe a little bit. All of the above. They come from musical places, they come from non-musical places, really everything.
CP: How has being from New York influenced your art, music, and style?
DR: Very, very much, because I’m kind of just this lone wolf making the kind of music I make in New York. There’s not really like a scene I’m a part of, there’s just this constant individual and very frenetic energy that defines my records. And that to me is just the spirit of New York City.
CP: Your new video for “When the Love is Gone” dropped today. How did you come up with the family dinner scene?
DR: That was a great collaboration with Noel Paul, and I really wanted to pay homage to some films that I’m obsessed with, you know, like 70s era films like Saturday Night Fever. And just riff on this idea of being an outsider in your family and chasing this dream and having these larger-than-life visions that are just so impossible for other people to comprehend. And it’s all kind of just born out of that frustration.
CP: Kind of on that line, what other media are you consuming? What movies or TV shows are you watching?
DR: I watch a lot of old films, I like films. TV shows, I don’t really watch much TV, to be honest. I’ve probably rewatched The Sopranos way too many times. I love Mad Men, I really love that golden age of television. I also love the show 30 Rock, too; that’s like my comfort show.
CP: What are you currently listening to for music? Any tour playlists?
DR: No, definitely no tour playlists. It’s more, just like, trying to find weird, old stuff. I don’t listen to a lot of new music at all, unfortunately. I listen to a lot of classic music, a lot of classical music, a lot of classic rock. It’s really all of the above for me; I listen to everything.
CP: Do your bandmates ever come to you and say, “Hey, you’ve got to check this out?”
DR: Yes, sometimes, for sure.
CP: When did you buy your first leather garment, and what was it?
DR: Oh man, my first leather jacket was like a fake leather jacket in middle school that I was obsessed with. And then I was able to graduate to a real one shortly after that.
CP: Is there anything else we should know?
DR: Well, I’m getting ready to release an entire album; there’s a whole lot of music coming soon. And listen for a lot more touring announcements, just so you know. Stay tuned!
CP: Awesome. You’re pretty prevalent on social media, so we’ll see when that announcement will be made and when that album will be released.
DR: Oh, for sure. You won’t hear the end of it from me!
:: Des Rocs plays The Palladium in Worcester, MA on Tue, April 21st. The show is all ages, with doors opening at 6 pm and music beginning at 7 pm. Tickets for the show start at $39.29 and are available – HERE. ::
Featured image by: John Hutchings
