Dengue Fever’s Ting Mong might be our album of the year

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: Thank you both for making time on a show night. I know it's hectic enough, so thank you for making time to do this. Can you tell me a little bit about the break between records? Eight years is not the longest break in rock and roll history, but yeah.

Chhom Nimol: Are you sure? Wow, that's long.

LP: I've been waiting, so I know.

Chhom Nimol: That's not that long! We started... twenty nineteen, right before the COVID? Are you talking about the record break?

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, since The Deepest Lake. The Deepest Lake came out eight years ago. I trust Lawrence. Okay. We went out to the desert and stayed at this house in Pioneer Town. It's really nice, remote. And we just set up all our gear and recorded a bunch of ideas. And then we got, we came back, and then like COVID happened. For a while, we weren't getting in the studio together. It took a while until we got in. So COVID was four years. And so now, yeah, this is our first tour since it. So yeah, that's why it was so long. We probably would have put it out three or four years ago.

LP: Where did you spend the pandemic? Were you all in Los Angeles?

Chhom Nimol: I was staying home, learning how to cook, how to make all the food, the vegetables I like. I didn't know how to grow bean sprouts, so in that time, I learned how to grow bean sprouts on my own. It's fun, and then I know how to do pickles, lettuce, everything, and just put them in the fridge longer to save.

LP: So that was your COVID project?

Chhom Nimol: Yeah, just staying home and learning how to cook so many different things.

Ethan Holtzman: She started collecting cats. Yeah,

Chhom Nimol: yeah, and collecting. And the cats keep coming to my house.

Ethan Holtzman: She has how many, eight?

Chhom Nimol: Eight, yeah.

Ethan Holtzman: Eight kitties.

Chhom Nimol: We have a grandpa cat, and our grandpa has a girlfriend. Grandpa brings his girlfriend to say hello to us.

Ethan Holtzman: We're brewing kombucha in my place and taking care of dogs and just playing music. We're just like, we had loose. We played a little bit on our own, and then once it was safe to get back together, we got back together, and we started to finish the ideas that we had started.

LP: It's interesting to hear you say that because I've talked to some artists who have said they couldn't create at all during the pandemic. They lost inspiration; they couldn't find motivation. Other artists worked a lot and used technology and other ways to stay connected to other artists. How would you characterize your creativity during the pandemic?

[Ethan Holtzman: Creatively, we didn't do any band rehearsals. We didn't do any of that.

Chhom Nimol: We just stayed away from each other. (laughter)

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, I started to do a bunch of art at home. Drawing, try to erase board drawings, just having fun with that. And then just playing with some musical instruments around the house and, but. Nimol's creativity would probably be cooking.

Chhom Nimol: And then after that, I know it's going to be like a very long time to go back on tour with the van. And then I sell the dry fish from, bring it all over Cambodia and sell it. And I sell very good the business. But right now, I am too busy with the van, and they keep asking, Do you still have the dried fish? They say, No, I don't have the dried fish. (laughter)

Ethan Holtzman: Importing, yeah!

LP: That's amazing. It's interesting because I read something that you said in the past about when you first came here; what was different was that you had all the responsibility for yourself. Whereas back home, you had family and support and people around you. And it sounds like you have some hustle. Like you, you hustle, you work.

Chhom Nimol: Yep. I cannot stay still. Yeah.

Ethan Holtzman: And you don't wait.

Chhom Nimol: That's my personality. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just, I cannot if I stay there, I'm going to be bored. Am I bored? I'm going to, oh, I'm going to eat. That's why the pandemic is, I learned a lot. Yeah. Yeah. If Dengue Fever is finished, I can make my own hot sauce, barbecue sauce. (laugher) Yeah, I do a lot. I try a lot of different mixes together and how they taste.

Ethan Holtzman: She's a very good cook.

LP: So we're here on the occasion of the new record, which, to anybody who's been listening to me over the last few weeks, I've been saying is my album of the year. I'm always excited when you put out new records, but this one... I don't know; it's just very poignant. It's very emotional.

Chhom Nimol: You sound like me. (laughter)

LP: So I started to read some of the early reviews, and they said things like a departure. A lot was made of how it's a little quieter. As someone who's been a fan for a long time, I could hear the elements of this. You always had ballads, you always had very atmospheric, in addition to the big, vast songs. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why this sound now.

