dana brave the wind advisory in the van with a king size box of nerds
The Columbus band stay up late in Detroit to discuss writing songs with theremin, the regions that define them as egg punks, and hip-hop’s influence.
DANA let me know they’ve left Chicago a little late, so we’ll be doing the interview after the show. In the Detroit punk scene, this means “late as hell.” I decide to get to Paris Bar early anyway so I can at least chat with the Columbus art punks a bit before they play. When I bring up the god-tier show lineup to DANA’s Madeline (vocals, theremin), she proudly says they got all their first-round draft picks: Day Residue, 208, and Fen Fen.
In other words, they’re tapped all the way in. Somewhere between us discussing the invention of xanthan gum and Jeffrey Dahmer’s dad’s substitute teaching, I learn Madeline’s family is originally from Detroit. It turns out this isn’t my first non-Detroit band interview after all. Crisis averted.
No matter how good the music sounds on their excellent 2025 album Clean Living, there are some bands that demand to be seen live and, halfway through their first song, it’s clear to me that DANA is one of them. With blacked-out teeth and a weather-appropriate cossack hat, Madeline puts on one hell of a show, which Chris (guitar and backing vocals), Brian (drums), and Dan (bass) facilitate by absolutely shredding.
There aren’t really solos—just moments when the four of them collectively (yet somehow not chaotically) freak out. The already hypnotic experience is enhanced by the presence of the theremin, which more-than-occasionally makes it seem like Madeline is literally casting spells.
They finish up and Day Residue cap the night with a reliably excellent set. Show over, I track down Madeline, who rounds up the rest of the band, and we all collectively realize it’s too loud in the building and too goddamned windy outside (there is, in fact, a wind advisory). The decision is made that the interview will be conducted in their white 2018 Chevy Express van and I’m honored to sit shotgun. Chris offers me a yerba mate and Dan offers me some grape and strawberry Nerds from the king size box. I decline both, but instantly regret not accepting a handful of Nerds. It is 1:15 a.m.
In an effort to put the reader inside this shockingly normal-smelling van, I have created the below audioscape, which captures the wind howling outside, Dan’s Nerds consumption, and Chris’ genuinely charming habit of leaving the van to say what’s up to all of his Detroit friends as they leave.
I was reading about the Ohio lineage of your sound and your influences being Pere Ubu and Brainiac. I was wondering if that was conscious or an organic thing that just happens in Ohio, where you make a bunch of crazy, awesome sounds.
Madeline: I think it’s a little of both. When the band started, that was the short list of influences. We just love and are proud of the music from the region and maybe one of us gravitates to one band, or different armpit of the state, more than the other-
Chris: We’re from the four armpits of Ohio, like the Captain Planet of Ohio.
Madeline: None of us is from Columbus originally.
Chris: She’s northwest, Dan’s northeast, I’m from Portsmouth, and Brian’s from Dayton.
One of my best friends is from Dayton.
Chris: One of the guys we were playing with on this tour kept being like, “Ohio, Ohio, man,” and it feels good sometimes to hear other people say it.
Brian: Yeah, it was Drew Carey. [everyone laughs]
I’m sure you’ve been asked, but the theremin feels essential to the band. I can see people saying it’s just to be…
Madeline: Novel?
Right, you don’t want to say, “gimmick,” but if I hear there’s a punk band with a theremin, I’ll think, “huh.” But after seeing you guys and hearing your stuff, it’s such an essential part of the sound.
Brian: It fits right in there. If you write something the theremin can’t go wild over, is it really a DANA song?
Dan: Pretty much the three of us play like nutcases and the theremin circles everything back around so it’s centered.
Right, it…
Chris: Ties the room together?
Brian: “Phone’s ringin’, Dude.” [everyone laughs]
Madeline: I feel like when I started out, part of the appeal was that I could contribute to the composition without being tethered to an amp. It was Chris’ theremin and I had a guitar he really liked.
Brian: It was his fault.
