Doug Shaw, Geologist, and Me

Brian Weitz has a fond memory of Doug Shaw whenever he settles into a venue’s green room. Shaw, a longtime fixture of New York underground music who remains little-known outside of it, is old friends with everyone in Animal Collective, and came along as the opener on a European tour behind Merriweather Post Pavilion, the album that turned their defiantly strange band into an unlikely symbol of indie’s big late-2000s brush with the mainstream. Someone on the Animal Collective crew got a bad cold on that tour, and Shaw insisted on adding lemons, ginger, and a sharp knife to their rider. At the next stop, he spent his pre-show warmup time preparing tea for everyone in the touring party. “That was 15 years ago, and to this day, we still walk in and I don’t think anybody’s taken it off the rider,” Weitz says. “There’s still a piece of raw ginger sitting in our dressing room, and I think of Doug every time I see it.”

I was interviewing Weitz—better known to Animal Collective fans as Geologist, the band’s headlamped electronic noisemaker—about A Shaw Deal, his new-ish collaborative album with Shaw, and I had to interrupt him when he told this story. My band toured with Shaw in 2022, a monthlong trip around the continental U.S. with six of us in one van. It was our first big tour after COVID, and it turned my relationship with Doug—I might as well drop the pretense of last-names-only journalistic objectivity at this point—from something like casual acquaintance into something like family. Somewhere in the rural midwest, we stopped for food, fuel, and a smoke break at one of dozens of identical Quik Cheks and Circle Ks, feeling worn down and running late for the next show. Doug disappeared, as he’s liable to do from time to time, especially when you’re running late. He eventually returned with six shots of ginger, procured from what must have been the only raw juice shop in a 150-mile radius, and insisted we all take them before getting back on the road. He would have prepared the brew himself, he explained, but this was the best he could do in a pinch.

Doug’s habit of ginger-pushing reflects a sweetly paternal streak that might not be immediately evident upon meeting him. Other aspects announce themselves more quickly. There is Doug the life of the party, always ready with a joke and a posh caricature of his own London-born accent in which to deliver it. And Doug the adventurer, seemingly untethered from life’s daily obligations, who cajoled my bandmates and I into spending a day off in Big Sur rather than at whatever practical roadside stop we would have otherwise made, then convinced the management at a scenic hotel to give us a deeply discounted room because we were touring musicians. We spent much of the night all crammed into a hot tub clearly intended as a romantic dip for two. 

Or Doug the blazing talent with not much to show for it, who’s written hundreds of sidewinding songs and released almost none of them, who was playing 200-capacity shows with my band a decade after playing 2,000-capacity shows with Animal Collective. When they asked him to open, he had no released music, no merch, no online presence—no way to capitalize on the thousands of potential new fans. When he opened for us, the numbers were smaller, but the situation was still more or less the same. Many times on that 2022 tour, I watched him bring unfamiliar crowds to a reverent hush with the delicate grit of his voice and the fingerpicked shimmer of his acoustic guitar. Once, a woman came up to him after he played and shared what seemed like her entire life story in an attempt to explain how much the performance had meant to her. 

To know Doug is to want more for him. That’s part of what motivated Weitz to make A Shaw Deal. It was an unusual collaboration: For one thing, Doug didn’t even know it was happening until it was over, when Weitz presented the completed album to him as a birthday gift. Back in 2020, Doug regularly posted videos of himself playing guitar to Instagram, not thinking much about them other than as a modest musical outlet at a time when performing live was impossible. Unbeknownst to him, Weitz found solace in those uncertain pandemic days from listening to these informal clips of his old friend. They’d met about a decade and a half earlier, when Animal Collective was making its name on the Brooklyn DIY circuit and Doug was beginning to play guitar with White Magic, a freewheeling psych-folk band that ran in the same scene. (He would later play bass in Gang Gang Dance and guitar with the late, great Sierra Leonean bubu singer Janka Nabay.)

