Deeper and Deeper and Deeper

Deeper is a band from Chicago that I find myself listening to in my most tender moments; when I’m walking downtown in the rain in a jacket not warm enough for the climate, or when I am burning down the highway as fast as I’m burning down my cigarette - windows down, the ocean mist pushing onto my face with as much force as I’ll give the shittt ‘98 Toyota Camry’s combustion chamber.

This to say, it’s quite good, quite well-paced, quite adaptable, quite angular, and quite emotional guitar music. When I interviewed them here over a few margaritas moments before they’d play their sold out show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, New York City, I thought back to when I interviewed them last year for the release of their most recent album, Careful! and how fun that interview was, which reminded me of when I first met them in May, 2023, at a festival in Salt Lake City, and how at that festival’s artist area absolutely brimming with musicians taking themselves very seriously and embracing solemnity, Deeper guys were doing impressions and giggling.

They’re fun, easy, engaging people to be around, so it’s no wonder we chose them to play our showcase at South By Southwest presented by Sonny’s Porch; because when assembling a lineup, it isn’t just about how the music makes you feel like a sparkly industrial worker sucked into the gravitational density of Deeper’s dance floor (which it does), it’s also about who you can spend a week drunk in Texas with. 

Unfortunately and very unprofessionally though very on par with the nature of the publication at which you are reading this, the interview was done in the venue over margaritas across three tables and during a soundcheck, and this transcription is to the best of our abilities. Because of the difficulty of time and space and audio, I have composited the four members of Deeper - Nic Gohl, Shiraz Bhatti, Drew McBride, and Kevin Fairbairn - into one, with certain exceptions, and with their permission. 

I feel like a tinfoil hat would make you more conductive to electricity.

Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t make the rules. 

How’s this mini tour going?

It’s been great! It’s a lot easier to do four shows than forty shows. 

Has it taken you forty shows to discover that?

It has taken us four shows to discover that. I feel like you’re trained to believe that if you don’t do three or four weeks then it’s not really a tour, which isn’t necessarily true. And we are gaining a lot of clout for selling out a lot of one hundred cap rooms. But no one has to know that, it could be a thousand cap.

Yeah, nobody’s been to Kingston.

Sometimes you just have to lie on the internet.

You’re playing our showcase at SXSW, thank you for doing that.

Yes we are, thank you for having us!

Have you played before?

Yeah, in 2019, and not since. We were supposed to go in 2020. We were on our way in New Orleans and Trump came on TV, Rudy Gobert touched all the mics - they put Tom Hanks’ face everywhere and were like, ‘Tom fucking Hanks… no, not Tom Hanks, please,’ and everyone in the shitty touristy Mexican restaurant we were in were all like, ‘Nooooo!!!’ AMC did a Tom Hanks marathon that week. We were on our way when everything just fell apart.

Are you excited to come back?

Well, we are only there for like twenty four hours. If we were doing what we did last time, we’d be like, this is painful. We were there for five days and played ten showcases. It was jampacked. But also, your first time at SXSW, everyone’s like, ‘you need to make the most of this because there are a lot of industry people here,’ but then you’re playing at 11:00am to nobody. We’ve been able to say no to a lot of things as a band and that feels really good. That’s when you know you’re comfortable as a band, when you can say no. It doesn’t really matter usually, there are not too many ways that playing a couple of showcases will change your life. People are inundated with showcases. Except for Monster Children’s of course!

How’s Chicago?

The day we left it was sixty degrees and really sunny, and we came over here and it’s in the thirties. My neighbor’s rhubarb is sprouting a full two months early, it’s crazy. 

What have you been listening on this four day tour?

Decisive P!nk. Elliott Smith. 

Are you okay?

Some Papa M. We like spooky podcasts like Otherworld and Spooked. 

Are these like ghost stories?

People telling their paranormal experiences in story form.

How have these podcasts influenced your songwriting over the years?

[Nic] I don’t know if it has - me and my wife just like to listen to them before we go to sleep and have crazy dreams. So it’s indirect. 

