Raw and Real with Zia McCabe of The Dandy Warhols

One of the founding members of The Dandy Warhols, Zia McCabe, has continued to mix her fiery spirit into the DNA of the well-known rock band. In addition to Zia (percussion, keys/synth, and string bass), the band includes Courtney Taylor-Taylor (vocals and guitar), Peter Holmstrom (guitar), and Brent DeBoer (drums and vocals). The Dandy Warhols released their debut album in 1997, and Zia continues to be an integral part of their sound, having added many elements of percussion, synths, and electric bass. Now, almost exactly 31 years since their start, The Dandy Warhols are not the only career venture Zia has pursued.

After I first spoke to Zia last year at The Dandy Warhol’s Webster Hall show, I was initially drawn to not only all of her musical career endeavors, but to the magnitude of her DIY ethos, consistent work ethic, and her unique, extroverted personality.

I sat down with Zia McCabe ahead of The Dandy Warhol’s four nights of shows in New York City. 

We first spoke just over a year ago. So what have you been doing this last year? 

Since last May, what the fuck have I been doing? I fell in love. So wait, it was May when we saw you. 

I think it was March. 

It had to have been, because I fell in love in April. 

We did a tour in Australia, so that would've been booked. It would've just happened right after that [Dandy] tour. And the band that opened for us, Magic Machine, they're amazing. I was really excited. We always feel the coolest when we're the one who finds the opening act that everybody digs. It's kind of a low key competition in our band to find the cool openers. And so I found Magic Machine. They came on the road, they're great. And then I just thought I was going to have a fling with the drummer, as one does on tour. And we hit it off so well that we have seen each other a handful of times since then. His band became my backup band, and I went over there and toured as Magic Prairie opening for Magic Machine. 

We got really romanticized by the idea of being in a couple of bands together, and then we were like, “oh, we just worked that whole trip. How about maybe next time we have a little more time for romance?” Anyway, the big thing of the year is just falling in love with him and figuring out how I am going to get to Australia all the time. 

It's made me create a lot of interesting projects in Australia, working with other musicians over there, different DJ things over there. 

Do you feel like that has been inspiring for you creatively? 

Yeah, it's just a whole different reason to want to do things, right? I'm like, “what can I do in Australia?” So I have reasons to be in Australia. 

There's a museum in Tasmania called Mona (Museum of Old and New Art), and they have a festival called Dark Mofo. This guy, David Walsh, made a fortune gambling and is now banned globally. He hacked gambling. So then he made a museum. He dug all these tunnels into the sandstone in Tasmania and made this really crazy, mostly installation museum that's got a lot of interactive [art], everything's sort of leaning towards interactive and more tactile. 

So now I'll actually be pitching this right before we leave for Europe, but I want to have the Dandys play Dark Mofo, then I can be over there. Do the symphony with Tasmania, because we did one in Portland. We'll connect those two dots and then we'll do a strip down set inside one of their smaller stages. 

But then I have a huge sculpture that I've been kind of having in my back pocket for a few years that I thought was going to go in the STRAAT, which is another massive museum, but that's in Amsterdam. So I'm pitching it to Mona.

There will be these stems of music that overlap, that trigger in any different order and they'll never be the same twice. So [I have] all of these things that I've been wanting to do. And I realized I couldn't have any new creative ideas; I need to get these things out. These need to go live somewhere. So I think they're going to live at Mona and I'm going to be presenting that concept and all of the pieces that I want to include sometime in the next few weeks.

Can I ask what your sculpture is? 

I want to make the largest single oscillator, analog synthesizer in the world. Like with doorknobs and steering wheels and stuff that control the filters. 

So where have you been making that? 

Blake, my boyfriend's dad, will be the master builder. He lives in Tasmania and has a massive shop. And there's some other guys nearby with a massive shop that do a lot of refurbishing bicycles and stuff. And so I want everything I use to be upcycled and sourced from the area, and the sides will be plexiglass so you could see inside to the guts. 

But you can have headphones, you can hear what music you're making. We can email the file to you, you can save your piece. So it's just to kind of keep enthusiasm for music.

Peter had said once, if you make anything big enough, it becomes art. And so whenever I see a gigantic fork on a corner by a building in Perth, I'm like, “oh, that's art, Peter said.” And you look at it and it is. So installation through the lens of music is kind of like this direction I've been going in. 

Have you done a lot of other art stuff in this realm before? Or is this kind of the first? 