On lockdown at home in Washington, D.C., managing his kids’ virtual classroom sessions and seeking escape from the noise of helicopters flying low overhead to surveil the George Floyd protests that were raging outside, Weitz would sometimes lie in bed with his phone to his ear, listening to Doug’s intricate folk-blues instrumental sketches on loop. He considered devoting an episode of his NTS Radio show to a collage of the videos, playing them on near-endless repeat, but worried that such a straightforward approach wouldn’t capture the emotional resonance of his self-soothing ritual. It wasn’t just that he was listening to peaceful acoustic guitar music; it was that Doug was the one playing it, a friend similarly isolated and hundreds of miles away in New York, reaching out to anyone who might care to hear. Eventually, Weitz decided to take a more active approach to the music: He would use Doug’s Instagram clips as source material, feeding them into his own phalanx of modular synth gear, then stretching them, squishing them, chopping them into tiny pieces and reassembling them, until they became something else entirely. 

On “Wit of the Watermen,” steel-string licks appear as reflective shards and then quickly vanish, sucked into portals of ominous reverb. “Route 9 Falls” focuses on a single ascendant moment, reliving it over and over in hyperspeed, getting closer with each repetition to some ecstatic place in the sky but never quite arriving. “Loose Gravel,” with its flickering sustained tones, sounds like something Doug might actually play in a live performance, kicking on his trusty Freeze pedal and turning his guitar, for the length of an old blues standard, into a kind of celestial organ. I don’t know whether Weitz conceived of his electronic processing in this way, but it’s not hard to hear it as an aural metaphor for the distance and isolation of the high pandemic days. Your friend is right there on Zoom, or an Instagram live stream, in uncanny digital facsimile, on a connection that could drop at any moment.

In November 2022, on a break from Animal Collective’s resumed touring schedule, Weitz was nearing completion of this collection of music and still unsure what it was or what to do with it. Doug had a birthday coming up, and Weitz had heard that he was feeling depressed about not having released a solo album yet. (The closest thing to date is Best Bless, a well-received EP from 2010 under the moniker Highlife.) Weitz sent Doug an email with the music attached on his birthday, and told him they could release it if he wanted, or not. Mostly, he wanted to encourage his friend to be proud of the music he’d already made, to show him that even those sketches he’d dashed off on Instagram were worth something. Doug didn’t know what to make of it when it hit his inbox. For the first several days, he couldn’t bring himself to listen to it. 

I asked him why, huddled in a booth by the door at a tiny bar and musicians’ hangout in Williamsburg where I’ve spent more than a few late nights in his company. It was a few weeks after the eventual release of A Shaw Deal this past January, and he was about to perform a solo set on a bill with one of my bandmates. The place was thrumming with the sort of people who know that a solo set from Sleepy Doug Shaw—as he calls himself these days—is not to be missed. We only talked with the recorder running for a few minutes that night, because people kept interrupting our interview to say hello on the way in. “I was absorbing what he was telling me about my life, and what my music meant to him, which is something that I’m really serious about, but at the same time, I don’t take that seriously,” Doug told me. “I don’t see myself in the same canon of people, or I’ve just become used to not considering myself that way. It’s really beautiful to have a friend telling you that. And I think, also, in honesty, it was shame of myself.” 

Back to 2022: Doug was having “a fucker of a year,” as he put it to me before the show. That was the year we went on tour together, and I remember how carefree and in-his-element he seemed when we were playing shows out west, how he kept saying he’d be on the road all the time if he could, and how his mood darkened as the roadside desert rocks turned to chain stores and strip malls as we played our last stretch of shows on the way back across the country to New York. He was living in someone’s spare room in Rockaway Beach at the time, and told me a few stories about how the guy would fly into a rage and berate him about minor disagreements. The guy kicked him out when we got back home. He spent a long time couch surfing, then ran out of couches to surf. One night that year, I ran into him at that same Williamsburg bar, and he told me, with startling offhandedness, that he’d spent a few recent nights in Tompkins Square Park. 

