Photo courtesy of @wearedumdumgirls Instagram
Hive Five: Our Daily Listicle of Musical Musings
California fuzz-rock act Dum Dum Girls have toured steadily over the past few years and frontwoman Dee Dee has mastered the art of packing for weeks on the road. Her secret? A commitment to reading and keeping healthy. The band is currently on the road in support of their latest release End of Daze EP and for a look into what Dee Dee never leaves home without, check out these Instagrams below.
1. Sunglasses
I wear sunglasses when I tour all of the time. I’m hypersensitive to the sun so I’m always squinting anyway, but I find that I feel uncomfortable in general and sunglasses are a really good way to block that out and feel protected. I started wearing glasses all of the time in eighth grade. I used to wear rose or blue-tinted sunglasses all day in classes because I wasn’t bad enough kid to get away with wearing regular sunglasses. I did that all through high school and then it became a regular thing. It was stemming from me being hyper-self-conscious but I always made sure that they were cool looking. I find that you can just roll out of bed, put them on, put on a pair of boots, and it’s almost like you got ready.
2. Vitamins and Afrin
I’m a pretty severe health nut and because traveling in general — when you do it as much as we do with 12-hour flights twice a month it — definitely wreaks havoc on your body, so I make sure that I take all of my vitamins. One of my best friends’ mom is a raw nutritionist so I have her prescribe me the best stuff that she sells her hardened old coke-rock clients, who have switched from hard drugs to wheatgrass. The Afrin is not healthy, it’s really bad for your nose, but I have chronic inner ear problems so if I don’t use it when I fly then my eardrums would pop — that’s sort of my crutch.
3. Sleeping Mask
I suffer from insomnia and it probably took me a year to realize that it’s not jet lag but a permanent thing. It’s a lavender-infused sleep mask from Whole Foods and the little tin on it is my sleep aid box where I keep my Ambien or melantonin pills. I was writing Only in Dreams when I was really struggling with insomnia for the first time and it had a huge impact.
4. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
I always have books with me on tour but I’ve found that, because of my tendency for motion sickness and all of the time it takes to sit down and dedicate it to reading, taking poetry on tour is the best way to get something out of reading because it’s really easy to pick up and read 10 pages and be inspired by it. It’s such a condensed form of language. My new is hobby is collecting different editions and translations of Flowers of Evil. It’s one of my favorite collections of poetry.
5. Portable Recorder
It’s a really recorder that has an input for an instrument cable so I can play guitar, bass, keyboard, whatever. Say I’m on a four-week tour, the first two weeks I’m not really writing anything, by the third week I’m starting to have nagging ideas to write down, and by the fourth week I have too many ideas I’ll need to get my hotel room and demo and so that would be when I’ll use it. It’s helpful because what I’ve always done with my records has been pretty intensive demoing which I either touch up and release like the first record I Will Be, which was all stuff that I recorded myself, or Only in Dreams where we recreated everything and changed things in the studio.
End of Daze is out now on Sub Pop. For more Dum Dum Girls, check out Hive’s story on their new album and Douglas Wolk’s exploration of the band’s connection to Strawberry Switchblade.
