DRUGDEALER SELLS OLD-FASHIONED POP
MICHAEL COLLINS PERFORMER AS DRUGDEALER.
When you get Michael Collins, the Los Angeles musician who usually records music under the alias Drugdealer, on the phone for an interview, you kind of get the feeling that the dude is pulling your leg a bit when he’s talking to you. For example, when the topic of his song “If You Don’t Know Now, You Never Will,” one of the songs from his latest album, “Raw Honey,” appearing on a summer playlist Kendall Jenner assembled for Apple Music, this is what he has to say about it:
“I mean, I personally feel great, you know. I’m not as much familiar with Kendall Jenner or her cultural output. But, from what I understand, (her family is) a real American family and they know how to entertain.”
But Collins, 31, already knew about being featured on Jenner’s playlist when people notified him of it. “She’s got good taste,” he says. “It’s one of the deeper songs on the album. So, she probably likes lyrics, I imagine.”
Considering how enigmatic Collins is as a musician/performer, it would make sense that he’s the kind of artist who would yank an interviewer’s chain during a straightforward phoner. After all, this is a guy who has recorded music under such cheeky noms de guerre as Run DMT and Salvia Plath. (He says he came up with his latest moniker as a way of bringing awareness to our country’s out-of-control opioid crisis.) “When my art goes through a big change, I just change the name and the intention of it,” he says. “A lot of people I’ve seen choose a bad name when they start making music. And, then, their music changes wildly at some point, and they just keep going with the same name. I don’t think that makes a lot of sense personally.”
The child of research scientists, the New Jersey-born Collins bounced around several places before making Los Angeles his home five years ago. As a former Laurel Canyon resident (“It’s not the same place it used to be,” he says) who makes the sort of throwback, psychedelic indie-pop that sounds like it should be coming out of an AM radio 50 years ago, critics and scribes feel he’s been influenced by the ’60s artists — The Mamas and the Papas, Carole King, Neil Young — who came out of that area.
“The thing is that there’s just a lot of influence in my music,” he says. “You know, I’m just very openly influenced by everything. Like, I’ll probably be influenced by the way you talked to me on my next album. I’m very affected by everything, and some things are just more potent than others.”
Collins does admit he has a soft
spot for ’60s Brit artists like the Beatles (and, no, he hasn’t seen “Yesterday” yet) and Donovan. “The thing is that, for me, I just really like harmony and I like old-fashioned lyrics,” he says. “The truth is that this album is equally or more influenced by English artists. I think it’s just that people see a press release that says ‘Los Angeles artist’ — and also, my good friend did the great disservice probably of writing the tagline ‘Laurel Canyon’ in my press release.”
With “Honey” recently released into the world, Collins has been hitting the road and doing shows with the band (which includes pro skateboarder-turned-musician
Danny Garcia on guitar) that he used to record the album. Being part of a band is something Collins, whose last Drugdealer project, “The End of Comedy,” had him calling in musicians and vocalists like Ariel Pink and Weyes Blood to contribute, had to get used to. “I like to keep the vibe pretty specific in a recording atmosphere,” he admits. “It’s a lot easier to control that, you know, in a recording session than over the course of a tour. But, slowly, the right people in my life kind of assembled without much intention from me. And, now, I have a band of people that I just love traveling with.”
In the end, what does Michael Collins want people to know about him and his various musical personas? “Just that I have no idea what I’m doing — and neither should anyone try to figure it out too much,” he says. “The best thing to do is leave some mystery in everything you do — to yourself, not to anyone else. I don’t know where this is going.”