Ethan Holtzman: We just started to realize, rather than trying to steer Nimol into a Western idea, we were like, let's let her sing as comfortably as possible in the Cambodian traditional style. So she tapped into that for some of the slower songs and we were just like, let's just let it be minimal and just whatever tempo we'll figure it out. Yeah. Keep it streamlined. I think it's her best singing so far.

LP: I agree. If I'm correct, there's no English singing.

Ethan Holtzman: Zach sings, my brother Zach. And she might sing a little backup in English.

Chhom Nimol: Yeah, very little.

LP: That seems a bit intentional, right? You almost always sang at least some of your leads. In English, did you have a reason for that, or did it just fit the song, or was it more intentional?

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, it's more powerful.

Chhom Nimol: Yeah, more powerful and more comfortable and emotional and understand and deepening in my soul and the words when I'm singing to not just me, to the people, to the audience, to my community. I hope people like you understand more. We've been working so hard to finish this album. You're right; this album is one of my favorites so far. I never said that about any album before.

LP: The other thing, too, is, even as a listener who does not understand Khmer, there's such an emotional expressiveness in that language. Hearing any singer who can sing in that language is very unique. It's not like other languages that you hear.

Chhom Nimol: Like a "Silver Fish" is the blessing, and the quote called a blessing and forgot about anything. Forget about bad things and anything to the past, and bless me. Keep moving forward. Just keep being me and keep moving forward. You just can't wait. The song is a silver fish.

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, the native tongue has always been one of the main reasons why we formed the band. I like the music of Southeast Asian countries from the 60s and early 70s. I like Sumatran stuff, and the vocals are really nice. And some Thai mor lam stuff. But like the Khmer, the Cambodian stuff is definitely right up there.

LP: The band emerged during the MP3 blog era when it seemed like there were so many websites devoted to crate digging and finding regional music and things of that nature. Were you aware of that zeitgeist at the time? Did you plug into that? Because you're interested in predating that, but I wonder how you ...

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, the band was like, we were getting things rolling in like 2001, 2002. And then, yeah, as we started playing this music out, we started realizing that there was still some more out there. And like labels like Sublime Frequency were compiling some. And I mean, there's still, like, my wife just got this Cambodian vinyl of a bunch of older songs. I have yet to play it, but it came in the mail as I was leaving.

LP: So there's still stuff to find.

Ethan Holtzman: There definitely is, yeah. As far as compiling, we did one compilation of the music that inspired us, the Electric Cambodia record, and I haven't found enough other ones that blow me away to do volume two. They still want to do a volume two, but I'm still in the middle of that because I'm like, I don't know. If we did, we could start digging.

LP: yeah. Not just on this record, but in the last couple of years, you've really expanded the sonic palette of instrumentation. Is that fair to say?

Ethan Holtzman: Sure. Yeah.

LP: What's it like reproducing that stuff live?

Ethan Holtzman: We always stay open to play and experiment with whatever sounds we want, but we are keeping true to what we recorded, for the most part, for the songs that we're playing live off the new record. Dave Rollerke, our horn player and flute, plays trumpet. He has a wide variety of effects, so he's a big part of getting a lot: more different tweaked sounds, psychedelic stuff.

LP: Are you triggering things? Are you using samples and drum pads?

Ethan Holtzman: Oh, no. Did we use it on the record?

LP: These are nerdy questions. (laughter)

Ethan Holtzman: It's a question for Paul Smith, our drummer, but he didn't come on this tour.

LP: The way I've always understood the lyric writing process is There's a bit of a back and forth between you and the other band members, and that you'll even cave the melodies to suit your lyrics or to suit the language. Some of the song titles are funny. Is there any meaning to most of the song titles? How do you name them?

Chhom Nimol: No, the band names them the most. The name comes first. Because they're asking me, what does it mean? What does it mean? What is that? It says, line by line, what is it about? And then they put out that message.

LP: So then, what's a "Macho Purple Sunset?" (laughter)

Ethan Holtzman: Nimol can tell you about the lyrics, but it's about … don't know what it's about. (laughter) But the title, what I think of it, is like an airbrushed motorcycle gas tank parked on the PCH with the setting sun. Beautiful smoggy sunset. Yeah, like a "Macho Purple Sunset."