I think mostly what got me there was extreme imposter syndrome. I had a project, and it just became really highbrow really fast. It was experimental. My partner had an opera background and so the combination was really unusual between the two of us, and I felt like we weren't at the level that we were performing at. And so I started to create these worlds around us to sort of distract from maybe if the music wasn’t totally up to par, like “there’s really cool lights and flowers everywhere.” And so I think that I did it to create an experience that would validate the ticket price and the kind of audience that we had because I didn't think the music lived up to it. And that was making me feel very fraudulent and weird. Then an artist friend of mine was like, “you have to stop looking at yourself as just a musician. You've grown into this whole other thing.” And I was like, “oh my gosh, this is the thing now. “

You're a musician, a mom, a real estate agent, a DJ, a visual artist, and a lot more. How are you able to balance all of those aspects of your life? 

It's really fucking hard. I am very, very, very fascinated with AI and how it can help us. I think especially for people that are in any way neurodivergent and want to do all the things but don't necessarily have some of the cognitive behavioral skills or executive functions to keep their stuff organized. But before this trip, my 50th birthday is coming up, which is a trip that I'm planning and a weekend of events that I'm planning. We've got this tour that has to happen, press that has to happen, DJ gigs that have to happen, an investment property that I'm looking at, an Airbnb that I'm setting up, clients that need my attention. 

I was like, “Chat [GPT], you can't tell me there's not enough hours in the day because that's already how I feel. I need you to help me figure this out. You just have to make all of these things go. You can't tell me not to do any of the things. That's not an option. You just have to master this puzzle of a schedule.” 

And it printed out the schedule. It was like 7am to 11pm. I was like, “I already knew that, man. I can't do 7am to 11pm, so make it better.” But just getting it out helps you see all the pieces and helps you go, “you know what? Fuck that. I'm actually going to not do that thing, I actually can cut that.” And so I've been using Chat [GPT] to streamline, to organize, to pre-write things. So you give it the busy work and also any creative sticky spots. If I can't get through a spot all of a sudden I can break the thing into a small enough bite. And so it's funny though because it's only made me more ambitious and add more things.

This past year was the 20th anniversary of the documentary Dig! What were your perceptions of the documentary when it first came out versus now with the reissuing of it? 

Man, I'm glad you asked because so much has changed, and I'm the only person in the band that's happy to talk about it, honestly. So I went to the [Dig!] XX anniversary. I went to Sundance, and the last time I was there was for the release. I went back 20 years later, so that was cute. We did three [Brian] Jonestown [Massacre] songs and three Dandy songs. It was really cute. We did, I think, three performances. It was really fun. And then I hated the version. It was such a bummer. It's a different version now. 

And the version at Sundance is different from the one that came out? 

Yeah, they re-edited it again. I'm glad, because I went and we all watched it, we all did a Q&A. And all it showed, in my mind, I'm sure there was other stuff in there, was me doing more drugs. When you look at this, it looks like I did more drugs than both bands combined. That is not the truth for one. And also, what does that add to the story? I'm like, you have an opportunity here to really, really add to the story. And you have two bands that are still making music. Fucking tell the story, man. You don't need to sensationalize it more. You sensationalized the fuck out of it the first time. 

So the feelings, the first time, were that we dodged a bullet. There was a lot of worse shit that she could have put in there. Me and Peter were both like, that could have been worse. And also, it could have been better. I wanted to see more music being made. We thought we were making a documentary about music, not mental illness and not these other peripheral aspects. 

So then I went to the release in Portland and did a Q&A situation there. And that's the version that's out. And it's got kind of a long middle. I was like, “are we watching fucking Titanic?” 

But what I will say is that I walked away, and it was really nice to tell my band because you make decisions and you hang on to, like, “that ruined our career,” or whatever hyperbolic thing Courtney wants to say. But I think that this take is more compassionate around wanting to make a living as an artist. I want to be paid for what I do. I mean, I do real estate now and stuff, but because the career arc of a musician is different. But I don't want to be dogged for getting paid to be a musician. I want to be high- fucking-fived because it's hard and rare. And getting dogged for it, I was like, dude, we're kind of busting our balls out here man, and taking risks and there's no roadmap. And it's also more compassionate about wanting that and being too damaged to have it. So the Jonestown also wanted that. They acted like they didn't because they were too messed up to get it. And so it's easy to go, “I didn't want that anyway.”

So it left us both to just be us and know that there are just two different versions of trying to make it in the world as artists to varying degrees of success and with varying degrees of damage that gets in the way. And there's a lot more backstory. I think the first one would be more fun for the random watcher. You don't have to know who either band is to enjoy it. It's just fun and crazy. This one, I don't know if it would require you to be fans, but I think that it's more for the invested listener. It's more for, “okay, I already know some of their story. I want to know more.” 

