X-panding his repertoire
Ahead of his visit to Wellington next month, Jane Rocca talks to TV star who has established a latelife career change as a musician.
Best known for his 90s character FBI Agent Fox Mulder in the paranormal series The X-Files, David Duchovny has found his second calling – as a musician.
Right now his professional worlds are colliding – he’s about to begin a tour of Australasia and last month he finished filming The X-Files after a 14-year absence. Filming the rebooted series between Vancouver and Los Angeles has given Duchovny a great throwback buzz, but he’s also fallen in love with writing and recording his own music.
No stranger to the written word, Duchovny mastered a knack for storytelling by writing novels and became one of The New York Times best-selling authors along the way [more on that later]. His debut studio album Hell or Highwater was released three years ago and his next, Every Third Thought, is due in early February. It was recorded at Atomic Sound in Brooklyn in December 2016.
‘‘I always thought about music, appreciated it and listened to it, but I didn’t pick up a guitar until about seven years ago and started writing songs four years ago,’’ says Duchovny of his musical epiphany. ‘‘The whole thing came out of the blue for me and I am pleasantly surprised,’’ he says. ‘‘I’ve found a whole different way of expressing myself.’’
Duchovny’s musical inspiration stems from the classics – The Beatles, The Velvet Underground and Tom Petty.
The title track on his debut is low and murky, hinting at Leonard Cohen’s almost spoken raspy inflection, while Unsaid Undone is more poppy, and smiles with a crackling riff and a wandering heart. Lately It’s Always December gallops to a country beat, proving he’s most comfortable in the deep dark alley of folk-pop, clings to nostalgia and pens bruised anthems.
‘‘I haven’t been singing my whole life, so I am not naturally gifted with a big voice,’’ says Duchovny, in a deep tonal voice that sounds like he’s about to solve a mystery.
‘‘For me, exploring a music path is very much revolved around trying to figure out what I can do. Once I figured out the sort of music I could sing, I naturally stuck with that,’’ he says.
He admits heading into the studio a second time was easier than the first.
‘‘The second album is less heavy thematically and less heavy in lots of other ways,’’ says Duchovny of broadening his sound palette. ‘‘The first album was like, ‘I can’t believe I have actually written an album’ and the second one is realising this is part of what I do now. It was more of a natural thing,’’ he says.
At 57, he didn’t start writing novels or music until he was in his 50s. He might be a TV screen hero best known to us for his time in Californication [as Hank Moody, the womanising novelist] but he’s also spent plenty of time away from the limelight and quite likes the contrast of both worlds.
He’s about to release his third novel, Miss Subways in April, described as a love letter to New York by way of character Emer, who battles natural and supernatural forces to find her true voice. It follows 2015’s Holy Cow: A Modern-Day Dairy Tale, which made it to No 15 on The New York Times Best Seller List, and 2016’s Bucky F...ing Dent – a story about a 30-something stoner living in a Bronx tenement.
Duchovny’s father [Amram] published his debut novel Coney at the age 72 in 2000 [three years before he died] and his mother Margaret, a Scottish-born schoolteacher who lives in New York, also embraced a love of literature and encouraged it in her son. ‘‘I’ve always been surrounded by people who appreciated the written word,’’ he says. ‘‘My father was a novelist and I don’t know anyone who published their first book in their 70s like he did. He always identified himself as a writer and had the greatest respect for others who wrote,’’ he says.
Duchovny recently gave his 88-year-old mother an audio book of his forthcoming release.
‘‘I am pretty sure my mother has read my books,’’ he says. ‘‘Her eyes aren’t that great but she tells me she’s read them. I find when it comes to relatives, it’s hard for them to consume the works you write. I know my mother is afraid she’ll end up in one of the books. You read with that fear, of ‘please don’t say anything about me’.’’
As far as acting goes, the father of two teenagers (Madelaine West, 18 and Kyd Miller, 15), doesn’t like to think too far ahead.
‘‘I figure my downtime is going to come,’’ says Duchovny, who separated from wife Tea Leoni in 2014. ‘‘I still love my acting, I’ve just found other passions as well.
‘‘When you’re an actor-for-hire, you’re always afraid you’ll be put out to pasture or they will stop wanting to see you. I like to keep working while the work is there but having found music and writing prose for the last six years I have other ways to express myself.’’
Before he played Mulder in The X-Files, Duchovny first came to our attention as a cross-dressing FBI Agent Denise Barton in Twin Peaks. He reprised the role in the recent revival of the 1991 classic.
‘‘It’s been great to come back and do a role that’s more than 25 years old,’’ he says. ‘‘When I do a scene as Denise it’s as authentic to me as when I first approached it.
‘‘For better for worse, there is so much politics everywhere now. I think all art is political, but I don’t personally approach it in a conscious way with a political axe to grind. That would ruin me as an artist to do that. Luckily I didn’t have anything in mind and I think that’s why it works. The way the character was treated and portrayed was without any judgment or agenda at all.’’
For now, fans keen to hear Duchovny’s new album, which he funded via Pledge Music, can hear it from today. ‘‘If I wrote my debut album in my 20s it would probably be different to what I have to say now,’’ he reflects . ‘‘But a first album is a first regardless of what age you release it. Every Third
Thought is about as honest as I get to what I want to say. I hope my fans enjoy it.’’