Brody Dalle Interview: Living Dalle

She sat in the waiting room as he lay dying on the operating table. “We almost lost him,” says Brody Dalle. “That was the most traumatic thing I’ve ever been through. He actually died. He was gone.”
In 2010 Dalle’s husband, Queens of the Stone Age singer Josh Homme, came close to being asphyxiated when routine knee surgery went awry. Miraculously he pulled through but was bedridden for three months, during which he sank into a despondent fug and contemplated calling time on Queens.
For Dalle, formerly front-woman with cult hardcore outfit The Distillers, the trauma carried a terrible whiff of deja vu. She, too, has fought depression. Following the failure of her most recent project, Spinerette, she wondered whether she wanted to continue making music at all. Her disillusion was all-pervading.
“I barely toured with Spinerette,” she says. “I was unhappy in general. I had a young daughter and couldn’t stand to be away from her. It was really painful – an incredibly tough time. My band had changed, my body had changed.”
Comments about her appearance caused the deepest hurt. Having become a mother in 2006, Dalle had inevitably acquired a little baby weight, prompting a deluge of internet snark (entire message board threads were devoted to her alleged chubbiness). She would have liked to think she was too tough to care – as a victim of physical and sexual abuse in her adolescence she’d certainly already endured her share of pain. Nonetheless, to be ridiculed so publicly stung. She considered putting her guitar away, doing something else with her life.
“I’m a mom – that’s my priority,” she says. “ I needed to get away from music. It had become unfulfilling for me. I didn’t know if it was what I needed to do. For a while, I didn’t know if I would ever play again.”
Ironically, it was her husband’s brush with mortality that convinced her to pick up a guitar again. All of a sudden she had things to write about – pain that needed an outlet. From that period of trauma, she was inspired to make her first solo album, the caustic and bittersweet Diploid Love.
Lyrically, the LP sees agony and ebullience moving in lockstep. She ruminates on death, how close each of us is to the chasm (if Homme could almost slip away during a routine op, why should the rest of us be any safer?). Still, there’s tremendous happiness in evidence too –  the mother of two kids (eldest Camille and baby brother Orrin, an arrival in 2011) , Dalle finds enormous joy in parenthood. It has been her salvation and she isn’t embarrassed to sing about it from the nearest rooftop.
“I used to be able to play all day, all night, “ she says. “ I can’t do that any more. Nowadays it’s about grabbing a moment. So my entire approach to writing is very different. I wouldn’t have it any other way. My life has changed – clearly the way I make music is going to change too. I’m not going to stay up until 5am and watch the sun rise. Oh god no. Honestly that’s the last thing I’m going to do. I have new priorities.”
Her new album is a rare beast: an unexpurgated rock affair that makes no apology about its wish to create as raucous a din as possible. There’s nothing meta or knowing about Diploid Love – it’s a straight ahead collection of post-grunge anthemia that demands to be played with the volume cranked up to neighbour-troubling levels. A smart lady, Dalle is aware that in a world of twerkers and tweeters, this sets her apart. She’s cool with that. Fitting in was never the goal.
“Rock music asks a lot of questions,” she says. “It’s cerebral and spiritual in some ways, hedonistic in others. After 9/11, the culture craved a break from it – craved something light and fluffy, to erase all that awful shit. And then the world changed – there is technology, all of that. Look where we are today. Our lives are crazier, incredibly hectic. We are available to people all the time and yet completely detached. Where does rock music fit in? I’m not sure.”
Speaking to Dalle you might easily mistake her for the quintessential California Valley Girl. She ends her sentences with a faux question-mark uplift and slips into the laconic SoCal croak sociologists have dubbed ‘vocal fry’. But her twang is deceptive. Dalle is from a middle class suburb of Melbourne and didn’t move to the US until she was 17. She’s as all-American as a slap across the head from a boomerang.
She isn’t Brody “Dalle” either – her given name is Bree Joanna Alice Robinson (Dalle is from Beatrice Dalle, star of posh soft-porn movie Betty Blue). It was as plain old Bree Davison that, in 1997, she became romantically involved with Tim Armstrong, of stadium punks Rancid, whom she met at a festival in Australia. One whirlwind trip to the US later, the pair were hitched: the first couple of tattoo-heavy
punk-pop.
Being ridiculously young – Dalle was 18, 13 years Armstrong’s junior at the time of the wedding – it was perhaps inevitable the relationship would hit a patchy spell. In 2003, after six years together, they divorced (inspiring Rancid’s tempestuous breakup LP Indestructible). Meanwhile Dalle was becoming a major rock figure in her own right, as front woman of the loud, irreverent (and aggressively inked) Distillers. Snarling and agreeably shambolic, The Distillers bore a passing resemblance to Courtney Love’s Hole – an allusion to which Dalle did not always respond kindly.
“I’ve been compared to Courtney since I was 14,” she told this interviewer in 2009, when she was on promotional duties for the Spinerette record. “I can tell you it started at 14 because that’s when I started my first band – and back then I did try to emulate her. As you get older, though, you tire of being compared to someone. You want to be your own original spark. If anything I was… influenced by Kurt Cobain rather than by Courtney.”
She has changed since our last conversation. Back then, Dalle had adopted a somewhat withering persona – here, very clearly, was an individual who did not suffer fools (or even the moderately foolish). Five years on, she seems more tolerant of idiots – or better at concealing her impatience. As she says, the shock of almost becoming a widow has caused her to reassess the way she interacts with the world.
“I have a new appreciation of life. We [she and Homme] both do. What happens in those [near death] situations is you think, ‘oh my god, I’m going to totally change the way I live’. It was an incredibly spiritual wake-up call for both of us. One thing we know for sure is we belong together - that our purpose in this world is raising our kids. Life is short: you never know what’s going to happen next. You seize the moments and you hold onto them.”

Diploid Love is out now.