‘Mythos’ is the first song the Stevenson Ranch Davidians have ever released without a lyric in it, pulled from a 2019 session that sat unheard for seven years before the band decided it was too good to leave buried. Frontman Dwayne Seagraves, bassist Jessica Latiolait and drummer Misha Bullock explain why the words never came.
What led to ‘Mythos’ being a song where words weren’t needed?
Dwayne: My writing process is always rhythm and chords first. Those will typically evoke feelings that I will then attempt to put into words. I just felt that this one expressed everything it needed to without them. I think the essence of that song pre-dates words and ideas as maybe some kind of an ancient, ancestral feeling or state of being.
You’ve said hearing an old collection of Lomax brothers prison work songs, recorded on chain gangs, fed straight into this one. What was it about those recordings that came through in the finished track?
Dwayne: The weight of the sound of endless human oppression.
The title comes from a beer you were drinking on a trip to Greece. Once you looked at what the word means in Greek, did that change how you thought about the song itself?
Dwayne: I can’t fully remember the timeline, but we decided to give it that title months before I knew what the song was trying to convey. It wasn’t until I was tasked with doing a write up about the song that I decided to look up the meaning of the word and it just worked.
Rob Campanella, who also spent years as a member of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, tracked and produced this back in 2019 at his own studio, Figment Sounds. How much of that outside experience shaped the sound of this session compared with previous LP ‘Amerikana’?
Dwayne: A ton. The sessions for those two projects could not be more different. Amerikana was recorded solely by me with a 20 year-old pro tools rig that I learned to use as I went along, a Telecaster, a Fender Deluxe amp and a few microphones that cost me less than $300 total….It’s a sound, lol.
The sessions with Rob gave us access to far superior gear, tons of vintage stuff, preamps, microphones, all the instruments, etc., and Rob’s experience and expertise. Not to mention his impeccable ear for how things should sound. Those sessions were also a collective effort by the entire band which clearly influenced the sound.
Jessica, You’ve said going back to the 2019 recordings this year reminded the band how good they were. What made now the moment to revisit them?
Jessica: I think we finally had enough distance from them to hear them for what they were. We recorded those songs in 2019, in between two big tours, moving to New York, and some label chaos. Coming back to the recordings years later, with different perspectives, we were surprised by how good they sounded. They no longer felt like something that needed to be left in the past. If anything, we felt more connected to them now than we did at the time of recording.
You’re putting out a single a month for the rest of 2026, all from that same 2019 run with Rob. Is that a considered rollout, or simply a matter of pacing songs that have already been finished?
Dwayne: Most of the songs have been pretty much “finished” this whole time. I think the reason we decided to roll them out one at a time had more to do with running to create some momentum and frankly just kind of stretch out the amount of content that we could produce leading up to what will eventually be a new full length recording.
‘Mythos’ follows ‘Love, Light, Beauty & Truth’ and ‘High Time’, both from the same sessions. What separates this one from those two?
Dwayne: The groooove maaaaan! Seriously though, it’s a serious groove. I have no idea where it came from but I have always wanted to make a groove record, so maybe we’ll do that next.
Your bio roots the band in Southern California’s psychedelic culture, but the release for ‘Love, Light, Beauty & Truth’ called you a New York-based collective. Where does the band call home now?
Dwayne: The other three band members live in the Hudson Valley, NY. I live in Kansas.
The new album was recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Studio in Malibu, a very different environment to Rob’s own studio. How did that process compare with how ‘Mythos’ came together?
Dwayne: Yeah it was different all right. Imagine staying at a beautiful boutique day spa in Malibu for 10 days, waking up each morning to a cliff top ocean breeze and unlimited amounts of LMNT electrolyte powder. Sauntering into the studio after having breakfast and coffee delivered to record an album 100% live in a room that some of your biggest musical influences recorded in. Rob’s studio was just like that but with better coffee.
After the hiatus during the pandemic, you came back to live shows in 2024. How much of what you were writing on the road then found its way onto the new record, versus the older material now coming out as singles?
Dwayne: Hard to say. I can’t keep a timeline straight to save my life. I’m not someone who writes all the time. I typically set aside a week or two if I feel like I need to write some songs and that turns into a record. I’d say that the stuff we’re releasing now was probably written during a 2018 writing session in the Hudson Valley, New York and the stuff for the Shangri-La record is a combination of a few stragglers from that 2018 session, a few select re-recordings from our first few records, and a 2025 session, somewhere in the middle of Kansas. I can’t even imagine getting any writing done while touring.
Misha, you’re the one Englishman in a band whose whole sound leans on Southern California’s psychedelic mythology. Does that outsider’s position change how you hear this material, or has it long since stopped feeling like an outsider’s view?
Misha: I’m probably at the point where I feel more of an outsider when I’m in the UK now. I mean, I’ve lived in the US for 18 years! I also grew up as a bit of an outsider in my own way. While I was born in North Yorkshire, I spent a good chunk of my childhood as an expat in the Middle East. And with a prog-rock-obsessed dad from Leeds and my mother originally being from Southern California herself, I was raised on a very wide range of music. So while I suppose all of those things have shaped the way I hear stuff, I’ve never really felt like I was looking into the music we make from the outside.
With so much of this material built in the studio rather than the road, how is it translating live?
Dwayne: They’re translating about as well as we could have hoped them to. We are professionals after all!
