This past Friday indie rock veterans Deer Tick released their ninth studio album, Coin-O-Matic, an ode to their home state of Rhode Island (The album’s title is taken from the cigarette-vending-machine company that served as the headquarters of legendary Providence mobster Raymond Patriarca, whose crew Deer Tick singer/guitarist John McCauley recalls running into around town in his youth.) Over the weekend the quartet celebrated the release with a 3-night stand in South Kingstown, Rhode Island’s Ocean Mist, playing unique, two-hour sets each night, filled with the majority of Coin-O-Matic, along with favorites from the band’s catalogue dating back to 2007 debut LP War Elephant. And tomorrow Deer Tick officially hit the road for their first of three North American treks this year, which will have them at Underground Arts this Wednesday, June 10th, for their most intimate appearance in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection in well over a decade (if you don’t count Free At Noons…), where they’ll be joined by our buddy Jobi Riccio. Last month I got a chance to chat with John McCauley and guitarist/singer Ian O’Neil (who I last spoke with in 2023, when the band was touring behind previous LP Emotional Contracts) about Philly, Rhode Island (including some crazy memories from Newport Folk Festival), and their first self-produced album.
*Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Izzy Cihak: You’re gearing up to release Coin-O-Matic, which I know revolves around this sort of secret history of Rhode Island, but I’m curious how you think the album compares to previous releases in terms of the writing and recording process? I know you did it in your home studio, but that it is your first self-produced album.
John McCauley: I don’t know so much about this history being a secret around here. I mean, I kind of grew up assuming that every town in America had a mafia [laughs]. But that’s not really what the whole thing is about. It’s very inspired by growing up in Rhode Island in general. There’s some songs about criminals and whatever, mafiosos, but there’s also a lot of songs about family and religion and stuff like that.
Anyways, about the recording process… At this stage in our career — we’ve been a band for over 20 years now — we’re comfortable in the studio and we know what we like. And Dennis [Ryan, drummer] has spent the last several years really working on his engineering skills. We were making demos at our studio, and they sounded good enough to release, so we thought, “Maybe this is the moment where we kind of bring it all home. We do the record here in Rhode Island, we make a record about Rhode Island, we produce it ourselves, and we just take the money that the label was gonna give us to hire a producer and have to cram the whole process into a week, maybe two weeks, if we’re lucky. Let’s just take that money and invest it in our studio, and we can work at a more leisurely pace. And if any unforeseen roadblocks get in the way, it’s not a big deal, we’ve got all the time in the world now.”
Izzy: Have you had any favorite early reactions to the new music?
John: A lot of people have picked up on the writing, which means a lot to me. I put in a lot of extra work, more than usual, on these songs, so to be recognized by a few people for that felt really nice. My friend Gabe called my songs on the record “elevated” [laughs], “Elevated Deer Tick” [laughs]. So, that’s cool.
Izzy: It’s your second full-length for ATO Records, which is such a great label and home to so many of my favorite people [including PHILTHY phriends Friko, Joseph, and Margaret Glaspy]. How has it been working with them and being a part of that roster?
John: It’s great! I’ve been aware of ATO Records for as long as I can remember, and a lot of musicians I know, some that I’m friends with, are on that label and have put out some terrific records with them. They’ve been very supportive. They’re psyched on our new music, and when you’re in the same band 20 years later and there’s people telling you that your music still excites them, that’s nice. But yeah, they’ve been very helpful and I’ve enjoyed our relationship so far.
Izzy: Since you mentioned ATO having a lot of artists that you like, or even that you’re friends with, do you have any particular favorite labelmates?
John: Oh, gosh! Alabama Shakes has put out music with them, My Morning Jacket (I love those guys), Rayland Baxter. It’s just a cool and very deep roster they’ve got there.
Izzy: Next month you kick off a ton of live dates with three separate runs. Are there any dates you’re especially excited about, or just cities you’re especially excited to revisit?
