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“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be in a rock and roll band.”
Dave Hause had an epiphany rewatching Goodfellas. “There's that scene in the beginning where Henry Hill says, ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.’” The Philly-bred, California-based singer-songwriter always longed to be in a different kind of mob.
“This record is my realization that, as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be in a rock and roll band. This record is that rock and roll band distilled into 10 songs.”
This record is …And The Mermaid. And those 10 songs offer a welcome shock to the system, blending Hause’s signature lyrical elan and gift for surging melodies with his keening vocals and some deliciously sharp musical elbows courtesy of the titular group.
“I had made a couple of records in a row in Nashville, and I was super happy with the outcomes,” says Hause of 2023’s Blood Harmony and 2021’s Drive it Like it’s Stolen, both produced by Will Hoge with top-flight session musicians. While they certainly had their muscular moments, those records were more in line with the Americana-tinged music Hause had been making as a solo artist. He ended up on several solo tours, as well as some duo outings with his brother and collaborator Tim, which necessitated stripping the songs back. “It occurred to me how far I’ve come from my roots,” he says. “Punk rock just isn’t where my muse has been for the last couple albums.”
But as he pumped electricity when playing those solo songs with his occasional band The Mermaid at his celebratory weekend festival Sing Us Home in Philly the last few years, he realized, “I was just missing plugging in and turning up. I was missing the energy that it takes to deliver that show.”
While the former leader of beloved Philly punk rockers The Loved Ones has been no stranger to going to 11, it had been a minute since The Mermaid — whose current iteration includes brother Tim Hause on guitar and vocals, bassist Luke Preston, keyboardist Mark Masefield, and drummer Kevin Conroy — had done a proper tour. And they’d never recorded together.
“This is the first time I've taken that band into the studio and been like, ‘No matter what, damn the torpedoes, we are going to sound the way we sound. I'm not going to Nashville and getting the murderers row of players. This is our sound,’" says Hause of the mission statement for …And The Mermaid, which is being released on Hause’s Blood Harmony label.
Nearly 20 years into his career, the collection also represents a number of other firsts. It is the first album in his solo career where the entire band has been invited to contribute to the songwriting process. It contains Hause’s first cover on an album of originals, a harmony-laden rendition of “Bible Passages” by Tim McIlrath of Rise Against — “I finally was just totally comfortable enough to put a song I believe in that someone without the last name Hause wrote on my record." And it’s the first time he’s recorded outside the U.S.
With a little help from the Canadian government (in the form of a grant), The Mermaid decamped to Vancouver in January 2025 to co-produce the album with Jesse Gander (Japandroids, White Lung) who also served as engineer and mixer. “Jesse is about my age, so he's just as fired up on Minor Threat as he is on Bryan Adams,” says Hause of the obvious kindred spirit, with whom he had been chatting over the years. “The sonic references were really aligned, and I love his acumen and his approach. It's also a great studio, in one of my favorite towns, with tons of gear.”
The band and Gander tracked over 20 songs in two weeks, and Hause found himself grateful for the varying point of views that having other voices in the studio offered, even as he retained final say as bandleader. “It went really well,” he says of the creative collaboration. “We've cultivated a ton of trust and transparency. I would be an absolute fool to be this far in and assume that an idea shouldn't at least be considered. The older you get, the closer you can stay to the river of creativity, the better your life is. I had full faith that these four people that I've been working with in various iterations over the years are trying to do just that.”
It was Tim, who is also one of his older brother’s biggest fans, who helped Hause rediscover his inner rock and roll animal. “One of the things that Tim said when we were four or five songs into making this record was, ‘wow, I'm most excited for the fans for this one,’”Hause says. “‘Without hindering your creativity or making some preconceived decision to go back to your roots, you are going to stoke out every Loved Ones fan who we might've lost on a finger-picked gentle version of something. Every rock fan of ours, this is what they want.’”
