Dave Hause Is Back in the Front Seat on ‘Drive It Like It’s Stolen’ (Exclusive)
By Website Content Manager
PEOPLE caught up with Dave and his brother Tim about writing the new record, keeping things personal and bringing the music back to Philly with their own festival
Dave Hause is back at it — this time not only with a new record in Drive It Like It’s Stolen, but also having produced May’s Sing Us Home Festival with his favorite collaborator: his brother Tim Hause.
The now California-based rocker takes fans on a journey with Drive It Like It’s Stolen and his ultra-personal songwriting, teaming up again with co-writer Tim and producer Will Hoge to fully embrace the light, dark and everything in between. And as if putting out a new album wasn’t enough, Dave and Co. have taken on the challenge of bringing a “family reunion” style music festival to Philadelphia. The Drive-By Truckers, Kathleen Edwards and many more took the stage with the Hause brothers on Venice Island this spring to kick off festival season with the best of Americana.
PEOPLE caught up with Dave and Tim to chat about writing Drive It Like It’s Stolen, keeping things personal and bringing their music back to Philly.
Dave Hause: A major thing happened. I can only see it as major in retrospect, but Tim decided to make his debut record, which came out in January. In doing so, he decided to go to Nashville on his own and make that with Will Hoge. In other words, I wasn’t there.
And as he started to make some of those aesthetic choices apart from me in order to craft his own record, his own narrative around that record, it sort of reinvigorated me to understand now that there’s two lanes of creativity. There’s Tim’s lane and there’s my lane. Obviously, there’s a huge Venn diagram that overlaps the two, and we write all the songs together, so that’s the main thing where they cross-pollinate. But as artists, the things we decide to do in the recording and the presentation of the aesthetic are different, and those things reflect our own kind of tastes more specifically.
Going in to Drive It Like It’s Stolen, I was like, “Well, wait, I don’t have to make quite as much
room for Tim in the presentation, because he’s got his lane.” I think on KICK, and Blood Harmony in
particular, I was trying to make as much room for his songwriting and his aesthetic as I could, because it was feeling more and more like a duo or a team or whatever. Now, with that new open lane, I feel like we can be more ferocious in our presentation and have it specific to our individual view. So that was a major breakthrough.
In fact, in the studio I could kind of feel it. At different points, I would ask Tim, “Well, what do you think?” His response about a specific lyric or a specific sound or whatever was not what I would do. And on previous records I would be like, “All right, well, I got to synthesize this in.” On this one I was like, “Nah, this is what I want to do.”
It gives me a new appreciation for our working partnership and a new severity with my own creativity.