John: Philly’s always fun. You can’t really get a good cheesesteak around here [laughs]. You especially cannot get a Philly roast pork sandwich here.
Ian O’ Neil [joining call after brief technical difficulties]: There’s one place in North Providence that almost does it, but they just don’t put the pork on it.
John: What?!?!
Ian: It’s like broccoli rabe, provolone, and then no pork.
John: Doesn’t that sound like some bullshit, Izzy?
Izzy: Yeah… And, on that note, you have played Philly I don’t even know how many times over the years. I feel like I’ve seen you at least a dozen times and maybe missed you just as many. Do you have any favorite memories or experiences throughout the city?
John: Union Transfer was pretty memorable the time when there was a gas leak in the building [laughs].
Ian: That kind of bummed me out, actually [laughs].
John: Maybe not a favorite memory of Philly, but definitely a memory… I’ve always had a lot of fun in Philly. One early gig that we did there was a house show and I was 20 and I remember going out after the show. We went to the Pretzel Factory and got a bag of pretzels, and everybody was like, “We’re gonna sneak you into the bar, John. We’re gonna figure it out.” We got to some bar and my friend Jacob gave me his ID. I don’t look anything like him, but he looked a little bit older than me, I guess. He handed the door guy a pretzel and the door guy just let him in, without checking his ID. And I didn’t have any pretzels, so of course he checked my ID, and I gave him Jacob’s [laughs]. That’s how I got into the bar that night!
Izzy: On this upcoming run you’re playing Underground Arts… It is definitely the smallest venue that you’ve played in Philly in a long time, unless you count the Free At Noons… What can be expected of the live show on this run, in this room that’s literally half the size of Union Transfer?
John: I think we’re trying to get the rooms a little smaller, so it’s just packed out and feels more exciting to be standing in the crowd. We’re bringing out a friend of ours, Jeff Dazey, who plays with Nathaniel Rateliff and Leon Bridges, and he’s gonna be playing keyboards and saxophone. It’s gonna be a proper album release tour and it should be a lot of fun.
Izzy: You were talking about this, doing it for two decades now, and not only do you have a huge catalogue at this point, but you also seem to play fairly different setlists every night. How do you decide on what songs to bring out on any given tour, or even individual nights?
John: Having new material complicates things, because it messes with the calculus [laughs].
Ian: It pushes things in a weird direction the first time we go out with new material.
John: Fans expect a certain amount of familiar material. We’ve gone really heavy on new stuff and covers, and the success rate can be not as high as when we mix it up a little bit more [laughs]. So, we always try to find a good balance, but we have to entertain ourselves, too. I don’t know when we kinda figured it out…
Ian: We’ve put out so many albums at this point, and done this exact kind of thing so many times, where we have to decide. We kind of start out thinking that every single new song is absolutely essential for the rest of our career because it’s the best thing we’ve ever done [laughs]. And then you learn over time which ones make the most sense to be playing on a nightly basis, or which ones end up joining the ranks of your quote unquote greatest hits, the ones that are kind of perennial songs that you’ll play the rest of your career. Even though you hope that like every single song you ever write and record is absolutely essential, you learn along the way which ones are [laughs]. You don’t wanna cut them off at the knees from the outset, but it’s kind of like a natural culling process of figuring out what’s best live.
Izzy: Do you feel like there are previous records, or periods of the band, where the music gels especially well with the new record, that we might expect to hear a fair amount of?
John: I think there’re a lot of similarities with our earliest stuff. The new record’s kind of a cross between the first couple albums and Emotional Contracts, our latest album. I think that’s where I feel like fits in our catalogue, and maybe a little bit Vol.1 and Vol. 2. I think there’s some kind of mid-period Deer Tick stuff that maybe the new album’s not so similar to.
