By Jim Testa

In the 15 years or so that Kevin Devine has been kicking around in bands, he's seen it all - small indies, middle-sized labels, and even a short stint on a major. He didn't make the decision to fund his next release with Kickstarter lightly, but once he made the decision, he found that his fans were more than willing to help: Devine reached his original goal of $50,000 in less than one day and wound up with nearly $115,000 in contributions. So he's been busy recording two new collections - a solo set produced by Rob Schnapf, and an album featuring his full ensemble The Goddamn Band with Jesse Lacey at the helm.

But even as he's moving to shore up his future, Kevin is also taking time to look back: He'll be performing with his first band, The Miracle of '86. for two shows: June 14 at Maxwell's and June 15 at the Mercury Lounge.

The Miracle Of ’86 (referring to the Mets World Series victory of that year) was formed on Staten Island in the late Nineties by high school pals Devine and Chris McAllen. Guitarist Mike Robertson joined the group in 1999 and drummer Mike Skinner solidified the lineup in 2001; the band went on to some local success and limited touring, including the release of 2003’s well-received album “Every Famous Last Word.” But the group disbanded a year later, with Devine pursuing a solo career and McAllen moving over to the Lilies. Skinner and Robertson both found success working behind the scenes as producers, engineers, and professional songwriters.

On a personal note, I met Kevin in 2002 at a Miracle of ’86 show in Brooklyn, and we’ve been friends ever since. One thing you have to understand about Kevin Devine: We know he can write, and sing, and play guitar. But the man can also talk. Ask him a question, and he’ll ramble on for an hour if you don’t interrupt him. We talked by phone from L.A., where Kevin was busy recording the first of his two Kickstarter-funded albums, and talked about the decision to crowd-source his music and how Miracle of '86 wound up reuniting.


Q: Let’s talk about your Kickstarter. You started off with a goal of raising $50,000 to record two albums, and ended up with almost $115,000 in donations. Tell me about that process.

It was a six month process to make the decision to do it. And over the course of the six months, I flip flopped back and forth a hundred times. Yes, I’ll definitely do it, no I definitely won’t do it, everything in between, and finally, it was probably a 51/49 decision to go with it. Detailing the entire inner working of that self-abusive anti-intellectual process would require a 12-hour interview all by itself. So let’s just say that it was going to happen, then it wasn’t, then it did.

I genuinely thought that 50 grand, for two records… to anybody, that’s a lot of money. And I thought, we’re either going to fall flat on our faces, or we put it up for 45 days and maybe we just squeak through and raise the money. And then, for whatever reason, it raised like 64 grand in the first day, and it hit the goal in nine hours. It’s almost impossible to talk about stuff like that, because it’s money, it’s numbers, it’s nothing I’m used to talking about. So I’m trying to get better at just talking directly about it. But to me, that was genuinely shocking. In an amazing way, in a beautiful way, obviously… But I didn’t think, let’s ask for 50 so we blow through it in nine hours and look really cool, I honest thought we might not make 50,000 if we took the entire 45 days.

To break it down to a record industry perspective, I spoke to labels about making these records. And I wouldn’t have been able to go to any record label on the planet and say, I want to make these two albums, and I want to be able to promote them, and I want you to give me 115 grand to do that. They would have just smiled and said, ‘best of luck with that.’ So I feel like I’m lucky, I’m grateful, and I’m acutely aware that this is more about the audience than about myself. They spoke very clearly, and it eradicates a lot of fearful anxiety I had about where I was with my career. You think you’re connecting with people, but you’re never really totally sure. But this, it’s more than the money, it’s the audience telling me that they value what I do. It was overwhelming in that sense. It was my audience saying ‘we don’t have how your music comes out, or with whom, or through which channels. We just like that you make it, and we want you to keep making it.
As you know, I’ve been on a major record label, I’ve been on a bunch of small independent labels, I’ve been on Razor & Tie, which is something in-between.

This is the most gratifying experience to this point in my career because I’m living in Los Angeles for a month making a record with one of my favorite producers, not because some company is paying for me to do it, but because the people who like my music are paying me to do it. Any misgivings I had about the Kickstarter process vanish when I look at it through that lens. And I’m also grateful because I’m at the point in my career where I like working a lot. I’ve always liked working a lot, but in the past I was good at misdirecting myself and clouding that work ethic with a lot of horseshit. Now that I know I can be totally just working on music all the time, that’s totally fine with me. So I’m also not concerned that we’re not going to follow through on the good faith that people have share with me. I’ve been writing these records since the end of last year, so it’s not like I have to come up with filler to make the albums…

You think you know what the records are going to sound like, and then you get into the studio and you don’t. My idea is that the solo record with Rob Schnapf producing would be – not in terms of the content, but just the sound – sort of like Nebraska or Automatic For The People. And if there were rock songs on the album, they’d be every lean. But then we got into the studio, and it’s definitely not turned out like that. Like, songs that I thought would be great with just an acoustic guitar and a shaker have turned into Pink Floyd songs or something. But I like the idea of following the songs as you go along. And I also thought, if I’m making a rock record with the band, I can’t make any rock stuff with myself. And then I realized that’s nuts, and I just followed my instincts, and the stuff we’re doing with Rob just sounds different. Which makes sense. These two guys from an L.A. band called Everest played drums and bass, and they really opened it up. Sometimes it reminds me of the Zombies and sometimes like Neil Young’s Zuma. It’s definitely not what I thought it was going to be.


