DOMMIN Frontman On Debut Album - "I Didn’t Want To Be Locked In A Box Artistically"
November 3, 2009, 14 years ago
Kristofer Dommin, frontman for Los Angeles-based goth rock quartet DOMMIN, is featured in a new interview with The Contrapuntist. An excerpt is available below:
Q: When you hear many bands’ first albums, the songs are written in the same key and often sound the same. Each of your songs has a different vibe and sound world. Could you tell us a little bit about your songwriting process and how you came up with all those different vibes?
KD: "Those are really two different things. The songwriting process really comes from a statement that I wanted to say or an emotion I felt, like in 'My Heart, Your Hands'. There really wasn’t any music at first. After I had that emotion that my heart was in this girls hands and I felt like she was just closing her grip around it and that made me feel a bit suffocated, afraid, and overwhelmed. So the song came from the idea first and then the music. I remember singing it to myself in the car and then the music just came around the thought. You will notice in a lot of the choruses they are very simple; not very wordy because I like to sum things up in the simplest terms as far as the statement and build the music around that."
"As far as the differences on the album, a lot of these songs have been written for a very long time. 'My Heart, Your Hands' dates back to 2003 or 2002. 'Dark Holiday' is a newer song. I think the idea was to group songs together that had a similar mood or vibe together regardless of when they were written. We wanted this first album to be not so much a concept album, but something that just had a tone from beginning to end that had a similar emotion or mood. And this was a more calculated thing. I didn’t want to be locked in a box artistically. A lot of the times I can just imagine we would do a second album, with the first having songs like 'My Heart, Your Hands', and then doing songs that sound like 'Honestly'. I could just imagine people saying 'oh no, he’s changing' or 'going in a different direction. I really wanted to make sure there was enough variety on this album so that I could go in any direction I wanted."Go to this location for the complete interview. Click here for Dommin audio samples.