By November, his living situation had stabilized thanks to a long-term cat-sitting offer from a friend. When he eventually listened to the music that would become A Shaw Deal, he was “completely overwhelmed,” he said. “Knowing the entire template is made from my guitar, and I can maybe hear bits and pieces that he took to make something, but it sounds like it’s coming from a completely different place. It was a really deep, touching thing to realize, with more and more listens, the time he spent manipulating my playing with love and care and building this new thing. I’ve never had anyone so demonstratively show me that they’ve cared and listened to what I’ve played.”

It had the jump-starting effect Weitz had hoped for, at least initially. Drag City agreed to release A Shaw Deal. Doug had already begun traveling to Baltimore to work on the long-awaited proper solo album, in sessions produced by Josh Dibb, aka Deakin, Weitz’s Animal Collective bandmate. Then, in February 2023, his mother took a walk from her home in frigid rural Minnesota and could not find her way back. Her son was there the next day and ended up staying for four months as it became clear that her progressing dementia required a full-time caregiver. The solo album was shoved to the back burner. 

The family moved Doug’s mother to Brooklyn, where he continued looking after her every day for two years, riding his bike from Greenpoint to Brooklyn Heights each morning and back each evening, wondering sometimes whether his life as a performing musician was over. This arrangement continued until the day before A Shaw Deal came out, when she moved to a memory care facility in Connecticut, a coincidence of timing that is hard not to take as a signifier of a new chapter in his life. “The existence of this record that Brian made, through the time I was taking care of my mother, and knowing that it was in the works with Drag City, gave me a view to the other side,” he said. “When I would think of it, it would help me remember my life in music, and a future beyond the life I was living. I felt like I had left my life behind. It was hard to remember.”

I can assure you, from the process of trying to coordinate interviews for this piece, that Doug continues to visit his mom all the time. I’d initially approached him with the idea of writing something about him and the album in November, months before it came out, but we didn’t find time until late February, about a month after the release. We were both busy, but also, I suspect, both unsure about how to approach the sort of conversation I wanted to have about his life and music, in which journalistic inquiry might mingle uncomfortably with friendly commiseration and vulnerability. One evening, after agreeing over text that neither of us was up to the interview that night—he wasn’t feeling well, I had stuff to do—we ran into each other at a bar. Neither of us was too busy or sick, apparently, to have a few beers and take in a gig that some mutual friends were playing.

After the brief initial interview before his show, we found a free Sunday afternoon, working around a weekend trip he’d made to see his mom. We talked for an hour and a half, sitting next to each other at a picnic table under a heat lamp in a Greenpoint bar backyard, me nursing a couple of Kölschs and him a non-alcoholic Guinness. We could have gone longer, but I was getting a lot of material and started to worry about how to sort through it all. The conversation was part interview, part shit-shooting session, part mutual therapy. It reminded me of a night off on tour in Memphis, or Knoxville, or somewhere else entirely, when the rest of the guys made the wise choice to stay in and the two of us stayed out late, trading confessions of our darkest thoughts and reminding each other to hold on and keep living. 

That afternoon in Greenpoint, we talked about the tough few years Doug has had, and the self-defeating tendencies we both deal with as musicians, and his recent struggles to relocate his own artistic identity now that he has free time again and an album out on a venerated label, albeit one that doesn’t always feel like it belongs to him. He was worried that he hadn’t written any new songs lately. He told me about the psychological effects of the co-signs he’s received over the years from the multi-generational cast of great songwriters that he counts as friends and fans—Michael Hurley, Cass McCombs, the Animal Collective guys—which both encourage him and freeze him up, lest he disappoint their high hopes for him. And about how he feels torn between wanting a bigger career for himself and wanting to remain a humble member of a local music community. 