Izzy: This is totally an Ian question, about a song that I’m not expecting to hear, but I’ve definitely heard you play a lot. I have a radio show, Philthy Radio, on Y-Not Radio which is essentially an extension of this, and on the latest edition I talked about the show and played “Now It’s Your Turn,” which I know is one of the ones you wrote. It’s a longtime favorite, which you don’t play a ton these days, but I’ve seen you play it many times back in the day, so I’m curious if you have any memories of how that song came about or even of just playing it live?
Ian: That song was written when I was a very young man [laughs] about a personal relationship situation, but that’s probably as specific as I wanna get with that… But, the cool thing about that song is, I was listening to a lot of Harry Nilsson at the time and I think it was the first time I cracked some codes on some chord changes that I hadn’t yet explored, kind of getting closer to my love for standard songs, that kind of traditional songwriting. I had tried to get to that place before on my own, and I don’t think I quite had, so that was the closest I got to that. That’s kind of a cousin song to “A Light Can Go Out in the Heart” from Emotional Contracts, just ‘cause they’re kind of approaching my absolute love for that type of songwriting. But we have been playing that one more often recently than we had been, and kind of playing it in a heavier way, which seems counterintuitive, but it’s really fun, so maybe we’ll break it out, if you’re there. Let me know!
Izzy: Yeah! I will definitely be there! And, on that note of the Philadelphia show, it’s your first of a number with Jobi Riccio, who I met last year and totally love, so I’m curious if you have any thoughts on her and her music?
John: When we got a list from our booking agency, like, “These are some bands that could open for you,” Jobi really stood out to me and I think, unanimously, she was on everybody’s list of openers. She sounds great, so I’m really excited to see her play every night and get to know her.
Izzy: You’ll be returning to the Newport Folk Festival this July, which you’ve played a bunch in the past and which always has kind of an insane lineup. What’s it like playing Newport? And do you have any favorite memories of it?
Ian: We’ve been there so many times. Two memories, and then I’ll let John go [laughs]. We have this tick, pun intended, where we kind of try to subvert expectations when we’re put in a place. Like, at Newport, you could really do the Newport thing and play “The Weight” by The Band or something like that [laughs]. We opened one of our sets with “Mother” by John Lennon, which I thought was a really fun choice, and when you make a choice like that, it kind of sets this set off-kilter from what else is happening during the day, so that was a really memorable thing to me. Another one was we played a Bob Dylan tribute thing with the guys from Dawes, and a friend of ours, who has since passed, handed me Bob Dylan’s guitar he played at Newport in 1965, and I got to play that. So, that’s obviously a highlight.
Izzy: Yeah, that’s pretty insane.
John: You got to play the guitar that pissed Pete Seeger off… A memory that stands out to me is I was playing as a solo artist one year and I brought my mom up to sing a cover of “Margaritaville” with me… She’s a Parrothead [laughs]. And it was being broadcast nationally on NPR, so like two or three million people heard my mom singing “Margaritaville,” which was really funny to me.
Izzy: You do have a few gaps in your upcoming live runs, so I’m curious how you hope to spend your time off of the road, whether relating to Deer Tick or just kind of having fun and getting some downtime?
John: I’m either gonna be on the beach, if the weather’s nice, or probably smoke a little pot and just watch Jeff Beck videos on YouTube.
Ian: [Laughs] I will also be on the beach. We’ve got kids and stuff like that, and we haven’t been home for a summer in a couple of years, so after this June run we’ve got a couple genuine months of summer, with Newport in there, too… The Newport thing will be really fun. We’ll have to spend some time preparing for that, because we’re going to be having various musicians and guests and friends… What I think will be fun about that, probably fun and nerve-wracking, is just figuring out who’s around and what we can do, but that’ll be cool.
Izzy: I saw that! I saw it was billed as Deer Tick and Friends.
John: Yeah, they were like, “You wanna play Newport?” And we were like, “Okay, sure.” And then they were like, “Okay, it’s Deer Tick and Friends,” so we’re like, “Ah, shit, now we gotta practice” [laughs].
*Get your tickets here.