LP: It sounds like a guy thing.

Chhom Nimol: It's a guy with big muscles, like security. (laughter) The big man, but he's so weak. Yeah, that's what the lyric is about.

LP: I wanted also to ask you about your independence at this point. First of all, in terms of putting out your records. It seems like you have no one to answer to except your own sort of aesthetic, your own legacy. Does being independent mean anything in particular to either of you or both of you?

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, it's great. We have our own record label.

Chhom Nimol: Yeah, I think for myself, for my personality, I love independence anyway. So it's good we have our record label. We don't have to spoil it or listen to record execs.

Ethan Holtzman: Some labels were really nice to work with. And then one wasn't. They'd do a little press release, and it'd be last minute. And then just reading what they wrote. It wasn't really working. And it was also like a bigger label. There was us, and then they were putting out like Paul McCartney a week later.

LP: You saw that coming.

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, so that was it. We learned from that. After that, we went with all the early labels. It was great. And then we just did Tuk Tuk records. Yeah. It's nice to be in control of everything. We have a lot of artistic minds in the band acting together to focus on the artwork, which is strong. And then on this record, the artwork is a Japanese artist, Amiri is his name. Yeah, it's nice to do that, and we have some good help at our corner.

LP: Yeah, I was curious about that. Do you have to be more than just artists now? Does having your label imply you're more involved in the business side than you used to be, or can you insulate yourself from that?

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, we're all involved. For example, the other day, we were all in Nimol's house, packaging up all the orders. It was fun. It was like a little assembly line. It was a good day's work.

LP: The thing that's interesting about that is you're seeing very directly that there are a lot of orders, right? It's not abstract. It's like, "Oh, there's a lot of orders to pack." That's good. It's exciting. It's better than the alternative.

Chhom Nimol: Better than nothing.

Ethan Holtzman: It works out. The pandemic, too, changed things a lot. A lot of people got really appreciative. There was always a lot of love for our band, but now there's a whole new kind of interest. We also just played San Francisco, which was a lot of fun, so we're riding high off that. Sold out, and there, it was just a really fun show.

LP: What are you seeing in the crowd when you're on stage? Are you seeing the same faces? Are you seeing young people?

Chhom Nimol: I see a lot of new fans. I recognize old fans, but the new fans a lot. I can see more young white females and males at the past two shows already. I think in San Francisco, I saw different fans, but the first show was a little bit of an older crowd. Oh yeah, Menlo Park. Yeah, Menlo Park. They sit down, they try to come out, see the band, what's going on with Dengue Fever. Maybe they want, they think about, oh, it's going to be Friday night, Thursday night, going out to have fun.

Ethan Holtzman: Beautiful theater, yeah. It was different. It was a decent crowd. But it was nice because it was like a warm-up show for us. Because when you're playing new songs for the first time, it takes a couple of shows to dial them in and figure it out live.

LP: Have you landed on the setlist? Is it where you want it now?

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, I think we found our set list in San Francisco. We're going to try it out. We'll see how it works tonight. Yeah. I'm always so open to tweaking it.

LP: How do you decide which of the new songs you want to perform live? Do you ever want to do all of them, but you have to dial it back?

Chhom Nimol: I think I want to do a new one right now for me. I'm getting bored with the old set, to be honest.

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, but we brought a couple of songs off the old record, like from Escape From Dragon House, and we hadn't played that one. And now Nimol's English has gotten so much better. And so that was like a song that Zach wrote the lyrics for. So Nimol's like, oh my God, I understand the lyrics now. It's so funny because this is about her working at this club in Long Beach called The Dragon House. We called it Escape From Dragon House because we were always struggling with her working her job there singing. And we'd be like, we couldn't do gigs on the weekends. So we were always doing like Monday and Tuesday night. Finally, the band took off enough. So she escaped from Dragon House.

LP: Nice. What's the band's relationship with Cambodia at this point? Do you still go and perform there?

Chhom Nimol: Cambodia? Since the last time, we have yet to have a chance to go.

Ethan Holtzman: Do you remember where we went?