It’s a very subconscious influence.

I mean, there’s crazy shit happening in these dreams. Murders… not me murdering. 

[Kevin] Nic will meet up with me and be like, ‘ah man I forgot to tell you, I had a crazy dream where we were going somewhere to pick up a suitcase, and you got shot!’ 

Yeah, crazy stuff. There’s this one episode of Otherworld talking about astral projecting, and I  felt like that night I was astral projecting. I was like, in my room-

I think that was just a dream…

No! I was walking around and shit!

I walk around in dreams all the time!

Well then you’re astral projecting my guy! This person talks about how a lot of it starts with you in your room and then you can get sent out to other shit. You can see yourself sleeping.

Oh, that’s different, then.

Yeah, I could see myself and my wife sleeping and I was walking around. 

In the last interview I asked you to explain your bits. What are this tour’s bits?

I had a really good one for a while… I can’t do it now, but it’s like a kid at Ruby Tuesday’s and his dad’s being a total dick and being like, ‘What do you want on your potato?!’ It’s like a kid and dad arguing at a Ruby Tuesday’s, and at the end of the argument the kid is like, ‘so what do you want a side salad or a baked potato?’ and you discover that the kid is actually a waiter at Ruby Tuesday’s. 

So it’s like a radio play with a twist ending?

Oh, yeah, totally that.

Yeah, that one’s okay.

The bits get better the longer the tour goes because there’s this meta compounding of jokes and something breaks through from the weaker jokes. No shade on this guy, there’s this documentary about a hitchhiker who like starved to death and no one knew who he was, and at the end, one of the hikers that he had met on the trail starts playing this acoustic song, and we’ve been playing it a bunch and it’s really funny. It’s also like seven minutes long. The chorus is like, work on monday, work on tuesday, he does all the days of the week. 

In the van, how do you stay sane? 

I feel really fortunate that we have a good dynamic. Having toured with other bands, we can say, ‘oh we get along a lot better than that band.’ Everyone finds ways to get their alone time or get what they need in order to stay okay.

[Nic] and I find a way to intrude on all of their alone time.

Nic’s a full extrovert in the way that the other three of us are not. When we were on a tour in 2021, three of us got Covid in europe and were stranded there. Nic was the first to get it, and he had to isolate by himself. He was calling us like, ‘I can’t do this, what are you guys doing, what’s going on out there?’

Alright, what’re your tips for people coming to see you at this festival?

Say yes to everything; molly, PCP, have a good time, drink the drink, ayyy nah I don’t know. I hate going to festivals. Drink water. Show up early and go see bands you don’t know. Exploration is what festivals are good for. If you want to bring weed in, hide it in your sock or in that little lip on the inside of your baseball cap. I had a friend bring two fifths of vodka into Pitchfork fest one year. 

What? How? Was he just like, ‘I got a big dick, man’?

He was a pretty big guy, and we were watching LCD and he was that disruptive drunk guy flapping his hands around. Shoutout Adam. I went to Pitchfork to see King Krule and there was this old lady yelling like, ‘I’ve been waiting for hours and I can’t see now! What are you doing!?’ and I was like, ‘hey I don’t know, I’m just here with my sisters,’ and she just kept yelling at me about being tall and block her view, so here’s my tip: just bring her in front of you, because there will be a mosh pit and she will be even more frustrated.

It’s so annoying to me when people go to shows and stand right in that zone and are afronted by people dancing and moving. That’s what we are here to do, not to cross our arms like you. Also, when people complain about tall people, push in front of them. There are no rules. No harm no foul. 

Also, stay off of your phone, be in the moment. At the DC show - no shade on the older crowd - but they were in the front row for the whole show and didn’t want to move at all, just cross armed. One guy was reading a book. If you’re doing that kind of stuff, maybe you should go in the back and watch so that the kids can go crazy. I mean, it’s for the youth. We aren’t getting any younger. We’re, you know, twenty five.  

Get your hands on tickets to our showcase at SXSW, here.