Kevin with The Miracle of '86 in 2002.

Q: When you sit down and write a song, is it immediately apparent whether it’s a Kevin Devine song or a Goddamn Band song?

With this project, it became that way for sure. When we started to think about doing the Kickstarter, we thought, well, what can we do to make this special? Well, let’s make two records, and let’s make them in totally different ways. The songs on the band record we’re doing with Jesse Lacey were written in December, January, and February. The stuff on the Rob record, some of it I wrote a year ago, and the last song we did for the record I wrote when I got to L.A. in March. Those songs spanned a longer time frame. But once we had a picture of what we were going to do with the Kickstarter, we made a plan that we wanted to get into the studio as soon as the Kickstarter was done. So the month of January, I’d get up, make some coffee, sit down, and start writing and working on music. And maybe it sounds like punching the clock, but it was a great process. That first song is the one that feels like you’re trying to pull a tooth out of your head, but once that’s over, stuff comes. I think the turning point was, there’s a song on the Jesse record called ‘Talking Shit About A Fiscal Cliff,’ and I started writing it and it was like a Minutemen song or something. And I thought, I can’t write that song, that doesn’t sound like me, that’s stupid. And I sent it to the band, and got to rehearsal, and Jesse said, ‘That song you sent’s amazing, it’s great, let’s play that.’ And I was like, I don’t even know if that’s a song. It either sounds like Pearl Jam or the Minutemen, and I don’t know if it’s good either way, and Jesse insisted, no, it was good, we had to do it.

And that song became this real fun, screamy, catchy, punk rock thing. Power chords, adrenalized. It wasn’t even really what Miracle of 86 sounded like. To me, Miracle was a hybrid of a lot of things we liked at the time, whether it was Nirvana or the Pixies or the Replacements, but also there was a wave of emo that influenced that band, things like Texas Is The Reason and Promise Ring, and Miracle was in the center of all that. This song is something that sounded even a little more like punk rock than Miracle ever did. So when that song made sense of all of a sudden, not only did it fit, but I started writing more songs like that. I like that kind of music a lot but I’d always talked myself out of writing it for some reason, like I didn’t think the chord progressions were sophisticated enough, or another band had co-opted a certain style of song, so I didn’t want to play it myself.

And then all these songs started to come together, some political, some not political, some just about lack of love or whatever… Some kind of funny, some about social issues. But they all just poured out in a way that felt bracing and immediate. And for the lack of a more elegant way to say it, if I wrote something that was two and a half minutes long and had power chords, then that was a band song. And then when I was writing stuff that sounded like, say, Automatic For The People – it seems like there’s a point every year when I go back to that record and can’t stop listening to it – then I knew that would be for the Jesse album. I can’t wait for people to hear these records. I think both of them are really good in really different ways, really different from each other and also really different from my prior stuff, yet still sounding like the same dude wrote all the songs. And that’s all you’re trying to do.

Q: When you do a Kickstarter, you’re basically pre-selling the album to people at lower levels, but then offering incentives and premiums for the donations at higher levels. Are you looking at all the stuff you’ve promised to do and wondering how you get yourself into this?

I think I don’t know yet. So far, I’m in the place where I’m making the music, and that’s always the part that’s the most exciting. I’m in the studio 70 hours a week right now and that’s where my head is at. But here’s what the plan was. Again, if you don’t expect you’re going to raise more than $50,000, then you don’t expect you’ll have to do more than a certain amount of these bonus things. Making $115,000 is a blessing but it also means that I have to do two or three times more of everything we had originally planned. So the idea was that I would work through the Spring, record the two records, then in May I’m going to Europe to do some club shows. And there are intermittent shows with Bad Books through this period that were already booked.

But then from June 2 until fall, basically Kickstarter Inc. will be my day job and I’ll spend that time at home in the summer doing all those bonus things. So if you ordered the package where I record a cover song for you, I’ll do that on Monday. Then if you ordered the package where I record one of my own songs and write down a handwritten lyric sheet and get it framed, I’ll do that on Tuesday. That’s what I’ll be doing this summer. So I feel like it should be manageable. I basically run a small business with my career at this point anyway, so there’s always administrative stuff that has to be done. Or I’m songwriting, or something else. It’s not like I’m sitting on my ass watching television all day when I’m not on tour. So I don’t think it will be overwhelming, but I’ll find out. Some of those bigger ticket items, like the house shows and whatnot, I said, ‘you can put that stuff up because no one’s gonna take them, so do whatever you want.’ And then they went in a day.