Madeline: It’s all his fault! He wanted to borrow my guitar for a tour with a different band and I said, “You can do that, but as collateral let me use that theremin, ‘cause I’m working on a new band.” I had a lot of hubris getting into that instrument, because I was like, [supreme confidence voice] “I don’t even have to touch it.” Turns out it’s extremely difficult. And I’ve run it through guitar pedals, and changed the tuning, and made it my own and figured it out. And it only took like ten years. [laughs]
Are you conscious of the visual aspect of playing it?
Madeline: It’s just what it looks like. I know it looks like I’m doing close-up magic and I’m trying to be like [she mimes playing it] “oooooohhhh.”
So you can’t master it where it’s like, “OK, I’m gonna do this move and make it sound cool”?
Madeline: It’s just the way she goes, really. I might be doing something or approaching it physically in a certain way and then realize I need to shift my weight a little bit, because it’ll change the octave. It’s a proximity-based instrument. But I do feel like, very early on, I was doing more textural stuff. I remember someone from a noise rock band—that I will not name, who is an asshole—saw me setting up at a show and they were like, [asshole voice] “theremin!” And they fucking walked out, which I thought was very ironic, considering the kind of music that they make. Around that same era, another girl I knew from the garage rock world was like, “You don’t even need it, you’re that good, you don’t need it.” But I was like, “Well I wanna do it.”
It’s cool!
Brian: Someone playing theremin looks like if someone was playing guitar and the guitar disappeared.
Madeline: That's what I hoped to get out of it. Running it through guitar pedals, it was like a way for me to shred without playing guitar. I fancied myself a guitar player for a period of time, but I have little hands and I’m not good at it.
Brian: Your hands are tiny.
Chris: Oh I thought she meant she has less hands than most people.
Madeline: Oh I got hands.
Brian: What does Austin Powers say? “Carnies…”
Chris: Redacted, redacted.
No Austin Powers quotes in the interview?
Brian: Oh, behave.
I was wondering if there’s any hip-hop influence, specifically in Madeline’s vocals. There’s a certain rhythm to some of the vocals. I went back and listened to “Creamed Corn” [off their 2019 album Glowing Auras and Black Money], with that “three, six, nine, damn you’re fine,” line.
Madeline: Hip-hop is absolutely an influence.
Brian: Major influence.
Madeline: I grew up in an era where hip-hop became pop music. I remember somebody asking me, “Is this stuff inspired by, like, Suburban Lawns?” I was like, “I like that band a lot, but to be honest it was Lil Wayne.” I like malaprop wordplay and things where you don’t get it right away. I try to structure things that way and it makes it fun for me.
Dan: What was the “chickenhead” line you were talking about earlier?
Madeline: It’s not worth mentioning. [everyone laughs] When I wrote “Creamed Corn,” Chris didn’t catch it right away...
Chris: It was a James Brown thing.
Madeline: Well the song’s about James Brown. I grew up on pre-disco soul, Stax, Atlantic, Motown records, so that song was just kind of ostensibly about James Brown, but it was a nod to the influence of soul, funk, R&B, hip-hop. It’s an intrinsic part of me as a songwriter and as a performer, because it’s what I grew up with and what I admire.
Chris: There’s a very good chance that eventually Juicy J will be on a show with us. [everyone laughs]
“Time Suck(s)” was, for me, the Rosetta Stone for your guys’ sound, where I was listening and thinking, “This could have been a straight-ahead punk song and it’s not. It’s a DANA song.”
Chris: Someone said that’s like the one song where there’s a melodic guitar line that’s the same as the vocal line. Our friend Mickey from [the great Columbus band] Golomb was like, “You guys should do that more.” Also that is inspired by Egyptian Lover, I have to say. Maybe now that I said it, someone might be like, “Oh, that makes sense.”
Madeline: “We’re suing!” [everyone laughs] We were often so focused on doing the thing that you didn’t expect us to do in a song, that doing the thing that’s more traditional was novel and exciting. Like me doing a soft vocal line and people go, “Oh, I didn’t even know you could do that.”
Do you guys work around those freakout parts? I mean, I’m assuming you guys all write together.
Dan: I think generally it just kind of happens.
Chris: We’ll get together and, the more time goes on, we’ve made a pact that we’re not going to practice the old songs. So most of the time we spend practicing is just working on new stuff and finishing the things. We used to just drill the old material and I can’t believe we ever did that.