Were other people just unhappy with the initial Sundance cut and they re-edited again? 

It was really difficult because I went to Sundance when everybody else just wanted to walk away from the project because they're not happy with the outcome. You have to go look; somebody else is telling the story. That's how it fucking goes. Learn your lesson. If you don't want other people telling your story, don't tell other people your story. But also, I wanted to be there to represent me and my story and my reality, and I wanted to navigate that diplomatically. This was a massive undertaking. And who the fuck films two bands that are nobodies for seven years? That’s crazy. This doesn't exist, because why would you? Because they're going to break up. They're just going to fucking break up. And so we're still here. There's so many just anomalies and amazing things about this. I wanted to be like, “I am part of this whole thing that exists, and I have a little bit different take on it.” 

I am here to remind you that I am a person with my own story and my own reality and my band, and we have feelings and we have an experience, and all of those things are valid, even though the only one you see is the movie. And so I wanted to be there for that. And I feel like I did a really good job.

Your new EP came out today, “ROCK REMAKER.” “ROCKMAKER” came out last year right around the time that we did the interview, and now you have this new reissued version. Why did you guys choose to reissue and create an EP, and were you involved in that process?  

I had nothing to do with it. This was a Peter project. He loves remixes. I love remixes too, but he has a much better producer-remix network of people he knows. They're all on the nerdy engineer side of music stuff. So Peter just wanted to put together his favorites, and he wanted to release the remixes that had been done that he was proud of.

And Peter chose the songs that he wanted to remix and just went for it? 

I think earlier on, Courtney really wanted to control everything that went out. I think he really wanted to be like, “this is my baby. I make all these decisions about how everything looks,” which stifled us. 

You're looking through your lens of creativity through another person's creative lens. You lose a lot in making up what you think somebody thinks. You're literally filtering your ideas before they come out to protect this other person's aesthetic. I don't think that's a really healthy creative platform. And I think it slowed us down. I think it kept this band from accessing the potential of Peter, of me, of Eric, of Brent, unfortunately. And that's the fragile ego of a lead singer. Happens all the time. This is not an uncommon dynamic. What's great though is we've been together so long that nobody fucking cares. Everybody's too old to be running around micromanaging each other. We're just glad anybody came up with anything. So put it out. So if Peter wants to do EPs, great. If I want to do installations, great. Everybody's like, “what do you got? Let's do it.” 

If this band ended in one year and we just never went back on the road, we could just go in different directions. It would make it hard to just get it ever back together again. Our lives were, we ate and breathed and slept Dandy Warhols for the first at least 20 years. And then we slowly started to deprioritize so that our lives could fill in with families and other projects and stuff. 

But I don't want it to just kind of end. There's all these things that you just do the last of, and you don't know it’s the last. We have the agency to be in charge of that. And I literally thought of this yesterday. I want to go to Courtney and Brent and say, “if this band was ending and you knew it ahead of time? What haven't we done? What do you want from this career that helps us bookend it?” I'm not saying it's going to end, but don't be naive. At some point we're never going to play together again. And it's easy to take for granted when it's been 31 years now. I don't want to mourn what we didn't do. I want to celebrate what we did. Obviously that's a choice, but still, the more stuff you do, the easier the choice [is] to make. So that made me think, what do the guys have that they want? Let's see how many of them we can make happen. So that's kind of my new approach, starting like last night. 

As a DJ, how do you craft your identity? Wait, do you still have your radio show? 

I have a radio show. It's called “Get Lost” and it's on Shady Pines Radio in Portland. We just had our [one] year anniversary. It's a consortium of DJs, there's three other DJs. One has swapped out since then. 

But for the other DJing, it was really just, I couldn't believe how bad the music was most of the time. The world is full of good music and yet what they pump through public spaces is usually shit. 

And so I started offering to just play my records. I would rather listen to Jim Croce than whatever pop star they had in  there. And so then I became DJ Rescue: Saving good parties from bad music since 2001. I don't know if any other DJ has a slogan, but that's mine. I don't have a ton of time for my DJing. So my radio program is a really nice outlet for me. I only do it once a month because it's just too much. That's why I have the other DJs. I had wanted to for a long time, but I knew I couldn't do it weekly. So it was when it finally dawned on me to have a collection of DJs to share the responsibilities with, it worked a lot better. And I like the way they each interpreted my vision for the program. 

But mostly my DJing is the after parties for The Dandies because the band won't go unless I'm the DJ because the music is going to probably suck. Sometimes it's great. 

