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Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).

The new Roland High Life album is out today! →

Well folks, it’s been about a decade since we last released or performed any music … but the new 5-song EP from my indie rock band the Roland High Life is now available on Spotify, iTunes/Apple Music, BandCamp, and everywhere else you might want to find your tunes!

We arranged and recorded all of these songs over a single weekend at a house in Vermont. They weren’t fully written that weekend — me and Walker, my co-front-man for the band, had been working on songs intermittently that we’d share with each other. But we put them all together, arranged them, and recorded the tracks pretty quickly on our own. For a self-produced work in a basement in Vermont, I’m pretty god damn proud of the work that we pulled off, and I’m very much looking forward to what’s next for the band.

I wrote this song about a few people I know in real life who have succumbed to the crippling addiction of fucked up Trumpian conspiracy theories. I think the Americana-blues-punk vibe we landed with here really encapsulates our vision for the future of the band. The song also explicitly references David Graeber’s economic theory on Bullshit Jobs, which I think everyone should read.

This is a Walker jam (aka my best friend, and the other lead singer in the band). He had sent me an acoustic demo of this a few years back, and I think we landed in a pretty rad Jimmy Eat World-esque area in this. It’s a banger for sure, helped along by Chris the Drummer laying down a sick bass line.

I had originally imagined this as more of an AJJ-esque folk punk song; you can find my solo version of it on Spotify as well. It’s a lot more politically direct than our other Roland High Life thus far (even when we have gotten political), but I think we hit on something good here. Walker convinced me to play it like a Springsteen song that my audience already knew, and that’s exactly how we recorded it. I also threw down some mandolin and lap steel guitar on this track, to really mix it up.

This is actually an older Roland High Life song that we never quite recorded right. I’m not sure if this one is perfect, either — maybe a little too slow — but it’s still the best we have so far. It’s a love song to my cherry red Gibson Les Paul Junior, and I definitely accomplished what I set out to do (i.e., writing a song about loving music that’s also overly sexualized in a weird way). I originally wrote this at a time in my life when I was prone to over-complicating songs, but I do think that the look-at-me-i’m-so-clever music theory games that go on in here are still pretty cool.

Another Walker jam, this one started off as more of a Billy Joel knockoff, and Walker wasn’t sure if it would fit with our rock vibe. But Chris, our drummer, said that he’d been listening to lots of Teenage Fan Club lately, and as soon as he said that, I was hit with a Teenage Fan Club-style version of the song in my head. Or at least, that’s what we were going for; the final product is a little more ambient power-pop, and very much us, which makes it even better.

Plus that snare drop right before the second verse is sick.