Analog Dog: 'Disco Dani, Part One'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

This week’s episode of Sunday Music Drop is about a band that came about following a discussion on … the universe.

“On a fateful day, we played a show together, and then a few months later, [fellow band member Rob Nicol] was at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass on a blanket, and we sat down for like a good couple hours together and talked about the nature of reality in the universe,” says Austin Wasielewski, vocalist, guitarist, keyboard and synth player for Analog Dog. “Then we found our other mates and the five years have gone by, like, in the blink of an eye.”

In that blink of the eye, Analog Dog has become a project that Wasielewski says embraces “magical thinking” in a way that enables them to “break beyond those boundaries and see the depth of our connection to each other and the depth of our connection to the earth.”

“So I think that we strive to awaken that magic within people so that we can kind of exist in a more community space and in a more magical space,” Wasielewski says.

Analog Dog is a San Francisco band inspired by the Bay Area, which Nicol considers a “hotbed of ideas and cultural growth” — and yet, none of the band members are from the Bay Area.

“We hail almost like, distinctly from every corner of the country except for California and the West Coast,” Nicol says. “And so we all ended up here, and I think what brought us all out here is ideas.

“If you look at like the Grateful Dead and you look at California in general and all the artists that have come out from the West, I think that there’s just a there’s a pull and their gravity that brought us all here that I don’t think is in any way coincidence.”

So, what does Analog Dog sound like?

“… Its music is essentially genre fluid … encompassed in rock and roll roots, indie vibes, disco-dance passion, some improvisation and jam philosophy, with a little bit of jazz sprinkled on top.”

Their song “Disco Dani, Part One” is not just any song for them, it’s the one they close almost every show with, because “by then, everybody’s warmed up and it just hits in such a simple, fun way.”

“People lose it because we lose it because we know no matter where we’re at in the set, no matter how the set went, we just have this closer that everybody’s going to lose their pants … you wouldn’t believe the pants!”

There’s a song called Patience by Tame Impala. And I was super into it, and I was like, let’s write one like this and our keyboardist Jason. He kind of had a lick based on that, and we worked through that.

We also felt that if it was just part one — that’s been done a million times — It’s a great song, but it’s still just like a pop song. And so [we made] part two [which] has these… just like we got into three different keys and there’s time changes and it just goes crazy!

Rob Nicol describes the “flux” that underlies the song.

“[On the one hand, it’s a] kind of pop and really palatable, easy-to-digest music. And then this other hand in a more complex, challenging musical landscape that we’re both inspired by. And so it’s finding that right balance that people can connect with, but also that will keep things, keep people, keep people coming back to find something new.”

Analog Dog also includes Celia Ford on bass and vocals; Jason Blasingame on keyboard, synth and saxophone; and Kale Frank on drums. They will perform live at JaM Cellars Ballroom in Napa on Oct. 18.