Chhom Nimol: 2018?

Ethan Holtzman: No, no, cause Norva wasn't born. My daughter.

Chhom Nimol: 2017?

Ethan Holtzman: No, because it was probably like 15 or 16. Oh, 15 or 16? I think so. I am trying to remember when. But yeah, we've been like three times as a band.

Chhom Nimol: Yeah, three times. Maybe more than three.

Ethan Holtzman: We love going there. It's fun. It's just figuring out how to do it.

Chhom Nimol: We hope somebody will invite us to go

LP: what's the music scene there now? Has your band influenced what's going on there?

Chhom Nimol: Music right now in my country, everything K-pop. Take over all over Southeast Asia.

Ethan Holtzman: So they listen to Korean music?

Chhom Nimol: They love K-pop, but they listen to the old, not old like us, but they listen to what's fashionable.

Ethan Holtzman: When we go there, there's always a lot of people that are excited. It's a trip when we've played shows just in villages. Yeah. It's a really interesting experience.

LP: I went back to the film last night and watched it again in anticipation of seeing you. I always forget about this part when you're at a night market or something, and everybody's laughing at you guys, especially Zach. Because they said, where's the guy with the beard?

Ethan Holtzman: Oh, yeah! (laughter)

LP: It makes me laugh because a long time ago, my ex-wife and I went to Beijing, and she's like 5'10, and she's tall and blonde, and everybody was pointing and laughing at her. She said, "Why are they laughing at me?" I said, "Well, because you're funny."

Chhom Nimol: Just like that.

LP: Yeah, it's so funny. What do you listen to?

Chhom Nimol: To be honest, I don't listen too much, but if I want to relax, I'm now listening to Reggae or African music. But I don't listen to 'broken heart' songs, like love songs, American songs at all. I mostly listen to the beat of Bollywood, African, and Reggae. More groovy, more ...

Ethan Holtzman: She likes to dance.

Chhom Nimol: Yeah. When I'm at home, I never want to listen to the sad song.

LP: Just sing them?

Chhom Nimol: Yeah, just singing. Yeah. Yeah. (laughter)

LP: And Ethan, you're always on a mission, right? You're always looking for new music. What's a day in the life of your ears?

Ethan Holtzman: It's crazy now with just how accessible everything is, but I keep my ears open. I'm into the Amazon kind, their Chicha. I really like that—kind of like psychedelic cumbia.

LP: That initial compilation that came out … Roots of Chicha.

Ethan Holtzman: yeah, my friend put that out.

LP: What a record.

Ethan Holtzman: Oh yeah. It's so good. Yeah. Yeah. I love that stuff. The band, Juaneco Y Su Combo, that's one of our other, yeah, I think their plane crashed, and half the band died. It was crazy, but there are still some surviving members. Some of the children or something played. Yeah, Chicha has a lot of following. My wife is always putting on music for me. And now, like a lot of random cassette tapes that DJs put together.

LP: Cassette tapes are back?

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah. Cassettes and vinyl. CDs are strange. I don't have a CD player.

LP: It's funny you say that because I was going to ask you about the length of the album. It seems like it was designed to be an album. 10 or 12 years ago, people were making these 80-minute records to fill a CD. You guys have never done that. You've always had 40 to 50-minute albums. You were never into the like, "Let's tap 20 songs on here just to do it."

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah, I guess there's always more songs that you record and finish and then be like, all right, let's like try to shape the album, but the strongest ones come up to the top and just like work around it. And we'd rather have less and keep on wanting more.

LP: What do you do with those songs? Do they make it to the next project, or do you just leave them?

Ethan Holtzman: Sometimes if we need a b-side, and we're like feeling it, or like maybe we need to rework it or something a little bit. So sometimes we've used them, but sometimes we let them go.

LP: This is the first run of shows basically behind the record?

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah. Yeah.

LP: What's next? It seems like it's a pretty successful initial few shows.

Chhom Nimol: We go to Portland tomorrow, and then the next day we drove, we're driving to Sacramento.

Ethan Holtzman: . We have a day off, so we'll play Portland at Mississippi Studios, and then we're going to go to Sacramento. Yeah, California.

LP: You came up, and you're going down.