Kevin in mid-solo career, 2009


But I do have people helping me with this. My manager and his partner are going to be handling the records in their garage in L.A. and we’ll have interns packing and boxing stuff up. So I’ll probably go out there at some point and sign a thousand things. But it all seems doable. So right now, sunshine and roses. If you ask me in August, I might tell you, wow, this is insane and I don’t even know if it’s worth $115,000 to do all this stuff. To be honest, I spent a lot more time and effort coming up with the $200 level items because that’s what I thought my audience could afford. But some of the higher ticket items… For me to play at someone’s house, I thought, I’ve played a lot of house shows in my time but nobody’s every paid me $4,000 to play one, so that is never going to happen, so put up whatever you want. And I was obviously wrong. So I don’t know who that is yet, but that I think could be the most interesting experience out of all this. I’m speechless that people would do that shit, it’s all just amazing.


The Miracle of '86 in 2002.

Q: I’m really glad I’m going to get to see Miracle of ’86 again. Was this reunion something that has been festering for a while?

I really never thought our band would play together again, it wasn’t even a flickering thought in my head as recently as a year ago. That band broke up nine years ago and we’ve all gone on to other things. In 2010, the Goddamn Band and I put together a show at Maxwell’s to celebrate the re-release of Split The Country/Split The Streets. The rehearsals for that were so much fun, and it occurred to me that Mike (Robertson) had played guitar on that record. We hadn’t talked at that point in four or five years, but I emailed him and asked him if he wanted to come up and play with us. His response was very warm and he explained that he couldn’t get out of work to do the shows, but the tone made me think that he was very receptive. I was pretty messy in my early to mid-twenties, and I made some poor decisions and did some things I’m not proud of, and I wasn’t happy with the way we had left things. So I just suggested we get together and we had lunch, and it was really nice. We talked for over two hours, and a door was opened.

Q: Was there any hesitation about getting back together? I seem to recall that there were some pretty strong ill feelings when the band broke up.

The band was really fun but bands do break up, and by the end everyone wanted to kill each other, so there were some thoughts about if we really wanted to go back there. But in the end, we all thought it would be good idea.

Then Sandy happened, and one of my best friends in the world, Chris O’Brien, lost his house on Staten Island. Everything destroyed, wiped out. McAllen and I had grown up with Chris, he was always the kid in the Staten Island hardcore scene, he never played in bands himself but he was a fixture at every show we were at. When stuff like that happens, you talk to ex-girlfriends you haven’t talked to in ten years because you want to make sure they got through the storm all right. It brings a lot of people together. So I wrote to McAllen, since his parents still live on Staten Island, and made sure they were all okay. And I thought, if this band was ever going to play again, this would be the perfect reason. And also there’s a club on Staten Island called The Full Cup, and the owner’s been after me to do a show there forever. So what if we did a Miracle show at this guy’s club on Staten Island? It was the best of all worlds. So we gave some of the money to Staten Island Strong and some to Chris directly, we raised over two grand for Chris’ family and $1,500 for Staten Island Strong, and for a small club on Staten Island, that’s pretty good. McAllen said he was in, Skinner and Robertson were like “let’s go,” we put 150 tickets up on sale, and they were gone in a day. So I thought, that’s cool, people actually remember this and people want to see it. And it was really fun.


It was simultaneously like feeling the passage of time and remembering that we had spent a lot of time together, in this context. And once we got past that initial awkwardness, which was a little weird at first, it was just great. A lot of fun, a lot of stories, a lot of ball-busting. Played the songs and they sounded really good. It was a treat. So after the show, we were thinking, well, there’s some interest here. We heard from a lot of people who couldn’t get tickets because they sold out so quickly, or couldn’t get to Staten Island. It wasn’t like when the Pixies got back together, we didn’t mistake it for anything that big. I think Miracle’s biggest record sold 2,000 copies, and our longest, broadest tour got as far west as Omaha and as far south as Birmingham. So we can’t go and do a tour and have it be worth anybody’s time, but the idea of doing a weekend seemed very feasible. Well, we don’t hate each other, we don’t want to kill each other anymore, we really enjoyed playing together. We still like the songs. What if we did a New York show or a New Jersey show? So the guy who books my show came to that reunion show and really liked it. ‘I saw your band ten years ago and didn’t think much of it,’ he said. And that’s fair. There were a lot of great Miracle shows and some really shitty Miracle shows. So he put the feelers out and it worked out perfectly. Mercury Lounge and Maxwell’s are two places where we played a ton. And in lieu of Brownie’s, which isn’t around anymore, I think Mercury Lounge is probably the only surviving New York club where we’d feel at home. In fact, the first Miracle show before Robertson had even joined the band, prior to my 18th birthday, was at Mercury Lounge. There’s a lot of history there for the band, and the same for Maxwell’s. Miracle probably played at Maxwell’s three or four times. And I’m hoping both shows will sell out. Back when Miracle of ’86 was playing those clubs the first times, we weren’t selling out anywhere, so it will be nice to have played there, gone on and done other things for nine years, and then come back to those places and have them actually be full.