Madline: If we’re playing consistently, it’s not really necessary, unless there’s something we want to bring back from the dead. But lately, we’ve written a lot of new stuff, and the way it’s kind of gone is I’ll be like, “I’m gonna run upstairs and get a cup of coffee,” and they’ll just start fucking around and I’ll hit record on my phone and then go, “I really liked that.”
Brian: But then sometimes we’re just like…
Madeline: Sometimes you’re doing ridiculous shit.
Chris: We have like five side projects that are just when she goes to the bathroom.
Madeline: One of the songs we played tonight is an unreleased song and it was born out of these guys riffing and it was kind of nu-metal adjacent and I was like, “No I actually kind of loved that.” There was something there. And then we built off of that.
Chris: We have a rule that—it’s not a real rule, but it’s kind of like…
Madeline and Dan: There are no rules.
Chris: Every time we make a song where we accidentally are flirting with egg punk territory, we have to make a nu-metal sounding song to balance it out.
No egg punk?
Madeline: Dan has a CCTV tattoo on his leg; don’t get it twisted.
Chris: We’re fans.
There’s some good stuff, you just don’t want people to say it about you?
Madeline: Look, [laughs] we’re trying to diversify our bonds.
Chris: On the Europe tour, that was the main time they kept promoting us as an egg punk band and I get it. It’s good to say a thing that will make people come to a show.
People love subgenres.
Brian: I love subgenres. Italian sub. Turkey sub.
Madeline: It depended on the zone. Closer to Italy, it would be “egg,” but parts of the Netherlands would be like, “They sound like Butthole Surfers.”
Chris: The next record is called Radiation Clause and that started with us joking about how we were exempt from not being allowed to make egg punk. With the Lumpy thing, we were like, “Oh, but Ohio and Indiana get to still do it,” and later we learned that "radiation clause" is a real insurance term, meaning the insurer is exempt from covering damages caused by "nuclear incidents."
When is the next record coming?
Brian: Should be like two months. [everyone laughs]
Chris: Or maybe like 2035?
Brian: It’s like Chinese Democracy. [everyone laughs]
Chris: It’s mostly written.
Dan: Yeah. Well, the pandemic kind of screwed up a lot of things.
Chris: Well that’s why the last record took so long. They had very social jobs. Dan was doing valet, and Brian was working at a coffee shop, and Madeline and I were running a venue. So we were completely not working and they were always around people, so we thought we were probably gonna get COVID if we had band practice. But they didn’t get COVID.
Madeline: And I’ve gotten COVID like four fuckin’ times.
Me too.
Chris: Not me!
Madeline: The minute we could start playing shows again—I just love playing live shows. The biggest appeal of being in a band for me is playing live, so the minute we could start playing shows again, we hit it really hard.
Chris: So we went to the South! [everyone laughs]
Madeline: We toured a bunch. We did SXSW a number of times and just toured a ton. And we were writing stuff and were like, “Oh, we kinda forgot to put out a fuckin’ record. We’ve been so focused on playing shows, but we have to record these songs and release them. Then we can play shows again to sell people the record.” [laughs]
Chris: We’re normally almost a full record ahead of whatever we have vinyl of.
Madeline: The record that came out in June, we’ve been playing some of those songs for a couple years. Some for a little bit less. “Time Suck(s)” was written pretty late.
Chris: And “Ether Frolic.”
What about “Mankind”?
Chris: That one was written when we re-watched Twin Peaks: The Return and it was inspired by “She’s Gone Away,” the Nine Inch Nails song.
Madeline: We were like, “We could do a noisy groover like that.” And then one year, for Chris’ birthday, I got him Mick Foley’s autobiography and I was just like, “I really like this guy.”
Dan: We have a Socko around here somewhere.
Don’t do it to me!
Dan: We bought him on tour and he’s kind of our mascot.
Madeline: We went to some record and novelty collectibles store in Mansfield I think? It was a really weird vibe and they had an official Socko sock discounted for two bucks and we were just like, “Well we’re fuckin’ getting it.”
You should Socko the theremin.
Madline: I’ve thought about it.
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