What inspires the music that you play?

It absolutely depends on the space. So if I'm doing an after party, I will look at pictures of the venue. Obviously with the fans, they all expect [the music] somewhere in the indie, retro rock, rap. But I did a gallery opening where the art all looked very aerial to me. I think it was abstract art, but it looked to me like you were looking down on city landscapes. I measured all the speakers to be evenly spaced throughout the room. So there was no focal point of music like a dance floor would have. It was ambient. It just sort of was there, everywhere, perfectly spaced throughout all the art. So I mean, again, that becomes installation work. It's very much about what the space feels like, what I feel like, what I've been in the mood for. But I just read the room. 

What are your favorite elements of playing percussion? 

Because I started in dance and I'm tactile, I am a percussionist. And that took me a long time to realize, because drone synth doesn't seem percussive, but rhythmic synth does. Since I came through the drone entry point, it made it not read as percussion for me at first. I understood how to bring it with a shaker or a tambourine. So I found one at a thrift store, and just was like, “I'll do these things at the same time.” and people were like, “what the fuck are you doing?” 

And so that gave me this grounding thing in music. And the drummer, poor drummer, playing to a drone is not fun. I'm supposed to be the rhythm section. So adding the percussion connected me into the rhythm section in a way I needed to be without sacrificing the value of the swimming layers of bass. But it took dating a bass player for him to go, “you're a percussionist.” Then I had an identity as a musician. And so percussion is my safe space. I can pick up any percussive instrument and make it do something cool or anything and turn it into a percussive instrument. 

On this last record, I was really wanting to reunite us as friends in the studio. Because we live in different places and have busy lives and different schedules, we often do our stuff piecemeal and then put it together. And again, what do we want from this lifelong project? So I was like, “get Brent over here early before this tour and really get in this studio. Let’s give this next record an identity and some lift with us together and then contribute.” Because if you start in separate pieces, you're never really on the same page. I was trying to unify us. And the way that we did it was with percussion parties. It's an experimental, kind of ambient album. And so Courtney would make up these rules where you have three hits per measure and never on the three. And we couldn't hear each other's work. So one would go in the studio and then you listen and they orchestrate all together in this way that one person alone wouldn't come up with. So it made it very organic, very experimental, and very unifying. And I find that percussion is a great way to do that, right? It's the most universal. You don't have to know scales.You just have to have this body rhythm.

And then you started playing bass?

String bass, I just brought in, because Brent wrote a song around a bass guitar that just didn't really…you couldn't do it on synth. 

And so Peter was going to play it. Courtney was going to play it. I didn't know why my second bass rig was on Peter's side? And why does Courtney have a Coronado bass that's being custom made? 

I'm like, “those guys are going to try to play this.” I was dating a bass player. And he goes, “you're the bass player, you do it.” I didn’t even know how to hold a pick. 

And so I asked Peter if I could borrow his bass. He said no. And I was very mad. A very little sister moment. Those guys pull that shit sometimes. 

And so I brought this really shitty one in, this absolute piece of garbage. I was trying to play it for the song, and I'm dropping the pick. The guys are like, “what are we going to do?” 

So Peter hands Courtney his bass he wouldn't let me touch. And I was like, “oh cool, well for the third time in 30 years, I'm going to fucking cry about some shitty thing you guys say.” Usually I get mad. But I came back out and Courtney looked stupid and I hated all of them. So I went and bought the same base Peter has, but one year older. Same fucking color.

I brought this little practice amp and I just, spitefully, spitefully learned this fucking part in the dressing rooms every day. And every day we did it at soundcheck. And finally we did it, and I got good at it. Brent, one day goes, “Zia, I'm sorry I doubted you. You play it better than the way I wrote it. You're really good at this.” I'm all, “fuck you and fuck you too.” And so then I bought my red bass, and now I own three bass guitars. I can write as well on bass guitar as synth. Still, disclaimer, I don't really know how either of those things work. I can just make them do things. 

You're about to be 50 years old. What is one piece of advice that you would give your younger self? 

I mean, I have operated from a non-fear point for the most part, but I think, say even sooner, believe in yourself. Really, really do not hold back on your ideas because like I said, I really filtered myself hard at the beginning to try to fit in. And I'm glad that I don't do that now. But it left an indelible mark of carefulness. The less careful I am with my art, the better it is. So don't be careful when you're being creative would be the advice. 

Find Zia McCabe on Instagram. Follow The Dandy Warhols on Spotify, Instagram, and their website.

All photos by Tori McGraw (@afterr.hourrs)