Ethan Holtzman: And we're just going to keep going, jumping the inland coast. It'll be Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Fresno, San Luis Obispo. Then we drive to Pappy and Harriets out in the desert. That's a lot of fun, always. San Diego, we'll play the Casbah. And then we come home to L. A. and play 27th.

LP: Will you tour the rest of the country?

Ethan Holtzman: Not yet. Maybe, but right now, this is it. We're just, we'll do this, and then we'll see how it all goes. Probably in the spring, actually.

LP: It's really neat what you were talking about in terms of your current schedule because there are so many beautiful little theaters now to play up and down the West Coast. All these towns now have, throughout the Central Valley, like it's really amazing nowadays. Different than ten years ago, like so many things have sprouted up in the last decade.

Ethan Holtzman: Well, we haven't been there yet. So I don't know which ones we're playing, where we have these amazing little spots, but Menlo Park, the Guild Theater, was pretty beautiful.

LP: They put a lot of money into that.

Chhom Nimol: It was a beautiful backstage green room. So organized. Super.

LP: Before I let you go, I wanted to ask, is the musical going to continue to live on?

Ethan Holtzman: Cambodian Rock Band? They're doing it still. Yeah, they're coming tonight. The cast is coming tonight.

Chhom Nimol: They're here in Seattle until October.

LP: Oh, I didn't know they were here! I have to pay better attention. Remind me, were you involved in the creation of that? Did you also write and contribute to it?

Ethan Holtzman: Okay, it's a play based on a rock band in Cambodia in the late 60s, early 70s, when the Khmer Rouge were taking over, Pol Pot's regime. And so it's a story about what happened to the musicians. The band does a couple of old Cambodian rock songs, and then they play a bunch of Dengue Fever songs. Senan and Zach helped the musicians learn a few of the songs on guitar and bass early on. They did really well.

LP: I couldn't tell from the outsider from watching it develop how it intersected with you. I didn't realize they were just integrating you into the songbook. It wasn't clear if you were part of the creative process.

Ethan Holtzman: They were inspired by our band, and the playwright came to our shows, and we'd meet with her, and we'd talk to her while she was writing. It's doing really well. It's been all over the country.

LP: Nimol, when you go back to Cambodia, do you still perform on your own or with your family?

Chhom Nimol: Sometimes. It depends on how much time I have. Because I don't have that much time because I want to spend the most time with my family, they ask me to perform, and I have to take care of my voice. I have to look for the song I have to perform. Because I'm not a singer in Cambodia, I'm a singer who moved here already, make sure I perform good songs. It's exciting to go to sing on stage in Cambodia, my hometown. And then a lot of stress for me. So I'm like, Oh, I don't want to sing it. (laughter)

Ethan Holtzman: So Nimol does some singing. She does Dengue Fever, and then when we're not touring, she does a lot of solo gigs where she sings for the Cambodian community. She's a big part of that.

LP: I'm very curious. And again, this is because I watched the movie just last night. The band and the filmmaker were very gentle and cautious about overstating this, but it seemed like this band has helped with some of the reconciliation or reconnection with the music for the people in Cambodia. Is that a fair thing?

Ethan Holtzman: Like, when we went there and played the music, we did shine a light on this body of work that inspired us. The original Cambodian rock music was like Sinn Sisamouth and a bunch of great singers, like Ros Serey Sothea and Pen Ran. And they would hear western music from maybe the Vietnam War radio, and then they would reinterpret it. So you'd hear some Cambodian instruments, some Cambodian vocal stylings, then that music that they created inspired us to form, and then when we went back to play it. But they always listened to those old songs in Cambodia. Everyone knows.

LP: It's Like their classic rock.

Ethan Holtzman: Yeah. It's like their classic rock. It's hard to say because we haven't been back in a while, but when we're in Cambodia, there's a lot of mixing of a lot of the expats that are living there get really excited about it. And then a lot of local Cambodians come too, and they bring them together. Whereas, like some of the stuff, like just with their clubs, they keep separate. I remember there was definitely mixing. Yeah, it's cool.

LP: I want to thank you so much for making time. And thank you for the new record. So wonderful. And please don't make me wait eight years. I'm getting old! (laughter)

Chhom Nimol: After this, let's see what's going on!