Duchovney on singing: ‘Come for the actor. Stay for the music.’
TV star released fifirst album last year, preps for fifirst U.S. tour date.
Add David Duchovny to the long list of actors who have used their fame to become gigging musicians. The New York native best known for his role as the brooding Fox Mulder on “The X-Files” or bacchanalian Hank Moody on “Californication,” Duchovny released his fifirst album, “Hell or Highwater,” last year.
A literature major with degrees from Princeton and Yale, Duchovny, 56, found it easy to match poetry he had been writing to the music he was just learning on guitar. He also writes prose, having published two successful novels and readying a third.
We spoke to the actor-musician recently while he was en route to his fifirst U.S. tour date in San Diego.
What brought you to music this late in your career?
I’ve always loved music, and it was just something where I had a lot of down time. I always told myself I was always going to learn guitar at some point, and I fifinally did. I’m in my trailer so long. As an actor, you sit on your hands for three hours and then you act for 10 minutes. That’s just the nature of it. So while I wait, why don’t I learn guitar, because that will make me happy to be able to play music and listen to it. It kind of organically grew from just knowing a guitar well enough to throw some chords together, and then putting some melodies over those chords. I guess the lyrics came most easily because I’ve always written words. So before I knew it, I was putting songs together.
Are people skeptical of this new direction?
Sure. We only have so much room in our brains for other people. So people think of me a certain way. If they don’t think of me as “X-Files,” they think of me as “Californication,” or they maybe think of me from some other movie. But that’s probably as much as they care to think about me. So if I come and tell them I’m a singer as well, yeah, maybe they don’t want to think about that.
But certainly, there are some
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