To call D.A. Wallach busy would be too easy. Understandable, of course. But it’s been said before.
The former half of indie pop rock duo Chester French recently released his debut solo album Time Machine, wrapped up shooting Whiplash mastermind Damien Chazelle’s next project, and co-founded an investment fund called Inevitable Ventures. In addition, Spotify’s former Artist in Residence continues to advise the streaming service, as well as a number of up-and-coming companies he feels passionate about.
This past weekend, D.A.’s first order of business was trying to catch a show of Dave Palmer’s, the “insanely gifted musician” who played piano on his new album. First and foremost, D.A. is a fan — of music, of discussing ideas, and of groups of people striving to make the world a better place. (And yes, he includes Spotify under that last umbrella.)
The title of D.A.’s soothing LP is not a device he needs to keep up with his own schedule, but rather a salute to the time capsule role music plays for its listeners. Though his sound is often compared to Elton John and The Beatles, D.A. recently tweeted that he “despises nostalgia” and is determined to create music that is distinctly modern.
In a conversation with Billboard, the man stretched for time discusses his fixation on both preserving the creatively timeless as well as moving the human race steadily forward.
Let’s take it back first. Kanye West and Pharrell Williams discovered you while you were in undergrad at Harvard as half of Chester French. How did that go down?
Our sort of plan was to try and make the best record that we could in the context of the studio there on campus. We started the band at a moment when the Internet was beginning to play a much more important role in the way people discovered music. And so we put a lot of faith in this idea of just focusing all our energies on the studio side of things. By the time we reached senior year, we had this album, which was basically our debut album, Love The Future. I started sending it out to anyone who would possibly listen to it, anyone whose address I could get. I would have looked through Billboard and found your name and hunted down your email address and tried to get you a copy. We got really, really lucky with a couple of very fortuitous paths leading us to Kanye and Pharrell respectively, and amazingly, they both liked the music.
And how do you feel about Kanye potentially being on the presidential ballot in 2020?
(Laughs) Well, I think that he’s a really talented guy, but I’m not sure he has the qualities we want in a president.
You were at Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. Did you have any sort of relationship with them?
Yeah! I knew both of those guys. I remember getting on Facebook the second night that it was available just on our campus. And then I got to know Mark a little bit in school, mainly in the context of him sort of serving as tech support as we tried to use Facebook to build Chester French’s audience. At the time, there was sort of a precursor version of “Groups,” and I remember emailing with Mark about whether we could do certain things or whether he’d view that as spam. And we had lunch a couple times and talked about where Facebook was going. We still stay in touch.
So back to the present. Why is “Time Machine” the album’s title track?
The album obviously is in tradition of the ’70s sort of singer/songwriter records. I was listening to Carole King and Elton John, and I think all of that is probably apparent in the music. But really I’m not a fan of nostalgia. I like always trying to push myself to work within a tradition but to put my own spin on things. The album isn’t really meant to be a throwback.
The song was about a particular relationship between two people and about the way that interpersonal relationships change as a result of time. That connected in my mind to some things I’d been reading in theoretical physics about the actual nature of time. Time is really kind of an open mystery to physicists. In all the Newtonian physics equations, you can run time forwards or backwards — it’s like running a video backwards. All the laws work in both directions, and so it’s really a mystery why we seemingly only move forward in time. I was really interested in the nature of time and thinking of those more philosophical questions and then it started occurring to me that music is a very time-based art form. Unlike a picture or something that you might be able to experience in an instant, you can only experience music through time. What I love about recordings is that they capture a series of moments that actually happened in a way that allows you to revisit them in the future. And so, I think that this entire album really — like all music — as a time machine.
Is there an album that you do regularly go back to for inspiration?
I think a lot of the music I go back to over and over — which in many cases is from the ’60s, ’70s era — appeals to me because of how timeless it is. I think about what actually makes it timeless, and in my mind, there’s sort of a purity about a lot of the music from that era in its simplicity. It’s not really locked to a particular sound. The records that I always return to are Bob Marley’s records. I love Bob Marley. I feel like he made the most timeless music ever, and I actually think his music may be the most successful music ever. His music is still enormously popular on every continent, and there’s something strange about it. It doesn’t feel dated — ever. Even compared to things like The Beatles, who are obviously unimpeachable. But you listen to The Beatles, and it still sounds like it’s the ’60s. When you hear Bob Marley, it just exists in its own space really. It doesn’t feel like it’s connected to an era or to a place even — I guess Jamaica, obviously. I really love that aspect of his music, and it’s something that I strive for with my own stuff.
As a musician and former Artist in Residence at Spotify, why do you feel that the streaming service is actually an asset to the music industry?
I was always a huge collector of music and dealt with the inconvenience of hundreds of hard drives with tons of different music spread across them. It was always a dream of mine to have something like Spotify, just as a fan that would allow me to listen to anything whenever I wanted to. As an artist, I felt the pain of the past couple decades and in particular the five years that I had spent really spending all of my time trying to make a living putting music out in the world, and it occurred to me that Spotify was one of the only ways out of this kind of gridlock that the industry was in.