He shared a story I’d never heard before, from 2018 or so, when the small and ultrahip London label The Trilogy Tapes—home to releases by Dean Blunt, Joy Orbison, Ben UFO, Bullion, the list goes on—asked him about releasing an album. In a somewhat typical gesture of self-sabotage, whether intentional or not, he sent them a folder with 100 songs in it. The release never happened. At this point in our conversation, he leaned over toward my phone mic and addressed hypothetical readers directly: “Kids, don’t ever send anyone from any kind of record label that amount of stuff. Send them 10, max.” 

Weitz had told me that he intended A Shaw Deal in part as a gesture of encouragement to Doug. I asked Doug directly: Had it worked? The album got good press coverage, the release show had been a smash success, there were lots of other gigs on the calendar. Did he feel encouraged? “Yes, but it isn’t that simple,” he said, then paused for a long time. “I’ve done it for so many years that I’ve had to become kind of guarded with it. I love to play, it’s the best feeling in the world to me, and I’m so thankful for it, and sometimes I can even marvel at my own ability to do it. But I don’t think I have the same respect for what I do as other people do, which is pretty fucked up.” Another pause. “It’s really hard for me to talk about this. No one’s ever wanted to know.”

He texted me a few days later, concerned that he’d been too downcast. Good news was coming in; he and Weitz were about to embark on a tour together. He was hopeful about the future. We made plans to talk on the record again, but couldn’t find time to squeeze it in before they hit the road. The best I can do to represent his renewed optimism, which I have witnessed for myself in an off-the-record hang since then, is to quote from his texts: “All good bruv! Psyched!”

A Shaw Deal is a fascinating album, and at times a quite beautiful one. But it must be said that it does not really capture the full Doug Shaw experience. Nor is it really meant to. Though it’s billed as a collaborative effort, it’s a lot more recognizable as a Geologist album than a Doug Shaw one, which might have something to do with the way Doug chose to present his name on the release: D.S., initials only. 

As Doug’s friend, it’s difficult for me to describe the full experience without feeling like I’m either laying the praise on too thick or selling him short. His songs are rooted in old folk forms, but feel resolutely contemporary. In his lyrics, slangy street-level imagery of cigarette lighters and sparked roaches might open into a meditation on the nature of sunlight. Ask him about his influences and he’s as likely to mention grime MCs as guitarists. His singing cadence is sometimes talky, sometimes high and lonesome, and his guitar parts unspool in iridescent threads, aided as often as not by dubby delay effects. He comes across both like a classic Dylanesque troubadour and like a guy who moonlights as a footwork producer. (He does.)

I asked Weitz to do describe the special quality of Doug's music and he also had a hard time. He talked about another friend of his, a guy named Chris, who has the biggest and best record collection of anyone he knows, and is highly discerning about which contemporary musicians meet his approval. “Doug is one of the few people, where even Chris hears him, and is like I just don’t get why he’s not huge,” he said. “You could describe what Doug does—fingerpicked, kind of blues-adjacent acoustic guitar and singing, with some sort of North African inspiration—and someone might hear that and say, I know exactly what that sounds like. But you can’t really describe the heart that comes through it.” 

The most direct transmission on the record is “Avarice Edit,” the closing track, to which Weitz added only a bit of time stretching and ghostly echo. Otherwise, it’s ripped straight from Doug’s Instagram. “I realized that the record should end with something to show people: That’s Doug,” Weitz told me. “That’s one minute of his playing looped twice, and I think it’s the most beautiful part of the record. And I hope that’s the takeaway, for people to be like, There’s something so simple and singular about his playing, and they want to hear more of it.” 

If they want to hear more of it, for now, they’ll have to come see him play live. That’s always how it’s been for Doug, who has charted an extraordinarily challenging career in music for himself, grinding out gigs for years and years with no album to sell at the merch table and little online to point newly converted fans toward when they tell him how deeply his set has moved them. I don’t know if or when the album will come. But at this point in the piece, it feels right to make like Doug himself and address the reader—one particular reader—directly. We believe in you, bruv.