Brother Tim was right, and the album wastes no time announcing itself. “A Knife in the Mud” kicks off with a trumpet herald that gives way to a galloping groove that feels very much like the rock and roll cavalry is on the way even as Hause announces that vultures are circling to attack and balefully intones “There’s no knight coming in on horseback/It’s a fight for a knife in the mud.” The first of the album’s several anthemic choruses kicks in just when all hope is lost as Hause defiantly sings “We ain’t going down easy/We ain’t going down at all/We’re never gonna die.” But Hause wonders, is that a good thing? “Maybe it might not be the best thing that this cockroach-like species that we are is going to keep proliferating,” he muses.
The full-tilt fist-pumping pummels through the next four tracks. “Cellmates,” a fast and furious chronicle of survival complete with galvanizing “Whoa-oh-oh” refrain, balances the tension between the triumph of surviving and the rueful surveying of the wreckage of that survival as “we mainline nostalgia like amphetamine.”
“The initial inspiration was getting sober,” say Hause. “A lot of us made it out of really bleak times where we were in a lot of pain; using and abusing drugs and alcohol to mitigate that pain. I'm almost 10 years sober and I found myself running into old friends. We'd end up being like, ‘Hey, remember that time?’ And what we’re describing was fucked.”
Burning guitars undergird the emphatic vocals of “Look Alive” with Hause contemplating the end of the world and hollering “If I’m gonna pay for my sins/Goddamn I wanna sin some more” and engaging in another round of righteous “whoa-ohs” that will no doubt lead to robust singalongs at live shows. He lets them come organically, he says of choosing just the right spot for an exclamation. Then he runs it by his twin six-year-old sons, noting, “If they're pumped and they can remember this, everybody will.”
“I really do believe that songs are best when we all sing them,” he says of the community of the live space. “Everybody's busy, so remembering every single one of my little lyrics might be a lot for your average person with a job,” he says with a laugh. “But if you give them a ‘whoa,’ it gives them something to latch onto.”
“Mockingbird Blues” is a restless ode to feeling unmoored that takes a pleasingly dissonant left-turn with some saloon piano licks that amp up the song’s sense of displacement. And “Revisionist History” — inspired in part by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book The Message — is a dizzying, punk-inflected rocker that careens through the last 60 years with a look at how the good old days weren’t always good for everyone and maybe we shouldn’t be trying to turn back time.
“That song ties to ‘Enough Hope,’” he says of a deeper cut that takes the POV of those in power laughing at the working class. “And it ties also to ‘We mainline nostalgia like amphetamine’ from ‘Cellmates.’ That's the common thread, that the personal can become political. If we're so afraid of the future, not only are we going to hang around like we're cellmates in a prison yard, but we're also going to revise history to make it look rosier than it actually was.”
The album downshifts ever-so-slightly with the skittering ‘Yer Outta My Hair,” leading into the burbling guitars and soul-searching of “Bible Passages” and the midtempo pop-punk stomp of the delightful “Rumspringa,” which took a few musical cues from his pals the Dropkick Murphys. “May Every Last Fever Break,” a poignant parent’s wish for their children, fittingly featuring more interlaced sibling harmonies from Tim, brings the album to a soft landing as the faint trumpet herald from the album start fades out, signaling it may be time to put the weapons down and rest awhile.
Hause says that venturing into — and being fully embraced by — the Americana/singer-songwriter space for a few years ended up leading him back to a version of where he began. “It gave me enough confidence to come back to the rock and punk thing and be like, ‘I got nothing to prove. I'm just going to do me.’"
Fortunately he is not doing it alone and is eagerly looking forward to taking these songs and his band on the road, plugging in and turning it up and reveling with an even bigger gang, his fans.
“The band is called The Mermaid because being in a band has always felt like something I’ve had for a moment, and then the whole myth of it just swims away. If that keeps being the case, I want a musical document of the time we spent together.”
He hopes those fans have a similar epiphany when listening to…And The Mermaid that he had in making it: that being part of something larger than yourself can bring a different sense of meaning to your life.
“I hope people take away the belief that we can do things that are greater than ourselves when we decide to work together,” he says. “That's what a band promises. That's what a live music event promises. It's what a festival promises. It's what relationships promise. If you can work together, it's better than being isolated and living in fear. It's messy. It can be ugly. You're going to get into arguments. Somebody's going to get the last piece of cake and you're going to give that person shit but, hopefully, there's enough goodwill in the mission that you can forgive each other and know ‘This is greater than I could do on my own.’”