How so?
The biggest problem circumscribing the industry as a whole is that not enough money flows into it in the first place. Over the past 20 years, consumers have learned that music is not something you have to pay for. And the industry has tried to shame people into paying for music or suing them in the Napster days to try and get them to behave by moving them into a legal environment. But really people don’t pay because they’ve had an alternative available to them in terms of Napster or YouTube. What Spotify was doing that I thought was really intelligent was trying to compete with all of those free services by giving people something that was actually better than the free alternatives. So my view was, “This is the only way that we can possibly get people to start paying for music again and to move into a legal, paid form of behavior once again.”
So when someone as high profile as Taylor Swift comes out against Spotify and removes her entire catalog, what does that do for the music industry?
What’s interesting and sort of disillusioning from the experience I had with Spotify is that, as an artist first and foremost, people like Thom Yorke and David Byrne and others who have been critical of Spotify were like my heroes. And they weren’t just heroes because I thought their music was great, but I also thought of them as real truth-tellers and folks who had ultimate integrity. That’s always what I’ve loved about the life of being an artist. You can say what is true, and there aren’t consequences for it in the way that there are for someone who’s going to work in a cubicle and is worried about what their boss is going to think.
And so a lot of these artists I think on the basis of misinformation or poor reasoning came out critical of Spotify as if they were standing up to the man. And what was really sad about it is that I was sitting on the other side of the table and when we would reach out to these folks to say, “Look, come meet with us, and we’ll go through all the data with you. We’re just people trying to build something cool here. Let’s have an open, honest conversation about it where it’s not just you in the media trying to gain publicity by starting a fight.” And none of these artists would actually come and talk to us! It was really disappointing that artists like Taylor actually had no interest in learning more and having an open conversation with me or with Daniel Ek or any of the folks at Spotify who are really trying to do something great and also are perfectly willing to have a really productive and good-natured conversation. Our goal is — and has been — to build something that can hopefully save the industry and double or triple the size of the music business. I think that the big problem is that these folks have really misinterpreted what’s going on in the market because they don’t have the aggregate data about how consumers are behaving and consuming music. And if you’re Taylor Swift, I think it’s frankly irresponsible to put your name behind such harsh critiques without having all the information.
You recently launched your own investment fund Inevitable Ventures, which focuses on early stage technology, life sciences, and healthcare investing. Where does your interest in healthcare stem from?
My goal is to survey the state of the world at any given moment and try and identify the biggest problems that humans have and then to look for really talented, creative people who are really trying to solve those problems. So Inevitable Ventures is really a partnership that Ron Burkle, Chris Hollod, and I have undertaken trying to do just that. The only industry I could think of that was more messed up than music — and that’s a gross understatement — is healthcare. The theme that I’m pursuing is really about putting patients at the center of their own care and moving on from this model of medicine where patients have much less information than insurance companies or hospitals or doctors.
You also just wrapped making a cameo appearance in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land. That’s got a pretty star-studded cast. What was the best part about being on that set?
I’d never been on a film set before, and I’m not an actor. So it was amazing to watch Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone work because they’re both true artists. I didn’t understand how hard acting is. The way that they refined what they were doing every single time that they did a new take blew me away. And then seeing Damien, who’s actually been a friend for a long time in his element directing — it was so impressive to watch him do his thing. He’s really extraordinarily talented.
What’s next for you in music?
I spent two and a half years making Time Machine, and now I kind of owe it to myself and to the music to do whatever I can to get people to hear it. For me, it’s not about money or notoriety. The way I measure success with my music is how many people hear it and whether it hopefully makes a difference in their lives or makes them happy or helps through a tough time.
What happened to your Instasongs? Can fans expect to see those in upcoming projects?
The idea there was to just wake up in the morning and write a 15-second song and not to judge it at all and not to be critical of it and not to try and refine it into something perfect, so I really enjoy doing those just cause they’re super creatively liberating. I haven’t figured out what to do with them or how to put a bunch of them together. I have some other music projects I’ve been working on for the past two years that are in various states of completion. Similarly, my goal would be to get those out to people’s ears quickly.
Is there anything you’re not good at?
(Laughs) I’m mainly terrible at things. I think the one role I can serve is meeting a lot of smart people trying to synthesize ideas. But I’m totally dependent upon much more talented people than me to help get this stuff done in the world.
What motivates you to wear so many different hats and to keep wearing them well?
I never want to be spread too thin to the point where I can’t actually do anything that’s valuable in any of these areas, and so I’m still in the middle of it trying to figure out how to really balance the various things I care about. Making this album really gave me a lot of practice in figuring out how to sort of jump into one thing and focus on it exclusively for a couple hours — and then switch gears really quickly back to something that may be totally different. I believe in living life to the extreme, and I find a lot of different stuff interesting. I witness other people doing something that I’m really curious about, and I have a sort of sense of jealousy and a motivation to go and learn about it myself.