“Bombs and bullshit fill the air” is the line that opens “Yesterday’s Hero,” a track from Dean Wareham’s new solo album, That’s the Price of Loving Me. It isn’t difficult to grasp the reference to Gaza, though it may be surprising to hear Wareham deliver an unvarnished sentiment of this kind. His latest album is infused with politics in a way that makes transparent a side of Wareham that has long existed, if not always expressed directly.
Wareham is best known as the founder and lead vocalist for Galaxie 500, a canonical dream pop act during the late 1980s that channeled influences like the Modern Lovers and Joy Division to become the platonic ideal of what an indie rock band should be. He went on to establish Luna, which similarly defined the New York scene during the 1990s through a sequence of stylish albums that included guest musicians like Tom Verlaine of Television and Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground. Wareham wrote about these heady years in Black Postcards (2008), a characteristically understated memoir that nonetheless revealed the trials and thrills of becoming an influential musician before digital streaming changed everything.
Since moving to Los Angeles in 2013, Wareham has focused on his solo work, recording with his wife, Britta Phillips, as well as acting occasionally and composing film soundtracks, specifically for director Noah Baumbach. One song from their new LP, “The Cloud is Coming,” was originally written for Baumbach’s recent adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise. Closing the album, it has the refrain “I see no difference/Between the blue and the red/The cloud is coming for us all,” imparting a despondent, if not completely pessimistic, state of mind that Wareham has increasingly articulated in his latest recordings.
Wareham’s solo album from 2021, I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A., marked this political turn with tracks like “The Last Word” (about Eleanor Marx), “Red Hollywood,” and — inspired by Norman Mailer’s long ago political novel — “Why Are We in Vietnam?”
That’s the Price of Loving Me follows suit with songs about student activism and the pro-Palestinian encampments, including “New World Julie” and “Bourgeois Manqué” (“Forty thousand dead/But the students are unruly/So they’re suspending kids instead”), as well as a cover version of Nico’s mournful “Reich der Träume” (“Realm of Dreams”). On this latter track, sung in German, Wareham messages a desire to escape from the present moment, in addition to reflecting his long-standing affection for the Velvet Underground.
Pop music can offer things without being overtly political.
All these songs are delivered in the pop perfectionist style that Wareham is known for, creating an uncomfortable, if also beguiling, tension between the bright surface of his music and the darker themes underneath.
Over Zoom, Wareham is similarly a study in contrasts. Betraying, perhaps, his education at Dalton and Harvard, he conveys a cerebral, even professorial, air with his home office cluttered by books and a wall-mounted electric guitar. His hair is tousled like he just rolled out of bed, a casual rock-star look he has nonetheless managed to sustain for several decades. He is quick to drop names in conversation, whether Julian Barnes, Eric Hobsbawm, or Edward Said. He spoke to Christopher J. Lee about the new album, his career, and why his songwriting has become more openly political.